Supporting William Morris's 'Heaven on Earth'

Having secured a major grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund to safeguard Kelmscott Manor for future generations, we recently announced our need to raise £1.5 million to complete this vital project.

We are delighted to say that the response from Fellows has been magnificent! We are very grateful to everyone who has given so generously – and donations are still coming in. Every contribution brings us closer to achieving our goal of £1.5 million while making the case for supporting Kelmscott even more compelling. As a result, we are now in the process of applying to trusts and foundations to complete funding.

If you would like to contribute to helping William Morris’ Kelmscott, you can make a one-time gift of any amount, or  set up a recurring monthly gift via direct debit for as little as £10 per month – donating £10 per month for 50 months would amount to a generous donation of £500! We cannot overstate the value of such contributions to the success of the project.

We are immensely grateful for any gift you feel able to make.You can read more about our campaign and ways to help by visiting our website.

If you would like to discuss the project in more detail, please get in touch with our Head of Development, Dominic Wallis, on 020 7479 7092 or dwallis@sal.org.uk.

Image: Martin Levy, FSA and Chairman of the Kelmscott Manor Campaign Group.
 

Antiquaries Journal Call for Papers

Papers are sought for the Antiquaries Journal, especially on industrial archaeology, urban architecture from the Tudor period onward, and the influence of antiquarianism on public heritage policy, ethics and practice. Papers should take an overview of a particular period, issue or set of problems, be based on primary research, and be no more than 10,000 words.

Please email your papers to our Publications Manager,Lavinia Porter, at lporter@sal.org.uk.

More information about submitting a proposal for the Journal can be found on our website.
 

Cecil Clough FSA died on 20 May aged 87. Elected a Fellow of the Society in May 1980, he was Reader in Medieval History at the University of Liverpool until his retirement 20 years ago. 
 
Frank Herrmann FSA, writer, publisher and auctioneer, died in April.
 
Roy Davids FSA, auctioneer and collector, died in April.
 
Abbott Lowell Cummings FSA, architectural historian, died in May.
 
Appreciations appear in Fellows Remembered below. The section also contains a further notice on the late Roger Highfield FSA.
 
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Andrew Fitzpatrick FSA writes with news that John Collis FSA was made a Chevalier des Arts et Lettres on 25 May. ‘The ceremony took place at Bibracte (Mt Beuvray),’ he says, ‘during the annual conference of the Iron Age study group for France ('l'AFEAF). The citation, read by Marc Talon, the regional Director of Archaeology for Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, noted John's many achievements and in particular his contribution to the development of Iron Age studies in France. Wearing a trademark jumper (thoughtfully brought along by his family!) John received the medal next to the plaque that records the inscription of Bibracte as a Grand Site France by President Mitterand, and facing the monument that records Jacques-Gabriel Bulliot's pioneering excavations at the site in the 19th century.’

Bloomsbury is holding a launch event for Travels with an Archaeologist: Finding a Sense of Place, by Richard Hodges FSA, on 12 June from 6pm at Bloomsbury Publishing, 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP.


The Art Newspaper has reported the last press conference given at the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Tom Campbell FSA, who steps down as the Met’s Director this month. In his speech at its annual spring press breakfast, writes Victoria Stapley-Brown, Campbell emphasised the museum’s ‘key achievements and developments during his eight-year mandate – while adroitly alluding to the museum’s recent struggles.’ ‘The Met is, of course, in a period of transition,’ said Campbell, adding, ‘I want to make it clear to everyone in the room that I’m proud of what we accomplished.’ The Met’s photo shows Campbell (right) with US Vice President Joe Biden.
 
