The 50 Most Influential Britons of the Past 100 Years The 50 Most Influential Britons of the Past 100 Years E-Book

Peter Pugh

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 232

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Peter Pugh presents his selection of – not the best, fastest, most successful or richest – but the 50 most influential British men and women of the modern world – for good or ill. Pugh discusses and ranks the influence of scientists and inventors such as Francis Crick, John Logie Baird and Alan Turing; lawmakers and leaders like prime ministers Attlee, Churchill and Thatcher; entrepreneurs including James Dyson, Mary Quant and Terence Conran; and cultural icons like J.K. Rowling, who, in the words of Lisa Simpson no less, 'turned a generation of kids onto reading'. One of the most influential Britons in Pugh's book achieved influence by saying nothing for over 60 years, and the top three places are held by an economist, a scientist and a civil servant … In what amounts to a whistle-stop tour through recent British history, this undoubtedly contentious and wholly enjoyable book will spark countless debates across our sceptred isle.

Leseprobe

THE 50

MOST INFLUENTIAL

BRITONS

OF THE LAST 100 YEARS

IN ASSOCIATION WITH

TIMPSON

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David Gower’s Greatest Half-Century

THE 50

MOST INFLUENTIAL

BRITONS

OF THE LAST 100 YEARS

PETER PUGH

Published in the UK in 2015 by

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ISBN 978-178578-026-4

Text copyright © 2016 Peter Pugh

The author has asserted his moral rights.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Images courtesy of the Press Association, Rex/Shutterstock and Gary Cohen

Typeset and designed by Simmons Pugh

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Peter Pugh is a businessperson and company historian who has written more than 50 company histories on businesses from Rolls-Royce to Iceland Frozen Foods to Stannah Lifts. He is also the author of Introducing Thatcherism and Introducing Keynes from the well-known Introducing series. He lives by the sea in north Norfolk, and in Cambridge.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

THE 50 MOST INFLUENTIAL BRITONS OF THE LAST 100 YEARS

50. Sir Freddie Laker

49. Sir Henry Wood

48. Sir Alfred Hitchcock

47. J. Arthur Rank

46. George Orwell

45. Sir David Frost

44. Ian Fleming

43. Enid Blyton

42. Stephen Hawking

41. Bertrand Russell

40. Dame Cicely Saunders

39. David Hockney

38. David Ogilvy

37. Ernest Rutherford

36. Richard Dimbleby

35. Richard Curtis

34. Mary Quant

33. Alan Turing

32. Sir John Reith

31. Francis Crick

30. Greg Dyke

29. Galton and Simpson

28. Lord Nuffield

27. Jack Cohen

26. Elizabeth David

25. Sir Frank Whittle

24. Dr Beeching

23. Sir Henry Royce

22. Sir David Attenborough

21. Winston Churchill

20. James Dyson

19. John Logie Baird

18. Sir Marcus Sieff

17. J.K. Rowling

16. Queen Elizabeth II

15. Tony Blair

14. Sir Alexander Fleming

13. The Beatles

12. Sir Jonathan Ive

11. Roy Jenkins

10. Marie Stopes

9. Robert Baden-Powell

8. Vladimir Raitz

7. Sir Allen Lane

6. Emmeline Pankhurst

5. Clement Attlee

4. Margaret Thatcher

3. William Beveridge

2. John Maynard Keynes

1. Sir Tim Berners-Lee

INTRODUCTION

This book, indeed this series, is the result of my reading about a book published in the USA in 1978 called The Most Influential People Who Ever Lived. There was no Amazon in those days so I had to ask my parents, who were about to visit my brother in the USA, to bring me back a copy. They did, I read it and was totally fascinated. he author put Mohammad at number one, though as a historian I would have chosen Jesus Christ. He did not even put Christ at number two but an Englishman, Isaac Newton.

