Hermit nun and respected GP: Norfolk's own added to biography

Sister Wendy Beckett, Patricia Hollis, and Thomas Stuttaford are among 243 contemporary figures added to the new edition of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

The latest update of the publication, out this month, has added the biographies of the men and women who left their mark on the UK and who died in the year 2018.

Included with the new entries are six of the county’s own.

Sister Wendy Beckett

%image(14393476, type="article-full", alt="Sister Wendy Beckett at Quidenham Carmelite Photo:Sonya Duncan Copy: For: EDP2 EDP pics © 2009 (01603) 772434")

%image(14393477, type="article-full", alt="Sister Wendy Beckett sitting on her mother's lap (baby on right). Her father is behind her in the stripy jacket. Photo was taken in South Africa and is of her family Photo:Sonya Duncan Copy: For: EDP2 EDP pics © 2009 (01603) 772434")

Living in a small second-hand caravan, insulated with piles of books, and as a hermit nun under the protection of the Carmelite monastery at Quidenham, near Attleborough, was where Sister Wendy Beckett could be found.

She pursued her love of art history and became an unlikely television star as the nation’s best-loved art historian through a series of programmes in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Baroness Patricia Hollis

%image(14393478, type="article-full", alt="Baroness Patricia Hollis helped to save a chunk of Norwich's Golden Triangle from destruction. . Outside her old home (2, Adelaide St). Photo: Simon Finlay Copy: For: EDP Sunday EDP pics © 2007 (01603) 772434")

%image(14393479, type="article-full", alt="Labour supporters get their local election campaign on the move, on board the party's double-decker bus in south London in April 1987. Persuading Londoners to vote Labour are Dr John Cunningham (right), Shadow Environment Minister; Patricia Hollis, leader of Norwich Council and Jack Straw, MP for Blackburn. Picture: PA Archive/PA Images")

Baroness Patricia Hollis, who moved to Norwich in 1967, took a job as a historian at the University of East Anglia, where she became dean of the school of English and American studies.

She was elected a Labour member of Norwich City Council and became chair of the housing committee in 1970 and leader from 1983 to 1988.

She was later made a baroness in 1990, was a junior minister in Tony Blair’s governments, and after 2005 became one of the upper house's most effective backbench campaigners.

She was voted Dod's "peer of the year" and Channel 4’s "campaigning politician of the year" for her work on pensions.

Thomas Stuttaford

%image(14393480, type="article-full", alt="Macmillan Associates Lunch at the Great Hospital, Norwich on March 5. Shireen Naghshineh, Rachel Farquharson, Dr Thomas Stuttaford. Pictures by Amanda Sandland-Taylor.")

Born in Horning, on the Norfolk Broads, Thomas Stuttaford was a general practitioner who also sat on Norwich City Council as a Conservative and was briefly MP for Norwich South from 1970 to 1974.

During this time, he opposed his own government on a range of measures from free school milk to the introduction of museum charges.

Having worked with Harold Evans on the campaign for thalidomide victims, he was for almost 30 years after leaving parliament the Times’s medical correspondent.

Peter Mond

%image(14393482, type="article-full", alt="Lord Melchett smiles for the cameras outside Norwich Crown Court, after winning his case with the GM")

Peter Mond, fourth Baron Melchett, was a hereditary peer opposed to the principle of hereditary peerages, and a Labour junior minister where he spent two and a half years at the Northern Ireland Office.

Increasingly preoccupied by environmental and anti-nuclear concerns, he declared himself tired of Westminster politics and turned to pressure group activity.

As executive director of Greenpeace he was, in a celebrated case, arrested but cleared by a jury for taking part in non-violent direct action against genetically modified crops at Walnut Tree Farm in Lyng, near Dereham.

He himself farmed for many years at Courtyard Farm, near Hunstanton, where he put his principles into practice and made the farm completely organic by 2000 by cultivating wildlife and installing miles of public access footpaths.

Drue Heinz

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%image(14393484, type="article-full", alt="Production line workers packaging frozen sprouts at the Ross's Westwick factory at North Walsham before they were taken over by Heinz Dated -- c1972")

Born in Smallburgh, near Stalham, in 1914, the daughter of a domestic servant, Drue Heinz became a wealthy literary benefactor after marrying into the American Heinz family.

She was publisher of the Paris Review and founder of the Hawthornden literary retreat, which provided a welcoming environment for many writers. Her own life story reads like the plot of a romantic novel.

Mary Wilson

%image(14393485, type="article-full", alt="Former Prime Minister Sir Harold Wilson, in his robes as a Knight of the Garter, and Lady Mary Wilson, waiting for their car on the steps of the Queen's Free Chapel of St George at Windsor Castle after attending the Most Nobel Order of the Garter ceremony. Date: 18 Jun 1979 Source: Library")

%image(14393486, type="article-full", alt="Mrs Mary Wilson, wife of Mr Harold Wilson, the former Prime Minister in the Labour Government. Date: Jan 1971 Source: Library")

Finally, Mary Wilson, Lady Wilson of Rievaulx, born in Diss in 1916, has also been included in the dictionary.

She married the future prime minister Harold Wilson in 1940 but was a reluctant politician’s wife and found refuge in writing poetry. Her three volumes were highly popular and won the admiration of John Betjeman and Hugh MacDiarmid.

Other prominent figures from outside of the county who also appear in the new edition include theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, politician Paddy Ashdown, and Diane Leather, who in 1954 became the first woman athlete to run a mile in less than five minutes.