Who's Who (UK)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Who's Who (2005 Edition: ISBN 0-7136-7010-X), is an annual British publication of very short biographies of about 30,000 living notable Britons, published since 1849 by A & C Black ^[1]. Originally, it provided lists of notable people, for example all MPs or all bishops. Starting with the 1897 edition, it listed people alphabetically.

A full online edition of the work was launched in 2005.

Subjects include peers, MPs, judges, very senior civil servants, and distinguished writers, actors, lawyers, scientists, researchers, and artists. Anyone holding a Professorial Chair at Oxford or Cambridge is ex officio eligible for admission to Who's Who.

Normally, once someone is included in Who's Who he or she remains in it for life, so for example MPs are not removed when they leave Parliament. The 7th Earl of Lucan is still listed in the book, even though he has been missing since 1974 and is widely assumed to be dead, as he has not legally been declared dead.

Who's Who has been criticised for being too old-fashioned. For example, all members of the English, Scottish, British and United Kingdom Peerage and Baronetage are included, however minor their achievements, but many better-known people, such as some leading footballers, are not. Occasional problems arise with the publication's reliability as a reference source, because the entries are compiled from questionnaires returned to the publisher by the featured subjects. This has resulted in notable biographical omissions; for example, the playwright John Osborne did not acknowledge an estranged daughter in his entry. Carole Jordan does not mention any marriage in her article, although her ex-husband, Richard Peckover, does in his.

Sometimes, there is an excess of detail: the prolific romantic novelist Dame Barbara Cartland listed each of her publications, many hundreds of books, in hers, together with a list of her other achievements; the result was one of the longest entries in the history of Who's Who.

Several volumes of Who was Who have been published, which give the entries of people who have died; they are usually as they appeared in the last Who's Who before their death, with the date of death appended. The first volume covered deaths in 1897–1915, but more recently they have appeared at ten-year intervals, and now every five years ^[2].

A fuller history of Who's Who was published to coincide with the 150th edition in 1998.

The name has been widely copied, and now there are many publications with "Who's Who" in the title, though they are not from the same publisher.

The name is also often used metaphorically, as in this example from Wikipedia's entry about the former UK current affairs TV programme This Week:

"Its presenters read like a Who’s Who of British broadcasting."