Compact Biographies

“I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong” – Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell Biography

Bertrand Russell was one of the great thinkers of the 20th century. He was born into a life within the British aristocracy on 18 May 1872. His father was John Russell, Viscount Amberley who was a British Politician and eldest son of John Russell who had served two terms as British Prime Minister. His mother was Katharine Russell, Viscountess Amberley who was prominent in the British suffrage movement, and so it seemed that Bertrand Russell had a lot to live up to. In fact, few men would know a heavier weight to bear from parental influence than Russell whose father expected great things from him; however, even his father could never have imagined the heights and the greatness that Bertrand Russell would achieve in his lifetime across the span of the humanities.

Bertrand Russell’s life was dominated by liberal ideals. Both of his parents were considered extremely forward-thinking – almost to the point of scandal at the time.  Bertrand’s father consented to his wife having an affair; they were also in favour of birth control which was a hugely distasteful position to have in the Victorian era. Bertrand’s father even insisted that his son grow up atheist, which was again a fairly innovative position given the age in which he grew up.

Despite every opportunity at success throughout his childhood and young years, Bertrand Russell was often depressed and thoughts of suicide were his constant companions. His life was a lonely one; not having the same views as many of his peers due to his upbringing cost him no small measure of isolationism from his fellow peers. This, coupled with his gifted mind, set him apart in many respects.

However, even at a young age, his brilliance could not be stifled and it was his enduring love of mathematics that he would later say saved his life. But a keen sense of mathematics was not his only passion as he also was extremely interested in religious subjects as well. Thoroughly investigating and probing Christianity in particular, he ultimately found it to be unbelievable as he came to the personal conclusion that there is no such thing as free will.

It was these early forays into mathematics with one of his all-time favourite writers, the ancient Greek mathematician Euclid, as well as his first investigations into religion with Christianity that would be the hallmarks of a brilliant philosophical and mathematical career to come.

Bertrand Russell’s far-flung beliefs would sometimes land him not just in controversy but in trouble with the law itself. During World War I, Russell advocated for a peaceful solution to the war to such a degree that he was fined a hundred pounds. Russell was always a man of deep conviction and principles and refused to pay the fine as he wanted to make his political statement by going to prison. His friends, however, had a different idea in mind and instead they sold his books to raise the money. To ensure the books sold at auction they sold the books to themselves!

Later, when he got some of his books returned, it was his version of the King James Bible that he would hold as a personal treasure due to it being stamped with the words “Confiscated by Cambridge Police”. Here was a union between two of his greatest loves – his early inspiration for philosophical thinking as well a mark of his liberal ideals stamped on the very page of that book.

Bertrand Russell could not keep his mouth shut for long and shortly after his release from prison the first time, he ended up going back again due to giving lectures on why the United States should keep out of World War I. As an influential college professor, his words carried weight and many in the UK government even viewed them as seditious.

Over the course of his lifetime, Bertrand Russell’s views would change.

In episode 7 of the seventh season of the 5 Minute Biographies podcast, we take a brief look at the ultimately tragic life of a true legend of jazz music - Billie Holiday.

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“I never had a chance to play with dolls like other kids. I started working when I was six years old.” – Billie Holiday

Billie Holiday Biography

Billie Holiday was a well-known American jazz singer who was born on 7 April 1915 as Eleanora Fagan in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her prolific singing career spanned almost thirty years and what she lacked in formal music education and range, she made up for with style. She was known for her improvisational skills creating different methods of tempo, vocal delivery and phrasing with jazz instrumentalists heavily inspiring her singing style.

Her parents were unmarried teenagers Sarah Julia Fagan who was known to everyone as Sadie and Clarence Holiday. Her mother Sarah was evicted from her parent’s home in Baltimore, Maryland after she became pregnant with Eleanora at the age of only nineteen.

Sarah moved to Pennsylvania, but Clarence decided to leave his family just after Eleanora was born to become a jazz banjo player. As Sarah’s parents also offered her no support, she sent Eleanora initially to live with her married half-sister in Baltimore.

Billie Holiday continued to have a difficult childhood and was raised by numerous people during the first decade of her life. Her mother worked in transportation jobs, mostly as a server for passenger trains and so Billie did not spend that much time with her. She was often absent from school and ended up in juvenile court in 1925 at the age of nine. After this, she went to a Catholic reform school called House of the Good Shepherd. Nine months later she was reunited with her mother who had opened a restaurant. They worked there together many long hours and by the age of eleven, Billie had completely dropped out of school.

When Billie Holiday was ten years old a neighbour had attempted to rape her, but he was arrested, and she returned to House of the Good Shepherd as a form of protective custody. At twelve years old she worked for a brothel running errands and she also scrubbed floors in the neighbourhood. At this time she also started listening to music and heard the records of Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong.

