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If you have recently visited the Society's Library (either in person or remotely!), we would appreciate your feedback. Please take our user before it closes on 31 May. We are carrying out this survey to gather information about our users, how the Library is used, and satisfaction with the services provided. Analysis of the results will feed into our future planning for the Library and, where possible, we wish to implement the right changes for our users. You can complete the survey by visiting this link. You will be entered into a prize draw for a book voucher worth £30.
 

Celebrating the Centenary of Excavations at Ashley Rails

With our current Library display we are celebrating the centenary of Heywood Sumner’s excavations in Ashley Rails, carried out between December 1917 and October 1918. In addition to the objects on display, we will continue to share highlights from his works on social media, including examples of the New Forest pottery ware from MS 825/2, as well as parts of The Book of Gorley, volume 2 (MS 825/1) – Sumner’s remarkable hand written, illustrated diary of country life. The displays have been research and put together by Magda Kowalczuk, our Serials and Electronic Resources Librarian.

This eye-opening exhibition is the first to focus on Mary Frances Vivien Lobb (1878–1939), the companion of 22 years to May Morris while May lived at Kelmscott Manor. May, a designer and embroidery historian in her own right, was the younger daughter of famous Victorian designer, poet and social thinker William Morris (1834–96). This exhibition will contain photographs, documents and ephemera from the collections of The National Library of Wales and Kelmscott Manor – most of which have never been on public display before.
 
Little has previously been known about Mary Lobb, and the exhibition sheds light on her origins and family, the years she spent at Kelmscott and her relationship with May Morris. The exhibition will showcase artefacts from their travels to Iceland, their many camping trips across England and Wales, and their mutual love of gardening and animals. In addition, it will also contain representative examples of the archive’s important and previously unseen reference material relating to William Morris’s research activities for his last great endeavour, the Kelmscott Press.
 
The Society of Antiquaries of London and the National Library of Wales exhibitions service have worked in partnership to mount the exhibition at Kelmscott Manor. It has been co-curated by Simon Evans (The National Collection of Welsh Photographs) and Dr Kathy Haslam (Kelmscott Manor). Simon was responsible for identifying, re-assembling and researching this extensive archive, which was deposited at National Library Wales in 1939 at the wish of Mary Lobb herself.
                                                                                                                                             
Kelmscott Manor Exhibition: 10 June – 28 October 2017
Admission: Included with purchase of a ticket to the Manor house
Address: Kelmscott Manor, Kelmscott, Lechlade, Gloucestershire GL7 3HJ
Supported by the Arts Council England and the Heritage Lottery Fund.
Image: Mary Frances Vivien Lobb. © The National Library of Wales.
 

 

 

 

 

Anna Western FSA, a former Archaeological Conservator at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, died on 4 May aged 99. She was elected a Fellow of the Society in May 1972. The funeral service will be on 26 May at St James’ Church, Brightwell-Sotwell, Wallingford, Oxfordshire, at 11.30 am.
 
Fellows Remembered below contains further notices on the late Geoff Wainwright FSA and the late Roger Highfield FSA.
 
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Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts by Christopher de Hamel FSA won the Duff Cooper literary prize in February. A much-praised compendium of stories about its author’s encounters with medieval books, on 15 May it won the Wolfson History Prize. ‘Christopher de Hamel's outstanding and original book,’ said Sir David Cannadine FSA, Chair of the Prize Judges, in a press release, ‘pushes the boundaries of what it is and what it means to write history… It is a masterpiece.’ Previous winners of the prize, which this year came with a £40,000 cheque, include Cyprian Broodbank FSA (The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World, joint 2014), Mary Beard FSA (Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town, joint 2009), and Rosemary Hill FSA (God's Architect: Pugin & the Building of Romantic Britain, joint 2008). In 2012 Nikolaus Pevsner FSA featured in the prize: he was the subject of Susie Harries’ biography, Nikolaus Pevsner: The Life. The photo is from The Economist 1843, which predicted de Hamel’s book would be ‘the cultural bestseller of the season’ in its August/September 2016 edition.
 
The Richard III Society, I noted in the last Salon, may have reservations about some new productions of their namesake’s Shakespearean play. Too true, at least regarding the one at Leicester Cathedral. It will be there on 19–20 July, in a tour that takes in other cathedrals at Peterborough, Ely, Gloucester, Bristol and Salisbury, and culminates (22 August–9 September) in the Temple Church, London. Carol Fellingham Webb, an archaeology graduate and a long-standing member of the Richard III Society, wrote to the Guardian (8 May) to complain. ‘How can this by any stretch of the imagination be construed as either dignified or honourable?’ she asks of the production, which will occur near the king’s new tomb. ‘As with so many of the cathedral’s activities surrounding the discovery and reburial of this king,’ she adds, ‘it smacks only of another desperate attempt at publicity and money-making.’ Phillipa Langley, who led the original search for the grave, told the paper that the Looking for Richard project ‘deplore and condemn Leicester Cathedral for this wholly unprincipled commercial and promotional venture.’ She would like it to go away and never come back. The cathedral seems unflustered. The play, it said, ‘enables many to engage with different dimensions of this complex story.’
 