Anyway, it inspired me and now, at last, Icon Books is publishing a series of the 50 Greatest: 50 Greatest Footballers of All Time, 50 Greatest Cricketers of All Time, 50 Greatest Rugby Union Players of All Time, 50 Greatest Train Journeys of the World and 50 Greatest Walks of the World have already been published and here is the 50 Most Influential Britons of the Last 100 Years.

The last 100 years is important and I have interpreted it so that the person can have been born more than 100 years ago but his or her influence has resulted from their actions in the last 100 years. A classic example is Winston Churchill who was born in the 1870s but whose influence was in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. Incidentally, when I was discussing my selection at dinner parties it was amazing how many people said that they thought the most influential person was Churchill. Clearly, they had not thought about the meaning of influential rather than greatest.

There was a danger that I would have too many politicians and certainly there are several but I wanted to include scientists, economists, entrepreneurs, authors, actors, artists, broadcasters and others. There is even someone connected to sport in there too. Although not a player he nevertheless has had a great deal of influence on our most popular sport, professional football.

Not everyone will agree with my 50 and certainly not the order in which I have put them and there will be plenty of ‘What about …?’ and ‘Surely … should be in the top ten?’ If my choices spark disagreement and discussion so much the better.

Peter Pugh, December 2015

THE 50 MOST INFLUENTIAL BRITONS OF THE LAST 100 YEARS

50. SIR FREDDIE LAKER

Freddie Laker was one of the greatest, best-known and most popular British entrepreneurs of the second half of the 20th century. In simple terms, he revolutionised air travel.

He was born on 6 August 1922 in humble circumstances. His father left when he was only five and his mother worked as a cleaner. He was expelled from the Simon Langton Grammar School in Canterbury. Apparently he was constantly boasting to his friends that he was going to be a millionaire.

His entrepreneurial career began soon after the end of the Second World War, in which he had served in the Air Transport Auxiliary, when he borrowed £38,000 (about £1.3 million today) to become a war-surplus aircraft dealer. His business prospered by being heavily involved in the Berlin Airlift to overcome the Soviet blockade of Berlin in 1948 and 1949.

He sold his business in the 1950s and became Managing Director of British United Airways in 1960. In 1966 he formed Laker Airways and operated charter flights which cut prices way below the established airlines’ prices.

However, it was with his ‘Skytrain’ flights across the Atlantic from 1977 that Laker really pioneered the cheap transatlantic flights which delighted passengers on the one hand and infuriated the established airlines on the other.

Before Skytrain it was only the rich and business travellers who could afford international flights. This state of affairs had been protected by the International Air Transport Association (IATA), which had ruled out competition on the basis that it might prejudice passenger safety. There was therefore an inefficient monopoly offering identical services at high prices.

The first Skytrain to New York in September 1977 offered a no-frills seat (i.e. no meals) for £59 (£600 today) against the standard charge of £180 (£1,800 today). By 1980 Laker was carrying one in seven transatlantic passengers. This forced the airlines to compete, and unfortunately a combination of this with a worldwide recession and a fall in the value of the pound sterling against the dollar drove Laker Airways into receivership in 1982.

Laker Airways had carried 3 million passengers on Skytrain between 1977 and 1982 and had changed for ever the prices people were prepared to pay for transatlantic and other international flights. I remember paying £450 (£9,000 today) for return flights between Heathrow and New York in the late 1960s – and you can still pay only £450 today.

Margaret Thatcher, before she became Prime Minister in 1979, supported Laker’s championing of open markets in the 1970s as he struggled with legal battles against IATA for eleven years before he was able to launch Skytrain. Furthermore, Sir Richard Branson, whose Virgin Airways owed a great deal to Laker’s pioneering efforts, named one of his aircraft ‘The Spirit of Sir Freddie’. Laker became Sir Freddie Laker in 1978 as well as being voted ‘Man of the Year’.