‘There’s a sense of people often coming into the museum to get away from digital activities,’ Tristram Hunt, Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, said in a talk at the Hay Festival of Literature & Arts. The Times reported on May 31 that he said museums were wondering if resources given to digitising collections for free online viewing might be better spent. Peter Saunders FSA responded with a letter to the paper. ‘Tristram Hunt is right to question museum expenditure on “cool digital stuff”,’ he writes. Visitors’ ‘sense of wonder and ability to absorb knowledge is often spoilt by those concentrating on digital gadgetry, or by the technology that comes between them and the objects.’ However, says Saunders, Hunt ‘must … accept that online catalogues, comparable with an index to a book, are essential to inform the public of what museums hold and to permit virtual access by those unable to visit in person.’ On a different topic, Hunt said, ‘We are deeply proud of our European heritage but we also understand, in the context of Brexit, that we have to make sure that we speak across the nation.’ Hunt is to speak at the Creative Industries Federation’s International Conference on 12 July. It has moved its London venue to the Barbican's Milton Court Concert Hall, to accommodate ‘an overwhelming demand for tickets’.
 
Paul Cartledge FSA joined Colm Toibin and Bettany Hughes with Catherine Fletcher at the Hay Festival, to talk about Women's Voices in the Classical World. The discussion was broadcast by Radio 3's Free Thinking. Earlier in May at the British Academy, Rana Mitter led a Free Thinking discussion about writing history, at which Christopher de Hamel FSA (author of Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts) and Matthew Strickland FSA (Henry the Young King 1155–1183) joined a panel shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize; as reported, de Hamel won. De Hamel talked to Matthew Sweet in a Free Thinking broadcast last September, when he revealed his deep enthusiasm for manuscripts (‘I’ve never actually licked one, but I actually would rather like to’), and confessed to an off-guarded remark to his publisher which came back to haunt him.

On 2 June the Victoria and Albert Museum revealed first details of its new Photography Centre, designed by David Kohn Architects. Opening in autumn 2018, the centre will more than double the V&A’s photography displays. Part of the space (formerly Gallery 100) will be known as the Bern and Ronny Schwartz Gallery, recognising the centre’s first major ‘supporter’, the Bern Schwartz Family Foundation. A successful American businessman, Bern made a name for himself as a portrait photographer in his 60s. The press release notes that a 1978 portrait of Sir Roy Strong FSA, Director of the V&A 1973–1987, ‘has recently entered the Museum as a gift to the American Friends of the V&A through the generosity of The Bern Schwartz Family Foundation.’ The photo will join the collection when the current loan agreement ends in May 2020.
 
The Neolithic of Britain and Ireland, by Vicki Cummings FSA, provides a synthesis of this dynamic period of prehistory from the end of the Mesolithic through to the early Beaker period. Drawing on new excavations and the application of new scientific approaches to data, the book offers a clear introduction with an emphasis on wider research questions. It begins by considering the millennium before the Neolithic starts, and goes on to consider what life was like for people at the time, alongside the monumental record and how people treated the dead, proceeding through the early Neolithic, middle Neolithic, late Neolithic and early Beaker periods.

On 1 June Hilary Carty was named as the new Director of the Clore Leadership Programme, to start in September 2017 after Sue Hoyle steps down. ‘Hilary Carty is a widely admired figure in the arts and a powerful exemplar in the field of cultural leadership,’ said Sandy Nairne FSA, Chair of the Programme, in a press release. ‘She has demonstrated an approach to supporting others in the arts which is both generous and dynamic.’
 
Nick Merriman FSA, Director of Manchester Museum, took part in the Great Manchester Run, a charity event on 28 May which opened with a minute’s silence in honour of the victims of a bomb attack in the city six days before. His tweet celebrates a personal best for a half marathon. In another tweet, Merriman drew attention to an advert for the Director of the Whitworth and Manchester City Galleries. The post has been vacated by his wife, Maria Balshaw, who started as Director of Tate on 1 June.
 
