Ronald Mansbridge
Encyclopedia
Ronald Mansbridge was a publisher, author and wit. He served for forty years as US representative for Cambridge University Press. He had also served briefly as Acting Director of MIT University Press and, for two years, as a Managing Director of the UK office of Yale University Press.
Mansbridge was born in Sanderstead
, Surrey
, England
, the fourth child of George Frederick Mansbridge, inventor of the Mansbridge electrical condenser, and Florence Quye Mansbridge. He traced his ancestry back to the Mansbridges whose land is shown on medieval maps of Hampshire
as the Mansbridge Hundred.
He was educated at Malvern College
(1919-1925) and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge
(1925-1928). In 1928, he came to the United States and for two years taught in the English Department at Barnard College
, working also at Oxford University Press
. In 1930, he joined Cambridge University Press
as their representative with the Macmillan Company, New York
.
On April 10, 1931, he married Georgia St Clair Mullan, daughter of George V. Mullan, Justice of the Supreme court
of the state of New York and Helen St Clair Mullan. He and Georgia had two children: Jane Mansbridge, born November 19, 1939, now Adams Professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government
at Harvard University
, and Bruce Mansbridge, Ph.D., born April 20, 1945, now Director of the Austin Center for the Treatment of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder in Austin, Texas
. He had two grandchildren: Nathaniel Mansbridge Jencks, of New York City
, and Travis Marshall Mansbridge, of Austin, Texas
. In 1947, the Mansbridges moved from New York City to Weston, Connecticut
. In 1990, two years after the death of his first wife, Mansbridge married Janet Dunning Van Duyn, author of books on the Ancient Greeks
and Egyptians
, who died in 2003.
In 1949, Mansbridge left Macmillan to establish the Cambridge University Press American
Branch, beginning with a workforce of nine. The Branch was to grow under his direction to a multi-million dollar enterprise. On retirement, after more than forty years with Cambridge University Press, he served briefly as Acting Director of the MIT University Press
, and then for two years as Managing Director of the Yale University Press
, London
Office. It pleased him that the initials of the university presses for which he worked – Cambridge
, Oxford
, MIT
and Yale
– spelled the word COMITY.
Mansbridge made frequent contributions to media ranging from scholarly journals to the weekly press. His first printed contribution was a pacifist
piece; throughout his life he was a committed pacifist. He later wrote on books and Bible
s, publishing and English usage for the Book Collector, Scholarly Publishing, Publishers Weekly, The Saturday Review of Literature, Verbatim and English Today. His extensive collection of Cambridge University Press books printed between 1584 and 1800 is now housed in the collection of fine books at the Waseda University Library, Tokyo
. He was a member of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (of which he was elected Vice-President in 1940), the Century Association, the Grolier Club
of New York City and the Baker Street Irregulars
. He was also a member of the Tyndale Society, working hard to revive the memory of the man whose translation of the Bible was the first printed in English
directly from the Greek
and the Hebrew
. Tyndale supplied more than eighty percent of the words in the King James version
, including those that Mansbridge regarded as the most beautiful. Always a keen bridge
player, Mansbridge wrote bridge columns for several publications, the first in 1928 and the latest, a weekly column entitled "Minuteman's Bridge," for the Westport "Minuteman," that ran until 2002.
Mansbridge also had a lifelong interest in daffodils, culminating in the planting of a daffodil field adjoining his house in Weston. The field, composed primarily of Narcissus Pseudo-Narcissus, a species daffodil that will reproduce itself from seed, includes daffodils of this variety from Spain
and from Wordsworth
's garden in the Lake District
of Northern England
.
He lived until his death on the banks of the Saugatuck River
in Western Connecticut
, his home of 59 years, with his stepdaughter Barbara Van Duyn. He had recently written a book of annotated limericks, and a book on bridge: How to Win at Bridge Without Being an Expert. He celebrated his 100th birthday
on November 11, 2005. He had hoped to live to be 106, so that he could see again the date his father showed him on his sixth birthday: 11/11/11, but it wasn't to be, since he died at exactly 100 years of age.
Mansbridge was born in Sanderstead
Sanderstead
Sanderstead is a village in London Borough of Croydon, located on high ground at the edge of the built-up area of Greater London. From 1915 to 1965 it formed a parish in the Coulsdon and Purley Urban District of Surrey. Having been a farming community in previous centuries, Sanderstead is now...
, Surrey
Surrey
Surrey is a county in the South East of England and is one of the Home Counties. The county borders Greater London, Kent, East Sussex, West Sussex, Hampshire and Berkshire. The historic county town is Guildford. Surrey County Council sits at Kingston upon Thames, although this has been part of...
, England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
, the fourth child of George Frederick Mansbridge, inventor of the Mansbridge electrical condenser, and Florence Quye Mansbridge. He traced his ancestry back to the Mansbridges whose land is shown on medieval maps of Hampshire
Hampshire
Hampshire is a county on the southern coast of England in the United Kingdom. The county town of Hampshire is Winchester, a historic cathedral city that was once the capital of England. Hampshire is notable for housing the original birthplaces of the Royal Navy, British Army, and Royal Air Force...
as the Mansbridge Hundred.