Historic England is thinking about the practice of archaeology, ‘which has changed dramatically since our predecessor English Heritage was created in 1984’. As part of this, Steve Trow FSA, Director of Research at HE, has written about development-led work. ‘Given that public expenditure is likely only to decline in the foreseeable future,’ he says, ‘Historic England’s role needs to be focused tightly on those issues the commercial sector cannot resolve for itself.’ It can be an ‘agent of last-resort funding’; research frameworks will continue, but it hopes universities and others will take on more of the burden; retrospective synthetic studies are important, but should not be paid for by developers – the UK and European research councils, and other research funding bodies, are most appropriate; a Heritage Information Access Strategy will tell archaeologists that they must upload their records to the Archaeological Data Service website; HE’s excavation backlog work will move from funding to telling others what needs doing; to help museums, archaeologists will need to think about how much stuff they dig up really needs to be kept. To debate these and other issues, HE is sponsoring a series of round-tables, 21st-Century Challenges for Archaeology, co-hosted with the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists. Photo shows excavation at Bloomberg Place, London, in 2013.

‘That’s kind of like the voice of the planet, right?’ says Goopal Shah of Google Earth, introducing the latest versions of Google Earth, of David Attenborough FSA. The BBC’s Natural Treasures features over 30 locations within the new Voyager feature of Google Earth, with video clips from films presented by Attenborough.
 
Elizabeth Minchin and Heather Jackson FSA have edited Text and the Material World. Essays in Honour of Graeme Clarke. Graeme Clarke FSA is Emeritus Professor of Classical Studies at the Australian National University, and his research into the ancient world spans the archaeology of Syria and studies in early Christianity and patristics. The book has 29 contributions from around the world, says the blurb, from Bronze Age Cyprus through the classical period in Greece and the Hellenistic and Roman worlds, to the growth of Christianity and the work of the Church Fathers, and, finally, 14th century AD France (a medieval manuscript). Essays raise questions about archaeological publication, the tracking of aesthetic preferences, ethnic identity, cultural relations and social practices in the ancient world.

Neither of them is a Fellow, but many reading this would enjoy listening to Jane Goodall and Bettany Hughes talking to Michael Berkeley on BBC Radio 3. In his long-running series Private Passions, Berkeley entertains guests by playing their choices of music while discussing their lives and careers. A 23-year-old Goodall famously rang Louis Leakey FSA to talk about animals. He arranged for her to study chimpanzees: she proceeded to overturn preconceptions about these complex, intelligent creatures – in the programme she wonders what music they might enjoy – with repercussions that profoundly affected the way we think about early humans, and us. As I write, Hughes, a successful broadcaster and writer of popular books on classical history (often featuring the lives and achievements of women) is due to appear with Berkeley on 21 May. Goodall’s programme was broadcast the Sunday before, repeated from last year. Both can be heard online, as can Gabriele Finaldi, Director of the National Gallery (7 May). Have any Fellows joined Berkeley in the studio?
 
The Historic Towns Trust, in association with the University of Hull, has produced An Historical Map of Kingston upon Hull, from Medieval Town to Industrial City. Major Medieval and later buildings and sites of historic interest are picked out on a full-colour map based on an Ordnance Survey map of 1928. On the back is a 6,600-word illustrated gazetteer by D H Evans FSA, David Neave FSA and Susan Neave. Few cities, says the blurb, have experienced Hull's uninterrupted position as one of Britain's leading centres of population and economic activity over nine centuries. The legacy is a variety and richness of architecture which is too often overlooked. The project was developed by Evans, the Neaves, David Atkinson and Keith Lilley.
 
Fans of Jane Austen will be pleased to see her face on a new £10 note to be issued in July on the 200th anniversary of her death: but not all, says the Sunday Times (21 May), as a ‘prettified’ version of the ‘sour’ original portrait has been used. The National Portrait Gallery has a sketch by her sister Casandra, in which Austen looks determined and glum. A later engraving shows a fuller and less forbidding face, the one used for the note. ‘It’s the National Portrait Gallery’s sketch that we think really is Jane,’ commented Lucy Worsley FSA.

Last year, says the Economist (18 May), ticket sales at the Colosseum in Italy brought in €44.4m (£38m) from 6.4m visitors (at Stonehenge, by comparison, there were 1.4m visitors; many will have paid no entrance charge, as members of English Heritage or the National Trust, so we might guess £10m receipts). In Rome, says the paper, Dario Franceschini, the Arts and Heritage Minister in Paolo Gentiloni’s coalition government, and the city’s Mayor, Virginia Raggi of the Five Star Movement, have different ideas about how public money should be spent to conserve and present state-owned monuments, museums and excavation sites – not least what happens to the Colosseum’s profits. The issues are current and global. Salon would like to hear from any Fellows with special experience of Rome and its long-suffering antiquities.

Or Orkney. The Orkney islands were once an obscure place of storm, stillness and beauty. Then the archaeologists came. Then the tourists, and now giant cruise ships with more passengers than there are islanders. Orkney has become an Easter Island of the north; it’s only a matter of time before it gets its own Lonely Planet guide. Neil Oliver, a journalist-archaeologist who has presented three TV films about Orkney’s Neolithic past, admits in his Sunday Times column (21 May) that he has contributed to this new popularity (the islands’ tourist board has helped, too). ‘The magnetic draw of so much history’, he writes, ‘is presenting a growing list of challenges.’
 