‘Almost no one has heard of Hans Sloane,’ opens John Carey’s Sunday Times review (4 June) of Collecting the World: The Life and Curiosity of Hans Sloane, by James Delbourgo, ‘although Sloane Square and other London landmarks are named after him.’ That is changing. Sloane’s Treasures is a research project run by Kim Sloan FSA and JD Hill FSA at the British Museum, Arnold Hunt FSA at the British Library and Julie Harvey at the Natural History Museum. Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753) moved in a world of aristocracy and power, and accumulated one of the largest collections of 'natural and artificial rarities' ever formed, leading to the creation of the British Museum. Sloane’s Treasures is considering ‘a dialogue between culture and science’, image making and understanding nature, ecology and the environment, social issues (slavery, commerce, medicine, first encounters), and the differences between a private and public collection. Kim Sloan is also the principal investigator of another BM project (with UCL), which received Leverhulme Trust funding last October, called Enlightenment Architectures: Sir Hans Sloane's Catalogues of his Collections. One of the more recent biographical studies is Sir Hans Sloane: Collector, Scientist, Antiquary (1994), edited by Arthur MacGregor FSA.
 
Antti Matikkala FSA, Principal Investigator at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, has published Kunnian ruletti – korkeimmat ulkomaalaisille 1941–1944 annetut suomalaiset kunniamerkit (The Roulette of Honour: The Highest Finnish Orders to Foreigners 1941–1944). The focus of the monograph is political and military history. It also discusses material aspects of the insignia of orders of merit, such as two Finnish Grand Cross stars that belonged to Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring and ended up as war-booty, now in the RAF Museum, Hendon. There is one Englishman, says Matikkala, among the 317 decorated persons under study. The illustrated book is in Finnish, but it includes an English summary.
 
The Norfolk Churches Trust has written to the Secretary of State at the Department for Culture Media and Sport; Sir Peter Luff, Chairman, National Heritage Memorial Fund and Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF); Sir Tim Laurence, Chairman English Heritage; and all nine Norfolk and Norwich MPs. The trust is concerned that the HLF has confirmed that its dedicated grant programme for major repairs to listed places of worship, the Grants for Places of Worship programme, is to close later this year. Churches will have to compete for alternative funding with other organisations. ‘Cancelling the scheme', says the trust, ‘is a retrograde step. It is the only grant scheme using public money which is designed especially for, and dedicated to, major repairs to listed places of worship. It is hard to overstate the importance that the programme and its predecessors have had in supporting historic religious buildings.’
 
Houses of Power: The Places that Shaped the Tudor World, by Simon Thurley FSA, is about the houses that Tudor kings and queens built, extended and refurbished. It is, says the author, the result of 30 years' research among excavations, financial accounts and plans and drawings, leading to a study of private life, politics, diplomacy and court. It is a catalogue (the Amazon page lists all the houses, perhaps in response to a peeved reviewer who noted the absence of such a list), but also, says Thurley, and ‘more importantly, it sets out to show that, as Tudor royal life changed, so did the buildings that they inhabited. So … you can, by deduction, tell the story of the Tudor monarchy from the inside.’ Thurley’s efforts have been well received by critics. Writing in Country Life, Sir Roy Strong FSA called it ‘a landmark book’. It’s ‘A triumph’ (Literary Review), ‘Fresh, learned, readable and full of life (Mail on Sunday), and ‘Immensely informative’ (Daily Telegraph).

‘It’s a tough time for heritage,’ says John Darlington FSA, opening an article earlier this year in the Art Newspaper about the Anglican Christ Church Cathedral in Zanzibar. The cathedral, he writes, is ‘an extraordinary architectural melange of European Gothic, Arabic and Swahili styles’ – and built on ‘the site of the last and biggest permanent slave market in East Africa.’ Despite its importance at the heart of Stone Town, a World Heritage Site, the cathedral was in a poor state. It was placed on the World Monuments Watch list in 2014. Now it is being restored. ‘Hearteningly,’ says Darlington, the project ‘is also about tolerance and co-operation. The vast majority of those who worked on the project were Muslim, from the trainee masons to the tour guides, from local government officials to the curators of the new exhibition centre. At a time when heritage has been in the news for all the wrong reasons, it is good to have an example of care for the past that unites, rather than divides.’ Photo Wikipedia.