He was educated at Malvern College
Malvern College
Malvern College is a coeducational independent school located on a 250 acre campus near the town centre of Malvern, Worcestershire in England. Founded on 25 January 1865, until 1992, the College was a secondary school for boys aged 13 to 18...
(1919-1925) and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge
Corpus Christi College, Cambridge
Corpus Christi College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. It is notable as the only college founded by Cambridge townspeople: it was established in 1352 by the Guilds of Corpus Christi and the Blessed Virgin Mary...
(1925-1928). In 1928, he came to the United States and for two years taught in the English Department at Barnard College
Barnard College
Barnard College is a private women's liberal arts college and a member of the Seven Sisters. Founded in 1889, Barnard has been affiliated with Columbia University since 1900. The campus stretches along Broadway between 116th and 120th Streets in the Morningside Heights neighborhood in the borough...
, working also at Oxford University Press
Oxford University Press
Oxford University Press is the largest university press in the world. It is a department of the University of Oxford and is governed by a group of 15 academics appointed by the Vice-Chancellor known as the Delegates of the Press. They are headed by the Secretary to the Delegates, who serves as...
. In 1930, he joined Cambridge University Press
Cambridge University Press
Cambridge University Press is the publishing business of the University of Cambridge. Granted letters patent by Henry VIII in 1534, it is the world's oldest publishing house, and the second largest university press in the world...
as their representative with the Macmillan Company, New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
.
On April 10, 1931, he married Georgia St Clair Mullan, daughter of George V. Mullan, Justice of the Supreme court
Supreme court
A supreme court is the highest court within the hierarchy of many legal jurisdictions. Other descriptions for such courts include court of last resort, instance court, judgment court, high court, or apex court...
of the state of New York and Helen St Clair Mullan. He and Georgia had two children: Jane Mansbridge, born November 19, 1939, now Adams Professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government
John F. Kennedy School of Government
The John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University is a public policy and public administration school, and one of Harvard's graduate and professional schools...
at Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
, and Bruce Mansbridge, Ph.D., born April 20, 1945, now Director of the Austin Center for the Treatment of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder in Austin, Texas
Austin, Texas
Austin is the capital city of the U.S. state of :Texas and the seat of Travis County. Located in Central Texas on the eastern edge of the American Southwest, it is the fourth-largest city in Texas and the 14th most populous city in the United States. It was the third-fastest-growing large city in...
. He had two grandchildren: Nathaniel Mansbridge Jencks, of New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
, and Travis Marshall Mansbridge, of Austin, Texas
Austin, Texas
Austin is the capital city of the U.S. state of :Texas and the seat of Travis County. Located in Central Texas on the eastern edge of the American Southwest, it is the fourth-largest city in Texas and the 14th most populous city in the United States. It was the third-fastest-growing large city in...
. In 1947, the Mansbridges moved from New York City to Weston, Connecticut
Weston, Connecticut
Weston is a town in Fairfield County, Connecticut. The population was 10,179 at the 2010 census. The town is served by Route 57 and Route 53, both of which run through the town center. About 19% of the town's workforce commutes to New York City, about to the southwest.Like many towns in...
. In 1990, two years after the death of his first wife, Mansbridge married Janet Dunning Van Duyn, author of books on the Ancient Greeks
Ancient Greece
Ancient Greece is a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in Ancient Greece is the...
and Egyptians
Ancient Egypt
Ancient Egypt was an ancient civilization of Northeastern Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in what is now the modern country of Egypt. Egyptian civilization coalesced around 3150 BC with the political unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under the first pharaoh...
, who died in 2003.
In 1949, Mansbridge left Macmillan to establish the Cambridge University Press American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
Branch, beginning with a workforce of nine. The Branch was to grow under his direction to a multi-million dollar enterprise. On retirement, after more than forty years with Cambridge University Press, he served briefly as Acting Director of the MIT University Press
MIT Press
The MIT Press is a university press affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts .-History:...
, and then for two years as Managing Director of the Yale University Press
Yale University Press
Yale University Press is a book publisher founded in 1908 by George Parmly Day. It became an official department of Yale University in 1961, but remains financially and operationally autonomous....
, London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
Office. It pleased him that the initials of the university presses for which he worked – Cambridge
Cambridge
The city of Cambridge is a university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It lies in East Anglia about north of London. Cambridge is at the heart of the high-technology centre known as Silicon Fen – a play on Silicon Valley and the fens surrounding the...
, Oxford
Oxford
The city of Oxford is the county town of Oxfordshire, England. The city, made prominent by its medieval university, has a population of just under 165,000, with 153,900 living within the district boundary. It lies about 50 miles north-west of London. The rivers Cherwell and Thames run through...
, MIT
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...
and Yale
YALE
RapidMiner, formerly YALE , is an environment for machine learning, data mining, text mining, predictive analytics, and business analytics. It is used for research, education, training, rapid prototyping, application development, and industrial applications...
– spelled the word COMITY.