In 1929 she went to live with her mother in Harlem, New York. Their landlady ran a brothel where Billie’s mother worked as a prostitute and it wasn’t long before mother and daughter were working together again with Billie becoming a prostitute herself at the age of only fourteen.

At around the same time, Billie Holiday started singing in nightclubs around Harlem. She took her father’s last name and the first name of Billie Dove, an actress she looked up to, and Billie Holiday was born. In 1932 she was singing at a club where she had replaced singer Monette Moore for the evening. Producer John Hammond had come to hear Moore sing but ended up hearing Holiday instead, a piece of good fortune that led to Billie making her recording debut at the age of eighteen. The song she recorded, ‘Riffin’ the Scotch’, sold an impressive 5,000 copies and Hammond said of Holiday, “Her singing almost changed my music tastes and my musical life because she was the first girl singer I’d come across who actually sang like an improvising jazz genius.” She was compared with the great Louis Armstrong, which was an incredible compliment for her.

Her career transitioned from singles and jazz clubs to mainstream success with Decca Records and Columbia Records and her song with Teddy Wilson, ‘What a Little Moonlight Can Do’, became a jazz standard.

At one point she was in competition with another popular singer at the time, Ella Fitzgerald, but they would later become good friends.

When working for Columbia in the 1930s Billie Holiday sang the song “Strange Fruit” based on a dark poem about lynching. The lyrics include the words, “Southern trees bear strange fruit,

“I’m not concerned with your liking or disliking me… All I ask is that you respect me as a human being.” – Jackie Robinson

Jackie Robinson Biography

Jack Roosevelt Robinson, known as Jackie, was born on 31 January 1919 in Cairo, Georgia, USA. He was the last of five children born into a family of sharecroppers which meant they worked the land for a landowner in return for a share of the crops they produced. Jackie’s middle name was given to him in honour of President Theodore Roosevelt who had died only 25 days before he was born.

Before Jackie was one-year-old, his father Jerry left the family and so his mother, Mallie moved along with Jackie and his three brothers Edgar, Frank and Matthew and his sister Willa Mae to a small plot containing two houses at 121 Pepper Street in Pasadena, California. The neighbourhood itself was rather affluent compared to what the family had known before but as Mallie only had a few odd jobs with which to pay the bills, they themselves were relatively poor. Due to the lack of things to do for a kid in the neighbourhood, Jackie was tempted to join in the gang culture but was persuaded not to by his friend Carl Anderson.

In 1935 Jackie went to John Muir High School following his graduation from Washington Junior High and was persuaded to pursue his interest in sports by his brothers Matthew and Frank. (It should be noted that Jackie was not the only member of his family to become an accomplished sportsman. His brother Matthew, also known as Mack would become a silver medallist at the 1936 Summer Olympics).

Jackie played a number of sports at school including football, where he played quarterback, basketball, where he played guard, baseball, where he played short-stop and catcher. He also enjoyed track events and was a member of the tennis team. The Pasadena Star News in 1937 reported that Jackie had been the outstanding athlete at Muir for two years running.

After he graduated from Muir, Jackie went to college at Pasadena Junior College where he continued his interest in football, basketball, baseball, and track. In 1938 he was elected to the baseball team for the All-Southland Junior College team and became the region’s most valuable player. During the same year, he was recognised by the college for the commitment and dedication he showed to his work and for the outstanding service he gave to his school.

Also during this time, Jackie was persuaded to attend church regularly by the Rev. Karl Downs who became a confidant for him. He was also starting to have regular run-ins with authority figures including the police, especially when he or his friends became the targets of racially motivated incidents.

Towards the end of his time at Pasadena Junior College, the brother he was closest to, Frank, was killed in a motorcycle accident. This led to Jackie wanting to stay close to Frank’s family and so he decided to pursue his athletic career at UCLA which was nearby.

At UCLA Jackie Robinson once again excelled at his four chosen sports and became part of what was at the time the most integrated college football team in the country, the UCLA Bruins, as he was one of four black players on the team. He won accolades in track and field and also met Rachel Isum, who would become his future wife whilst at UCLA. However, in early 1941, he left college to get a job as assistant athletic director with the National Youth Administration. When the government disbanded the programme, Robinson traveled to Hawaii and played semi-professional football for the Honolulu Bears. He soon returned to California though, but what looked to be a professional football career in the making was stopped dead when in December of 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour.

Jackie Robinson was drafted in 1942 and was assigned to a segregated Army Cavalry unit. As he had the qualifications,

In episode 6 of the 5 Minute Biographies podcast, we take a brief look at the life of the first black baseball player to be called up to the major leagues - Jackie Robinson.