Frank Herrmann FSA died on 23 April aged 89. He was elected a Fellow of the Society in January 1975. Writing in the Antiques Trade Gazette (May 15), Rupert Powell says Herrmann ‘loved to entertain friends and colleagues at the Travellers’ Club, at Double Crown Club dinners and, if you brought an object to show others and on which you could elucidate, at the Society of Antiquaries.’ After a distinguished career in publishing, Herrmann joined Sotheby’s to reorganise their book department. ‘With an outsider’s eye’, says Powell, ‘and with Teutonic efficiency … Frank introduced “Fast Sales” to clear the backlog of consignments – he reduced the waiting time from consignment to sale date from some 14 months to four weeks.’ He was ‘scrupulously fair, honest and ran his auction house with the utmost integrity. He made work both fun and fascinating.’
 
Robin Harcourt Williams FSA says he came to know Herrmann through their common membership of the Essay Club. He has written this tribute:
 
‘Frank Herrmann died shortly before his 90th birthday. The funeral took place on 9 May in his parish church at Woodham Walter, the Essex village where he had lived with his wife Patricia in a moated Elizabethan house for nearly 60 years. In his autobiography, Low Profile: A Life in the World of Books (2002), he chronicled a remarkably varied and successful career as author, publisher and auctioneer.
 
‘He started work in the production department of Faber & Faber in January 1947. In 1956 he moved to Methuen’s, becoming Production Manager and, soon afterwards, a director of the firm. In later years he was a director of Nelson’s and several other publishing and bookselling companies, still finding time to compile The English as Collectors (1960), a pioneering sourcebook on the history of collecting. This led to a connection with Sotheby’s, whose history he published in 1980 (Sotheby’s: Portrait of an Auction House). He reorganised their book department and was appointed a Director and Head of Overseas Operations outside the UK and the USA.
 
‘Apart from his books and many articles on collecting, Frank was the author of The Giant Alexander (1964) and three sequels, which first began as bedtime stories for his children. In 1983, in conjunction with two other ex-Directors of Sotheby’s, he set up Bloomsbury Book Auctions, which was a commercial success, very quickly establishing a good name and attracting prestigious collections.
 
‘He was an active supporter and benefactor of the Plume Library, not far from his home. This charity, founded under the will of Dr Thomas Plume dated 1704, still occupies its historic premises in the town of Maldon. Frank was the founding Chairman of the Friends of the Plume Library, formed in 1988 to raise money for the conservation and purchase of 17th-century books. Owing to poor supervision in the 19th and early 20th centuries, over 700 titles were missing from the original bequest. Frank was able to take advantage of his exceptional position in the rare book world to replace a substantial number of them when they happened to come on the market.
 
‘He was also well placed to indulge his interest in collecting Regency porcelain. He amassed an astonishing number of dinner, dessert and tea and coffee services. To house them he built an award-winning china store in the garden at Woodham Walter.
 
‘He was the older brother of art historian Luke Herrmann FSA, a collector of studio pottery who died in 2016. On account of their paternal grandfather being half-Jewish, the family had moved to Great Britain from Berlin in 1937. Their extensive property in Germany was seized by the Nazis but the Schloss Pretzfeld in Franconia was returned to them in 1948. Frank took over responsibility for managing the castle in 1966. Later he enjoyed the challenge of restoring a 300-acre estate of forest and farmland at Wulkow, not far east of Berlin, which was restored to the family in wrecked condition after the collapse of communism.
 
‘Frank is survived by his widow Patricia, whom he met when they both worked at Faber & Faber, and by their four children.’
 