Sir Richard Branson was not the only airline entrepreneur to benefit from Laker. Easyjet and Ryanair, as well as Southwest Airlines in the USA, Air Asia, West Jet and Virgin Australia, also owed their existence and success to his breakthroughs in cut-price air fares. Even so, Laker felt they could go further, and he said before he died at the age of 83 in 2006:

I think it’s great they are still doing it and have produced low fare operators but if you think about this low fare operation in Europe and even the US, it’s still on short haul journeys. There’s no one with a dedicated low fares operation across the Atlantic.

His lasting impact and legacy was his pioneering of low-fare services and liberating air travel from the straitjacket imposed for decades by IATA in collusion with governments, many of which owned the airlines involved in a non-competition industry.

49. SIR HENRY WOOD

Sir Henry Wood is known by most in connection with the Proms, and especially the Last Night of the Proms, but his influence went much further than that.

Born in London on 3 March 1869 to a father who ran a successful model engine shop and who, alongside his wife, was a keen amateur musician, Henry Wood participated in family musical get-togethers from the age of six. At the age of only fourteen he played the organ at the Musicians’ Church, St Sepulchre-without-Newgate, the largest parish church in the City of London.

His ambition was to teach singing and he composed some songs of his own but, after graduating from the Royal Academy, he became an orchestral and choral conductor, gaining experience by conducting for several opera companies. In 1893, when he was still only 24, he was asked by Robert Newman, the manager of the Queen’s Hall in London, to conduct at a series of promenade concerts (‘promenade’ meant concerts in London parks where the audience could listen as they walked past, the French for walk being promener).

Newman’s aim was to educate the musical taste of the general public and Wood shared this ambition. Newman said:

I am going to run nightly concerts and train the public by easy stages. Popular at first, gradually raising the standard until I have created a public for classical and modern music.

Newman and Wood gradually carried through their plan, cutting back on what they deemed to be trivial music and introducing Wagner, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Richard Strauss, Tchaikovsky, Glazunov, Massenet and Rimsky-Korsakov. Every Monday evening was devoted to Wagner and Friday to Beethoven.

Wood also raised the profile and helped improve the pay of the rank-and-file orchestral players, insisting that they stand to accept the applause alongside the conductor. He also introduced women into the Queen’s Hall orchestra in 1913. By 1918 there were eighteen women in his orchestra.

Gradually the Last Night of the Proms became famous and Wood composed the work for which he is most celebrated, Fantasia on British Sea Songs, initially to commemorate the centenary of the Battle of Trafalgar. A highlight was the hornpipe, and Wood said:

They stamp their feet in time to the hornpipe – that is until I whip up the orchestra to a fierce accelerando which leaves behind all those whose stamping technique is not of the very finest quality. I like to win by two bars, if possible, but sometimes have to be content with a bar and a half. It is good fun and I enjoy it as much as they.

Also made famous by the Proms and sharing in their influence was Sir Edward Elgar. He was born and brought up in Broadheath near the cathedral town of Worcester, and spent much of his youth in the cathedral listening to the music of its daily services. He did not have a systematic musical education but played the organ at St George’s, and indeed succeeded his father as the regular organist there. He also played the bassoon in a wind quartet and, more often, the violin. At the same time he composed.

Elgar married in 1889 and his wife, Caroline Alice, encouraged his efforts to become a composer. This led to his moving to London, where he struggled to gain recognition from other musicians, publishers and concert givers. In 1891 he returned to Malvern in the Midlands and began the composition of a number of pieces for both choir and orchestra which were produced at festivals.

Nevertheless, full recognition of his musical genius was slow in coming. For example, The Dream of Gerontius, performed in Birmingham in 1900, was declared in general to be a failure, in spite of praise for some of its beautiful moments. It was not until much later that the work was generally recognised as one of the great and imaginative musical creations.

In spite of this relative failure in Birmingham, one of the audience, A.J. Jaeger, was instrumental in having Gerontius played at the Lower Rhine Festival in Düsseldorf, where the usually critical German audience loved it. This led to a repeat performance in Birmingham and a further one at Covent Garden in 1904, and led to Elgar going to the USA where his works generally met with enthusiastic support.