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Virginia Katherine McMath, who became known as Ginger Rogers, was born in Independence, Missouri on July 16, 1911. She was an American singer, actress, and well-known dancer. Her mother Lela Emogene was a scriptwriter, newspaper reporter, and film producer. When Ginger Rogers was born, Lela left her husband William and went away to have her daughter as in an earlier pregnancy William had allowed the doctor to use forceps to deliver the baby who subsequently died and so Lela did not want her child to be born in a hospital.

Ginger’s childhood was a bit rough. Her parents divorced shortly after she was born, and her father kidnapped her several times, with Lela finally taking him to court. She was very close with her mother since her father eventually stopped seeing her and she didn’t have any living siblings although she did have cousins, which is where the name Ginger came from, as they apparently had trouble saying Virginia.

In 1915 her mother left Ginger with her grandparents for a while to search for a scriptwriting job across the country in Hollywood, California. She eventually succeeded in getting an essay she had written turned into a film and she subsequently continued to write scripts for Fox.

When Ginger Rogers was nine years old, her mother married John Logan Rogers, and although Ginger was never officially adopted by him, she took his surname. They all lived together in Fort Worth where Ginger attended the Central High School, but she never graduated.

At fourteen years old, Ginger won a Charleston dance contest which helped launch a successful Vaudeville career. She also became known on Broadway for her role in ‘Crazy Girl’. Her success was not just in theatre, however. Her first film roles consisted of a trio of short films made in 1929 and in the following year she landed herself a seven-year deal with Paramount Pictures.

Throughout her career Ginger Rogers appeared in a total of 73 films but the roles which made her famous are generally thought of as those where she appeared alongside her dance partner, Fred Astaire, including their first film together Flying Down to Rio which was released in 1933. They also co-starred in Top Hat in 1935 and Shall We Dance in 1937. In 1934’s The Gay Divorcee she also sang a song called ‘The Continental’, which won the first Academy Award for Best Original Song.

Ginger Rogers is also associated with the phrase “backwards and in high heels.” It means that although Fred Astaire was a brilliant dancer, Ginger was even more impressive as she had to do everything whilst going backward, not being able to see where she was going, and all the time looking fantastic in flowing gowns and high heeled shoes. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers made ten films together, and despite some misconceptions, they were never romantically involved. Fred Astaire said of her that, “Ginger was brilliantly effective. She made everything work fine for her. Actually, she made things very fine for both of us and she deserves most of the credit for our success.”

They also made a lot of films independent from each other, with Ginger Rogers doing very well in several non-musical dramas such as Stage Door in 1937. In fact, she was so successful that by 1942 she had become one of Hollywood’s highest-paid stars earning over $350,000 per year. She didn’t fritter her money away either, investing it in blue-chip stocks and land.Fred and Ginger’s film Top Hat was the first time Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers had a film written exclusively for them, and it was one of the most financially successful films of 1935, with worldwide revenues of $3.2 million as well as being the most profitable RKO film of the 1930s. Together they were voted number four on the Top Ten Money Making Stars Poll put out by Quigley Publishing Company.

Ginger Rogers earned several awards during her career including an Oscar for Best Actress...

In episode 5 of the 5 Minute Biographies podcast, we take a brief look at the life of one of the most graceful dancers and actresses from the golden age of cinema. She made ten films with Fred Astaire and she is of course - Ginger Rogers.

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“Truth is the daughter of time, and I feel no shame in being her midwife.” – Johannes Kepler.

Johannes Kepler Biography

Johannes Kepler was born on 27 December 1571 in Well der Stadt, a small town in what is now the Stuttgart region of Germany. He was the fourth child of Heinrich Kepler, a mercenary who left the family when Johannes was only five and is thought to have died in the eighty years war. His mother, Katharina, was an innkeeper’s daughter. She did her best to allow Johannes to experience the wonders of nature, and it was probably because of this that he developed a love for astronomy. It was she who took him to a high place in order for him to see the great comet of 1577 better and it was probably she that called him outside in 1580, when he was nine, to look at the lunar eclipse.

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In 1589, after leaving grammar school, Kepler attended the University of Tübingen, and proved himself to be a skillful mathematician. Under Michael Maestlin, the university’s professor of mathematics, he learned about planetary motion and became a fan of the Copernican system which put the Sun, rather than the Earth at the center of the universe.

Kepler had wanted to become a minister, having studied both philosophy and theology whilst at university, and having attended seminary at Maulbronn before that. However, he was recommended as a teacher of mathematics and astronomy at a school in Graz, a position which he took up at the age of 23 in April 1594. Whilst teaching at Graz, Kepler claimed to have an epiphany on 19 July 1595 in which he believed that he was shown God’s geometrical plan for the universe. His experiments led him to publish a book called Mysterium Cosmographicum in 1596. A second edition of which was published in 1621 included all of his observations and corrections since the first edition was published some quarter of a century earlier.