• During his publishing career, Herrmann was responsible for bringing Dick Bruna’s Miffy books to the UK. He became good friends with EH Shepard, illustrator of A S Milne’s books. He gave his Giant Alexander books archive to Seven Stories, the National Centre for Children's Books in Gateshead, Tyne and Wear. Oak Knoll has put a chapter from Herrmann’s autobiography online, in which he describes his experiences at publisher Ward Lock, where he arrived as a shareholder and joint managing director in 1971. Incidents include a promotion event in the Cotswolds for a new edition of Mrs Beeton’s Cookbook, organised by Clement Freud.

The gastronome and politician fully booked two hotels for the guests, and ‘laid on the most fabulous feast à la Mrs Beeton in a third … I remember there were two sorts of salad dressing, one consisted of almost neat, chilled gin. Clement Freud entertained us with the speech of the century.’ The next morning, ‘after a memorable, substantial breakfast, straight out of Mrs Beeton,’ one of the guests left by helicopter. The resultant press coverage ‘consisted of one short tribute to Isabella in a remote journal.’

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Sheep in Fog, of which this is the top of the autograph manuscript, is an essay by Ted Hughes about Sylvia Plath's poem, The Evolution of Sheep in Fog. It is addressed to Roy Davids FSA, and with Davids’ comments on assorted notes and photocopies, at times the collection of papers almost takes the form of a conversation. In a version published in 1994, Hughes wrote, ‘Written for Roy Davids, of Sotheby's Manuscripts Department, to be given as an illustrated lecture to the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere, on 25 February 1988.’ Bonhams sold the bundle in 2013, for £10,000.
 
Roy Davids died on 30 April aged 74. He was elected a Fellow of the Society in March 2011. The Hughes manuscripts were just one item in an extraordinary sale across two days in 2013. The lots were a roll-call of poetic talent – Bronte, Dickinson, Hardy, Housman, Kipling, Lowell, Yeats, and on and on. Yet this was the third Bonhams sale from Davids’ collection. The first, in 2005, featured portraits of writers, artists, musicians and others. The second (2011) more manuscripts, from Joseph Addison to William III, Prince of Orange, via Blake, Churchill and Gandhi.
 
John Wilson FSA delivered a eulogy at the funeral on 22 May, and has sent this extract:
 
‘Roy Davids was an historian, a distinguished collector in several fields, and consecutively one of Sotheby's most influential auctioneers and a dealer in autographs and manuscripts.
 
‘He was born in 1942 and educated in Sussex and at Queen Mary College, University of London, where he came under the influence of the great Tudor historian Professor S. T. Bindoff. He joined Sotheby's book department in 1970 and was immediately set to cataloguing the vast residue of the collection of the Victorian eccentric, Sir Thomas Phillipps, an experience which stood him in good stead for the rest of his professional life.
 
‘He became head of the Manuscripts Department in 1975, head of Books and Manuscripts in 1981, and later head of Marketing. Davids' influence on the manner of cataloguing and marketing books and manuscripts was profound, and influenced not only his own firm but ultimately the whole trade. Descriptions became more scholarly, and catalogues were well illustrated; inaccuracies and speculations were not tolerated.
 
‘His legacy to Sotheby's lived on in his own later life as a dealer and collector. He formed fine collections not only of letters and documents, particularly poetical manuscripts, but also of Victorian Gothic furniture, Chinese ceramics, medals and medallions and works of art in bronze. In all these various fields he displayed his remarkable gift of spotting the finest, rarest and historically most significant examples.
 
‘After suffering a stroke following heart surgery, all of his collections were dispersed in a series of sales at Bonhams Auctions. He died at Chilton House nursing home in Oxfordshire.’
 
• Davids wrote about cataloguing manuscripts – and how to read others’ catalogues – for the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association. His instructions are detailed, strict and refreshing, calling for open and honest descriptions and caution from the buyer. ‘Beware/avoid the word “interesting”’, he writes. ‘It usually means that the cataloguer thinks or hopes that the item has merit, but that he does not know, or has not troubled to find out, in what ways.’ ‘At their best,’ he concludes, descriptions ‘strive to inform without instruction, to entice without exaggeration, to describe faults accurately without being damning, and to praise where praise is possible.’  
 