Stephen Clarke FSA has edited a new edition of the Selected Letters of Horace Walpole for Everyman’s Library. The original Everyman edition, long out of print, was first published in 1926, and over the years introduced generations of readers (including, says Clarke, the new editor) to Walpole’s letters. The new edition has been annotated throughout with new introductions, and the text has been corrected with excised passages restored. Author of the first gothic novel and son of the first prime minister of Great Britain, Walpole had wide-ranging interests that included literature, politics, world affairs, collecting, antiquities and architecture. He wrote on these and other topics in eloquent, witty prose to his many correspondents. The letters are arranged by subject, including social life, the Court, politics, literature, and the evolution of his Gothic castle and art and book collections at Strawberry Hill.
 
A story from New Zealand would be deeply shocking if true. Vice.com, a news website, reported that a group with far-right political links calling themselves archaeologists and historians claimed to have found evidence for a pre-Māori European race in New Zealand. That would be stupid and offensive, but otherwise relatively harmless. However, Noel Hilliam defended blonde Caucasian facial reconstructions, supposedly created for him by a forensic pathologist at the University of Edinburgh (the university denies all knowledge), by saying they were based on remains he had dug up. He told Vice that he'd ‘taken skulls and bones from a number of historic burial sites around the Northland area,’ and that in 1997 a London forensic anthropologist had taken a tooth to Britain; the unnamed scientist apparently proved it had Welsh ancestry. Siân Halcrow FSA, a bio-archaeologist at the University of Otago, dismissed the claims. ‘The statement that the young adult woman is from Wales is ludicrous,’ she said, adding there is ‘zero scientific evidence for a so-called “pre-Māori” race.’
 
Viking: Rediscover the Legend opened at the Yorkshire Museum on 19 May. It is an exhibition created in partnership with the British Museum, in the latter’s extensive project to share its collections and expertise across the country. PR focused on ‘the most significant Viking treasure hoards ever discovered in Britain’, which can be seen together for the first time: they are known as the Bedale Hoard, the Cuerdale Hoard and the Vale of York Hoard, a spectacular haul of loot, much of it silver and featuring pieces from Ireland to Byzantium. But Vikings did more than lose their valuables, and the displays also feature research led by Dawn Hadley FSA and Julian Richards FSA, which they reported in the Antiquaries Journal for 2016. They have, they say, found the winter camp of the Viking Great Army of AD 872–3 at Torksey, Lincolnshire, and it’s much bigger than scholars had thought. The exhibition presents their work as a virtual reality reconstruction – appropriately, visitors will don helmets, presumably without horns.

Roger Highfield FSA, who died in April, is described by the Times (22 May), as a ‘Distinguished fellow of Merton College, Oxford, who was a living compendium on its history, but an uneasy colleague of JRR Tolkien.’ ‘After 68 years as a fellow of Merton College, Oxford,’ the obituary opens, ‘the majority as history tutor, archivist and librarian, Roger Highfield seemed as much a fixture as the mellow stone of Mob Quad, the oldest quadrangle in the university.’ He was not, however, enamoured of J R R Tolkien (a Fellow of the college), who he thought ‘very lazy and supervised few’.
 
Both his parents died before he was 17. He went to Magdalen in 1940, after winning an exhibition, soon joining Intelligence services in Italy and then Yugoslavia. Back at Magdalen he got a first, and gained a Tutorship at Merton in 1951 with a doctorate on Edward III’s bishops.
 
The history collection at a new undergraduate library at Merton, built in 1997, was named the Highfield Room. A portrait of Highfield by Jeff Stultiens (1987) hangs in the Upper Bursary.
 
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The Times (13 May) has published an obituary of Geoff Wainwright FSA, who died in March, under the heading, ‘Forceful archaeologist who persuaded developers to pay for excavations.’ This refers to planning policy published by the government in 1990, which, says the paper, Wainwright, a ‘wiry, red-blooded Welshman with a taste for a fight,’ shrewdly negotiated after a public furore over remains of Shakespeare’s Rose Theatre, exposed during development in London.
 
The obituary is strong on personal details. Frederick Wainwright, Geoff’s father, was a former miner who lost his job gardening for the local squire, after plucking a bunch of flowers as a birthday present for his wife: ‘His son was furious and roughed up the squire’s boy.’ He was never a willing sufferer of fools. ‘In public, the only indication of his anger was his neck turning a shade of damson. In private, those he judged incompetent felt the abrupt lash of his tongue. “He was black and white,” one colleague said. “But if he liked you, nobody was more loyal, kind or generous.”’
 
‘He was a master of the exasperated sigh,’ though not always successful in his aspirations. ‘He took about 100 driving lessons, but gave up after a memorable occasion when he oversteered on a hairpin bend, leaving his car on the edge of a hill.’
 
He had played rugby university as a hooker. A shirt signed by the present Welsh players hung over his coffin.

 

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