This Week: Private View for Blood Royal Exhibition

There are just a few tickets left for the private view of our free summer exhibition, Blood Royal: Picturing the Tudor Monarchy, which will showcase our collection of medieval and Tudor royal portraits alongside material from the Library and Museum collections, including our postmortem inventory of Henry VIII and an Elizabethan map of an the area near Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

We are grateful to the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) for supporting this project. We are delighted that a number of Fellows have given generously of their time to help write interpretation, film video highlights for objects on display and participate in special programming such as gallery talks (Tuesdays, 14.00-14.30) and museum lates (11 August and 25 August). We would particularly like to thank Fellows Mr Peter M Barber, Dr John PD Cooper and Prof Glenn J Richardson, who have worked closely with Society staff to undertake research into the collections and produce the exhibition.

The exhibition officially opens to the public next week, Monday (24 July), and we hope Fellows will bring family and friends to explore our collections. Tickets are still available for the private view and can be purchased via our website.
 

Kelmscott Manor, As William Morris Would Have Known It

Watch the video below to hear Fellow Paul Drury describe the way our conservation plans will be based on detailed assessments to reinstate some of the original (pre-Morris) arrangements of the manor house.



The Society is grateful for any donations towards this project. If you can support our plans as a Companion (£500), Benefactor (£5000) or Major Benefactor (£15,000) of Kelmscott Manor, your gift will be recorded in perpetuity. Find out more on our website.

Don't forget Fellows' Day at Kelmscott Manor: 28 July. Tickets are still available through the Society website (login required) or by contacting Kelmscott Manor directly (call 01367 252486, or email admin@kelmscottmanor.org.uk).
 

Cecil Western FSA, archaeological scientist and museum conservator, died in May.
 
Bridget Allchin FSA, South Asian archaeologist, died in June.
 
Jo Draper FSA, archaeologist, local historian and writer, died in June.
 
Appreciations appear in Fellows Remembered below, along with a new obituary of Collin Carpenter FSA, who died in 2015. The section also contains a further notice on the late Martin Aitken FSA
 
Stanley R Jones FSA, draftsman and vernacular building recorder, died on 9 July. A tribute will appear in a future Salon.
 
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My attempts to list Fellows and others celebrated in the Queen’s Birthday Honours 2017 has again gone awry (I’m afraid long lists are not my forte). Apologies to Helen Dorey FSA and Tom Mayberry FSA, who received MBEs, not the other things.
 
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Just shy of his 90th birthday, writes Matthew Spriggs FSA, Jack Golson FSA, Emeritus Professor of the Australian National University (ANU), has produced his long-promised master work on Kuk Swamp. Kuk, says Spriggs, is ‘the least known independent centre of agriculture, in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea and now a World Heritage Site as a result of Golson’s excavations and findings.’ European outsiders first explored the upper Wahgi Valley in the early 1930s. After the Second World War, the area, with others, was developed for coffee and tea plantations, of which the establishment of Kuk Research Station was a result. Large-scale swamp drainage produced abundant evidence for early cultivation in the form of stone axes and wooden digging sticks and spades. Ten Thousand Years of Cultivation at Kuk Swamp in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea, edited by Golson, Tim Denham FSA, Philip Hughes, Pamela Swadling and John Muke, is for sale in print and available as a free download. ‘Congratulations to all involved,’ says Spriggs.

Charlotte Gere FSA has contributed to the profusely illustrated catalogue for Alma-Tadema: At Home in Antiquity, an exhibition at Leighton House Museum, London until 29 October. The exhibition shows Alma-Tadema’s works in chronological succession, hung in the opulent rooms of Frederic, Lord Leighton’s house. A transformative visit to Pompeii on his honeymoon in 1863 inspired Alma-Tadema to depict carefully researched scenes of Roman life, often with a focus on the minutiae of day-to-day activity. Photographs, artefacts, drawings and paintings accompany a selection of panels, painted by Alma-Tadema’s friends and contemporaries, which have been reunited for the exhibition. Gere writes about the Alma-Tademas’ own London homes.