It also led to Elgar producing symphonies and, at last, these were greeted with ecstasy by the general public. He is probably best known for the first of the five Pomp and Circumstance Marches which has become familiar to millions all over the world who watch the Last Night of the Proms. Land of Hope and Glory is now considered as an alternative national anthem.

Henry Wood deservedly won many honours. He was knighted in 1911, awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Philharmonic Society in 1921 and made a Companion of Honour in 1944. In Europe he was appointed to the Order of the Crown in Belgium in 1920 and as an Officer of the Legion of Honour in France in 1926.

His biographer, Arthur Jacobs, wrote ‘His tally of first performances, or first performances in Britain, was heroic: at least 717 works by 357 composers … He remains one of the most remarkable musicians Britain has produced.’

48. SIR ALFRED HITCHCOCK

Born in August 1899 in Leytonstone, Essex, Alfred Hitchcock made Britain’s greatest contribution to world cinema. He was brought up as a Roman Catholic and was educated at Salesian College and the Jesuit St Ignatius’ College in Stamford Hill, London.

His obsession with crime and the police was probably caused by his father’s sending him when he was only five to the local police station with a note asking the police to lock him up for five minutes for his bad behaviour. He was rejected by the army in the First World War on the grounds of his obesity.

He began work in the film industry immediately after the war and took up a full-time position at Islington Studios in 1920. By 1925 he had become a film director and, the following year, he produced his first thriller, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog. It became a great success.

Over the next three years Hitchcock directed ten films, and the tenth, Blackmail, was converted to sound, considered by many to be the first British sound feature film. The climax took place on the dome of the British Museum and began a Hitchcock tradition of using famous landmarks as a backdrop for dramatic scenes. In the early 1930s, working for Michael Balcon at Gaumont-British Picture Corporation, Hitchcock directed the successful The Man Who Knew Too Much and The 39 Steps. The latter was voted the fourth-best British film of the 20th century by the British Film Institute in 1999.

In 1938 Hitchcock directed The Lady Vanishes, described by the Guardian as ‘one of the greatest train movies from the genre’s golden era’ and as a contender for the ‘title of the best comedy thriller ever made’. The following year Hitchcock received the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Director, and a New York Times feature writer wrote:

Three unique and valuable institutions the British have that we in America have not. Magna Carta, the Tower Bridge and Alfred Hitchcock, the greatest director of screen melodramas in the world.

In 1939 David O. Selznick gave Hitchcock a seven-year contract and he and his family moved to Hollywood. His first film was Rebecca, based on the novel by Daphne du Maurier, and it won the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1940. In 1941 Hitchcock produced, as well as directed, Suspicion, his first film as a producer. Joan Fontaine won the Best Actress Oscar for her ‘outstanding performance’ in that film.

Hitchcock’s peak decades were undoubtedly the 1950s and 1960s, when he made, among others: Strangers on a Train, Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, To Catch a Thief, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho and The Birds.

Psycho, with the violence of its shower scene and the early death of the heroine, became a hallmark of a new horror movie genre and was copied by many other producers and directors. It broke box office records all over the world and was the most profitable black-and-white sound film ever made. Hitchcock himself made $15 million from it.

He seemed incapable of slowing down, even in his sixties, and made several more films including Torn Curtain and Topaz as well as The Birds. He was a master of shock effects and audiences eventually learned not to be lulled into security.

Hitchcock won many awards, receiving two Golden Globes, eight Laurel Awards and five lifetime achievement awards including the first BAFTA Academy Fellowship Award. He was also nominated five times for an Academy Award for Best Director. He was knighted in 1980.

47. J. ARTHUR RANK

J. Arthur Rank was influential because he not only saved the British film industry from extinction in the 1930s but was also instrumental in building up a following for British films in the USA.

Rank was born in December 1888 into a Victorian family environment at Kingston upon Hull in England. He was educated as a boarder at The Leys School in Cambridge where he did not show any intellectual prowess.