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Abbott Lowell Cummings FSA died on 28 May aged 94. He was elected a Fellow of the Society in May 1982.

Daniel Miles FSA, of the Oxford Dendrochronology Laboratory, writes that Cummings ‘is to New England early architectural studies what Cecil Hewett was to the English scene. It was he who instigated the first serious dendrochronological study of key New England houses in 1975 – it was so far ahead of its time that the process failed to work. I was fortunate enough to work with him and his protégé Anne Grady on the second dendrochronological study of eastern Massachusetts buildings in 2001, and three subsequent projects, all of which provided positive results and a number of reference chronologies. This work resulted in him revising his chronological theories in the development of First Period New England timber buildings. Abbott was a wonderful gentleman who it was a privilege to know.’
 
Richard M Candee, Professor Emeritus at the American and New England Studies and Preservation Studies Program, Boston University, has written an obituary from which the following is extracted:
 
‘Abbott Lowell Cummings was the leading authority of 17th and early 18th century (“First Period”) architecture in the American north-east, and author of The Framed Houses of Massachusetts (1979). An outstanding teacher at Boston University, Yale University and U Mass Amherst mentoring dozens of young scholars, he asked me many years ago to memorise his life and scholarship when the time came.
 
‘He was born in St Albans, Vermont, the son of a socialist minister. The budding art historian was educated at Oberlin College (BA 1945, MA 1946) and Ohio State (PhD 1950), then one of the few universities offering American architectural history. From 1948–51 he taught at Antioch College. He was then Assistant Curator for the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in 1955 becoming Assistant Director of SPNEA (now Historic New England), and editor of its journal Old-Time New England. From 1984–92 he was Charles F Montgomery Professor of American Decorative Arts at Yale University.
 
‘Abbott’s Master’s thesis, Documentary Histories of Seventeenth Century Houses in Massachusetts Bay, noted that stylistic changes could confuse historians hoping to date buildings. Over the next 34 years he continued his research about what really happened to these (mostly) surviving houses and their changes in structure or style.
 
‘What most folks never knew, was that Abbott thought he had his master opus nearly completed in the late 1960s. He and I spent several summer vacations trotting around England during the late 1960s and early 1970s looking at areas where “his carpenters” had come from, seeking out his famous “prototypes” – houses sharing similarity of form or construction to the earliest Mass. Bay homes. We spent several summers in the hands of Freddie Charles and his family, one year looking at examples with Ron Brunskill FSA, and another attending a meeting of the Vernacular Architecture Forum (of which he was the founding president) and tour with all the early Vernacular Architecture Group members.
 
‘There, too, he met Cecil Hewett, who revolutionised the dating of English framed building from the evolution of timber joints. In what I considered a clear act of intellectual honesty, Abbott threw out his old manuscript and – getting a grant to bring the whole Hewett family over to Massachusetts for a summer – revisited all the major houses so Hewett could draw their framing details and educate Abbott about this new theoretical system that linked the New World to the Old.
 
‘He was a Life Member of the Ancient Monuments Society. The Vernacular Architecture Forum’s highest prize for scholarship remains their Abbott Lowell Cummings Award.’

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Sir Hugh Cortazzi (British ambassador to Japan 1980–84), wrote to the Times (29 May) with a memory of Roger Highfield FSA, who died in April. Highfield, he says, was tutor/supervisor to the Crown Prince of Japan when he was at Merton College, Oxford (1983–85). In his memoir The Thames and I (translation 2006), ‘the prince made warm references to Dr Highfield, whose influence on him had been “incalculable”. His “first intellectual excitement” came from the historical walks that he did with Dr Highfield. “With his white hair and thick spectacles, and the sly grin he used to give you as you passed him in the street or when he told a joke, there was something special about him which made you think of a wizard riding on a broomstick.”’
 

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