Mansbridge made frequent contributions to media ranging from scholarly journals to the weekly press. His first printed contribution was a pacifist
Pacifism
Pacifism is the opposition to war and violence. The term "pacifism" was coined by the French peace campaignerÉmile Arnaud and adopted by other peace activists at the tenth Universal Peace Congress inGlasgow in 1901.- Definition :...
piece; throughout his life he was a committed pacifist. He later wrote on books and Bible
Bible
The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...
s, publishing and English usage for the Book Collector, Scholarly Publishing, Publishers Weekly, The Saturday Review of Literature, Verbatim and English Today. His extensive collection of Cambridge University Press books printed between 1584 and 1800 is now housed in the collection of fine books at the Waseda University Library, Tokyo
Tokyo
, ; officially , is one of the 47 prefectures of Japan. Tokyo is the capital of Japan, the center of the Greater Tokyo Area, and the largest metropolitan area of Japan. It is the seat of the Japanese government and the Imperial Palace, and the home of the Japanese Imperial Family...
. He was a member of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (of which he was elected Vice-President in 1940), the Century Association, the Grolier Club
Grolier Club
The Grolier Club is a private club and society of bibliophiles in New York City. Founded in January 1884, it is the oldest existing bibliophilic club in North America. The club is named after Jean Grolier de Servières, Viscount d'Aguisy, Treasurer General of France, whose library was famous; his...
of New York City and the Baker Street Irregulars
Baker Street Irregulars
The Baker Street Irregulars are any of several different groups, all named after the original, from various Sherlock Holmes stories in which they are a gang of young street children whom Holmes often employs to aid his cases.- Original :...
. He was also a member of the Tyndale Society, working hard to revive the memory of the man whose translation of the Bible was the first printed in English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
directly from the Greek
Greek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
and the Hebrew
Hebrew language
Hebrew is a Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Culturally, is it considered by Jews and other religious groups as the language of the Jewish people, though other Jewish languages had originated among diaspora Jews, and the Hebrew language is also used by non-Jewish groups, such...
. Tyndale supplied more than eighty percent of the words in the King James version
King James Version of the Bible
The Authorized Version, commonly known as the King James Version, King James Bible or KJV, is an English translation of the Christian Bible by the Church of England begun in 1604 and completed in 1611...
, including those that Mansbridge regarded as the most beautiful. Always a keen bridge
Contract bridge
Contract bridge, usually known simply as bridge, is a trick-taking card game using a standard deck of 52 playing cards played by four players in two competing partnerships with partners sitting opposite each other around a small table...
player, Mansbridge wrote bridge columns for several publications, the first in 1928 and the latest, a weekly column entitled "Minuteman's Bridge," for the Westport "Minuteman," that ran until 2002.
Mansbridge also had a lifelong interest in daffodils, culminating in the planting of a daffodil field adjoining his house in Weston. The field, composed primarily of Narcissus Pseudo-Narcissus, a species daffodil that will reproduce itself from seed, includes daffodils of this variety from Spain
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
and from Wordsworth
William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads....
's garden in the Lake District
Lake District
The Lake District, also commonly known as The Lakes or Lakeland, is a mountainous region in North West England. A popular holiday destination, it is famous not only for its lakes and its mountains but also for its associations with the early 19th century poetry and writings of William Wordsworth...
of Northern England
Northern England
Northern England, also known as the North of England, the North or the North Country, is a cultural region of England. It is not an official government region, but rather an informal amalgamation of counties. The southern extent of the region is roughly the River Trent, while the North is bordered...
.
He lived until his death on the banks of the Saugatuck River
Saugatuck River
The Saugatuck River is a river in southwestern Connecticut in the United States. It drains part of suburban and rural Fairfield County west of Bridgeport, emptying into Long Island Sound.-Description:...
in Western Connecticut
Connecticut
Connecticut is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States. It is bordered by Rhode Island to the east, Massachusetts to the north, and the state of New York to the west and the south .Connecticut is named for the Connecticut River, the major U.S. river that approximately...
, his home of 59 years, with his stepdaughter Barbara Van Duyn. He had recently written a book of annotated limericks, and a book on bridge: How to Win at Bridge Without Being an Expert. He celebrated his 100th birthday
Centenarian
A centenarian is a person who is or lives beyond the age of 100 years. Because current average life expectancies across the world are less than 100, the term is invariably associated with longevity. Much rarer, a supercentenarian is a person who has lived to the age of 110 or more, something only...
on November 11, 2005. He had hoped to live to be 106, so that he could see again the date his father showed him on his sixth birthday: 11/11/11, but it wasn't to be, since he died at exactly 100 years of age.
External links
- Obituaries: Ronald Mansbridge. The Independent, UK, Thursday, 7 September 2006, by David McKitterick. Retrieved 18 May 2010.
- Obituaries: Ronald Mansbridge. Rome News-Tribune, USA, Sunday, 10 September 2006, pp. 6A. Retrieved 18 May 2010.
- Ronald Mansbridge, Westport News, USA, 6 September 2006. Retrieved 18 May 2010.
- Ronald Mansbridge, 100, Started Cambridge Press in United States . The New York Times, USA, 8 September 2006. Retrieved 18 May 2010.