Rank was deeply religious and, in 1933, he helped to set up a new voluntary body, the Religious Film Society. He even came up with the idea for its first 20-minute film, The Mastership of Christ, produced in 1934.

Rank was also a businessman and he saw films as a commodity. Like many evangelical preachers, he believed that spreading the word of God was the same as selling a product. Films, too, could be produced, marketed and sold like flour.

And very quickly the business of making films roused Rank’s competitive instincts. Within barely two years, not content with funding straightforwardly religious films, he decided to make mainstream films for a wider audience, gently introducing them to ‘moral’ and ‘wholesome’ values without subjecting them to a sermon. Through films, he said, he would ‘help men and women make this world a better place to live in’.

In 1935, in alliance with the Tory peer Viscount Portal, he set up the General Cinema Finance Corporation and gradually built up a film empire that would eventually include the Pinewood studios, a distribution company, a share of Universal, the Odeon cinema chain, the Gaumont cinema chain, the studios in Denham and the Lime Grove studios.

In 1938 Rank bought the Odeon Cinemas chain and in 1939 he consolidated his film production interests in Pinewood Film Studios, Denham Film Studios and the Amalgamated Studios in Elstree, although the latter were never used as film studios by Rank. In 1941, Rank absorbed Gaumont-British, which owned 251 cinemas, and Lime Grove Studios (later owned by the BBC), and bought the Paramount Cinemas chain, so that by 1942 the Rank Organisation owned 619 cinemas. Other interests were acquired, such as the Bush Radio Company in 1949, which would be added to the interests in a few more years within this new company.

By the end of the Second World War, Rank was the most powerful man in the British film industry, although his handling of the generally sensitive film stars left something to be desired. For example, after seeing Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet (1948), one of the most prestigious films the Rank Organisation ever made, Rank said simply to the star: ‘Thank you very much, Sir Laurence.’ This was not good enough for Olivier, who had been expecting a torrent of praise and never forgave him for such an outrageous slight. And the actor James Mason, who had made his name in Rank films during the Second World War, made a blistering attack on his patron after decamping to Hollywood in 1946. Rank, he said, was ‘the worst thing that has happened to the British film industry’. That was clearly complete rubbish.

Rank’s empire reached its zenith in 1946. By then, he employed 31,000 people, turned over £45 million a year (about £1.6 billion today) and controlled five studios, five newsreel firms, a host of production companies and almost 650 cinemas.

The late 1940s and early 1950s were the golden age of British cinema and much of that was thanks to Rank. He put up the money for classics such as David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945), Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948), and for Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) and The Red Shoes (1948).

It was even Rank who paid for the Ealing comedies that have become synonymous with post-war Britain. Without him there would have been no Passport to Pimlico (1949), no Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), no The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) and no The Ladykillers (1955).

Rank himself had nothing to do with writing or making these films. His great virtue was that he gave carte blanche to more talented people.

‘We can make any subject we wish’, Lean said in 1947, ‘with as much money as we think that subject should have spent on it. We can cast whichever actors we choose, and we have no interference with the way the film is made.’

Even Rank’s great rival Alexander Korda believed that had it not been for the Yorkshireman, the British film industry would probably have been dead before the end of the Second World War. ‘Any who deny what Arthur has done’, Korda said, ‘know nothing.’

Rank’s biggest challenge was to be successful in the USA, which meant taking the fight to Hollywood or ‘Fairyland’, as he called it, and he saw British history as the way to do it.

He led his attack with Henry V, one of the most influential British pictures ever made. Not only did it boast the talents of Britain’s most celebrated actor, Olivier, it also had Britain’s greatest playwright. As for Olivier, he was a natural choice to star and direct since he had not only played Shakespeare’s national hero at the Old Vic but had recited stirring passages on radio since the outbreak of the Second World War.