The year before he published Mysterium Cosmographicum, Johannes Kepler was introduced to Barbara Müller, a 23-year-old, twice-widowed mother of one, and they began courting. The couple was married on 27 April 1597. They had two children who died in infancy, but three more children would follow, a daughter called Susanna and two sons, Friedrich and Ludwig.

Following the publication of Mysterium Cosmographicum, Kepler formulated grand plans to expand on the work, by publishing four more books dealing with the sun, stars, planets and their motions, the physical nature of the planets and the effects of the heavens on the earth. In order to help him with his work, he began correspondence with a number of eminent astronomers, to whom he had previously sent copies of his book. One such person was Tycho Brahe, who was particularly critical of the use, in Kepler’s work, of the inaccurate data supplied by Copernicus. Never the less, the two started regular correspondence. Eventually, and amidst, growing religious tension in Graz which was threatening his employment, Kepler accepted an invitation from Tycho to visit him in Prague.

Kepler arrived in Benátky nad Jizerou, about 35km outside of Prague, where Tycho Brahe was building a new observatory, on 4 February 1600. He met Tycho and his assistants and stayed for the next couple of months as a guest, and as Tycho began to trust Kepler, he allowed him more and more access to his data. Following an argument, however, over negotiations for a more formal arrangement of employment with Tycho, Kepler left and headed to Prague. The pair soon came to an arrangement though and Kepler returned to Graz to collect his family. Political and religious tensions in Graz meant that he could not return immediately to Brahe, but when he refused to convert to Catholicism he was banished, and he and his family headed to Prague, where from 1601, he was supported by Tycho Brahe but on 24 October 1601,

In episode 4 of season 7 of 5 Minute Biographies, we take a brief look at the life of a man who set the foundation for modern optics and produced groundbreaking work on planetary motion coming up with fundemental laws of motion along the way - Johannes Kepler.

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Elvis Aaron Presley was born on 8 January 1935 in Tupelo, Mississippi in a shotgun house built by his father Vernon. He had a twin brother called Jesse who was 35 minutes older than he but unfortunately was stillborn.Elvis’s mother, Gladys, who was of Scots-Irish descent, had eloped with Vernon when she was 21. She was four years older than Vernon when they were married in 1933 and the young couple did the best they could to cope but often had to turn to handouts from family members and also sometimes had to take advantage of government food assistance.

In 1938, Vernon was jailed for 8 months after altering a cheque. This resulted in the family losing their home and so Elvis and his mother moved in with relatives.

Elvis’ first experience of music came when one of his teachers at the East Tupelo Consolidated school he attended suggested that he enter a singing contest. Consequently, Elvis Presley’s first public performance was on 3 October 1945 at the Mississippi-Alabama Fair and Dairy Show. He placed fifth after singing “Old Shep” whilst dressed as a cowboy. A few months later he was given his first guitar although he recalled later that he would have preferred a bicycle or a rifle. Although at first, he was shy of singing in public, he started to learn the basics of the guitar and would over time become ‘crazy about music’.

In 1948, the family moved to Memphis, Tennessee. Elvis attended L. C. Humes High School where he managed to attain a ‘C’ grade in music in the 8th grade. By the time he graduated though, in June 1953, Elvis had already decided that he wanted a career in music.

He began recording with Sun Records in Memphis with producer Sam Phillips at just nineteen years old in 1954. This was at a time of immense racial tension and legal racism caused by segregation in America. Sam Phillips wanted African American music to have a wider audience, and Elvis was the man for the job. As no music style is ever completely unique, rock and roll music has its roots in rhythm and blues or R&B.

Rock and roll took the same elements but created an up-tempo combination of R&B and country music that was backbeat-driven. The particular style of rock and roll that Elvis Presley created was called rockabilly.

After a few false starts, Elvis stumbled across a song that worked and was the sort of thing that Sam was looking for. The song was called “That’s All Right” and after a popular Memphis DJ called Dewey Phillips played it on his show, people started asking who this new singer was.

In 1956 Elvis started to make recordings with RCA in Nashville and on 27 January 1956 his first single, “Heartbreak Hotel” was released, and it quickly rose to the top of the charts in the United States. But his voice was not the only thing people were interested in. He was very successful in a number of television appearances which helped him to also become the face of rock and roll.

It has been said of Elvis Presley’s musical style that it was more than just a mix of black, white, pop, and country. One of the things that made him different was that at a time when most singers created music for adults, he was appealing to a younger generation. Teenagers were one of his biggest audiences, and at a time when portable radios were becoming popular, he found it relatively easy to get his music to them, increasing his popularity even more. His incredible energetic and provocative performances of songs made him hugely popular – and controversial.

In many of his live performances, he would perform with African American backing singers in front of a mostly white audience. His career also allowed for African American performers to become more mainstream with white audiences because the style was in such demand. Elvis’ performances were also noted for being somewhat raunchy with screaming fans being wowed by the way he used his body,