And Rank’s men marketed it brilliantly in the USA. The film was shown in college towns for one night only, and in small venues, ensuring that they would be packed.

As word spread, the distributors booked bigger halls. After just twelve months, the film had already made a profit of £275,000 (£9.5 million today). It turned out to be an early and enormously accomplished example of an enduring blueprint for British success. Rank had hit on an approach that has come to define British cinema, and perhaps Britain itself, in the eyes of the world. Such films as Chariots of Fire, Gandhi and A Room With a View in the 1980s, or The Remains of the Day, The English Patient and Shakespeare in Love in the 1990s have followed the principles laid down by Rank and have proved immensely popular throughout the world.

Rank proved to be the most influential figure in British film-making and distribution, and a worthy member of the 50 Most Influential Britons of the Last 100 Years.

46. GEORGE ORWELL

George Orwell’s real name was Eric Arthur Blair. He was born to Scottish parents in India, where his father served in the opium department of the Bengal Government. When Orwell left Eton in 1921, after a somewhat troubled childhood and failure to get into university, he joined the Imperial Police in Burma and remained there until 1926.

Orwell began to write in the 1920s, adopting the penname Orwell after the river in Suffolk. He moved to Paris in 1928 but after a difficult two years returned to live in Southwold, where he lived for the next five years, indulging in both writing and teaching. He also began to visit London, especially the poorer parts. He worked in a series of mundane and badly paid jobs, for example as a dishwasher and bookseller’s assistant; he consequently knew the meaning of poverty and destitution and certainly wanted to promote social justice. He recorded his experiences of the ‘low life’ in The Spike and in the second half of his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, published in 1933.

In 1936, he carried out the suggestion made to him that he visit northern England, by then suffering mightily in the Depression of the 1930s. He stayed in Wigan and wrote about his experiences in The Road to Wigan Pier, published in 1937, which describes the miseries of unemployment.

In 1937 he volunteered to join the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War and was wounded. In 1939 he was rejected for the British Army on medical grounds and became a sergeant in the Home Guard. He wrote spasmodically during the Second World War but in 1945 published his famous Animal Farm. It was a fierce, perhaps amusing satire on the totalitarian tyranny of the supposedly classless society of Soviet Russia.

Animal Farm was ready for publication by April 1944 but the publisher, Gollancz, refused to issue it on the grounds that it was an attack on the Soviet regime, which was then a crucial ally. T.S. Eliot at Faber and Faber also refused but finally Jonathan Cape agreed to publish it.

Orwell is best known for, and had most influence with, his book Nineteen Eighty-Four, which he finished in 1948 (hence ‘1984’ for the title). It became the cult novel of the age, projecting a totalitarian future with perpetual war between the superpowers and Britain reduced to a nonentity. Orwell had a vision of Britain as ‘a cold and unimportant little island where we should all have to work very hard and live mainly on herrings and potatoes’.

His books may only have been novels but their influence and importance are such that Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four are regulars in GCSE examinations.

Many of the words, phrases and expressions in Nineteen Eighty-Four have entered the English language, and we use them every day:

‘Newspeak’ – the government’s language

‘Big Brother’ – the party leader

‘The Ministry of Truth’ – responsible for propaganda and disinformation

‘Room 101’ – the room of mental torture

‘Proles’ – the lower class

In 2003 Nineteen Eighty-Four was listed at number eight on the BBC’s survey The Big Read. In 2005, Time magazine chose it as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the period 1923–2005. By 1989 it had been translated into no fewer than 65 languages, more than any other novel at the time.

45. SIR DAVID FROST

David Frost was the man who led the satirical attack on the complacent class structure of the UK in the early 1960s.

Born on 7 April 1939 in Tenterden, Kent, he was the son of the Reverend Wilfred John Paradine Frost, a Methodist minister of Huguenot descent. David was taught in the Bible class of the Sunday school at his father’s church and began training as a Methodist local preacher. He went to two grammar schools, Gillingham in Kent and Wellingborough in Northamptonshire.