Susan Oosthuizen FSA has written The Anglo-Saxon Fenland. Archaeologies and histories of the fens of eastern England, says the blurb, continue to suggest that the early Medieval fenland featured north-west European colonists in an empty landscape. Using existing and new evidence and arguments, Oosthuizen offers a different view. The fen islands and the silt fens show a degree of occupation unexpected a few decades ago. Dense Romano-British settlement appears to have been followed by consistent early Medieval occupation on every island in the peat fens and across the silt fens, despite the impact of climatic change. This was a society with origins in prehistoric Britain.
 
Javier Pes, writing in the Art Newspaper (1 July), asked Thomas Campbell FSA why he decided to step down as Director and Chief Executive of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Was it a New Year’s resolution? Is he moving on to a major broadcasting role? What about criticism that the board has been taken over with people with a vested interest in modern and contemporary art? Was the planned modern and contemporary wing a project too far? Did he feel harshly treated over exaggerated reporting of a budget deficit? Was speculation about his relationships with staff difficult to deal with? Is the Met ready for a female Director? ‘There is no ideal time,’ says Campbell, ‘but I think it is a moment when I can step away feeling that the museum is in a very strong place.’ Read the interview here.
 
Students attending the University of Reading’s Archaeology Field School in Wiltshire have been excavating the remains of a Neolithic long barrow, under the direction of Jim Leary FSA and Amanda Clarke FSA. The burial mound at Cat's Brain, a low rise in the chalk in the Vale of Pewsey, had long been flattened, but suggestive below-ground features had been identified in air photos and confirmed by a geophysics survey. Removing ploughsoil revealed the marks of timber foundations in the shape of a trapezium, within an arc of ditches thought to be quarries for the mound. Dave Field FSA, author of Earthen Long Barrows (2006), told Salon that the significance of Cat’s Brain ‘is that it’s in the Pewsey Vale, an area once considered a marshy morass and devoid of prehistoric archaeology.’ The annual Vale of Pewsey Project has been focused on nearby Marden henge, a large Neolithic earthwork (2800–2000 BC) whose identity was proven in the 1960s by Geoff Wanwright FSA. Leary talks about the find in a video.
 
BBC Radio 4’s Front Row has been running a series of short presentations on the theme of Queer Icons. ‘LGBTQ guests’, it says, ‘champion queer artworks which are special to them, to mark the 50th anniversary of the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality.’ On 14 July Neil MacGregor FSA chose the Warren Cup, a Roman silver goblet decorated with images of men making love. The object is evidence, says MacGregor, that that there have frequently been societies where homosexual love is acceptable. And its display in the British Museum, where visitors happily enjoy looking at it, is evidence of a change in attitude in our country in his lifetime. The Museum itself is offering a guide to ‘Same-sex desire and gender identity.’ ‘The evidence for same-sex desire and fluid ideas of gender,’ it says, ‘has often been overlooked in the past, but museums and their collections can allow us to look back and see diversity throughout history,’ adding, ‘now we realise the past is much “queerer” than we have often thought.’

The inaugural Christopher Stell Memorial Lecture took place at the annual meeting of the Chapels Society in Wesley Memorial Church, Oxford on 8 July. Christopher Stell FSA, who died in 2014, was a seminal figure in the work of the Historic Chapels Trust, the Chapels Society, and the study of Nonconformist buildings. Kate Tiller FSA took the theme of ‘How to Read a Chapel’, proposing that a full understanding of chapels can best be achieved by a combined study of buildings, people and place. This approach interweaves insights and evidence from several histories – architectural, religious and denominational, social and local – too often treated separately. The lecture was illustrated by a case study of Cote Baptist chapel, west Oxfordshire, now in the care of the Trust.
 
In Britain’s Global Future: Harnessing the Soft Power Capital of UK Institutions, independent think tank ResPublica reminds us that not only is Brexit a challenge to the UK, but that the world is watching. A new approach is needed, they say. ‘Costly military interventions or fragmented formal diplomacy’ will no longer work. A ‘diplomatic mindset that can integrate our national interest with enhanced public diplomacy and cultural relations,’ will. Culture, arts, museums and galleries, the BBC, universities, the British Council, loom large. They could convene at an ‘annual gathering’; government should be supportive but distant (see how China gets it wrong). In the promotion, Ian Blatchford FSA, Director of the Science Museum Group, says, ‘Culture is a powerful bridge between nations and an area where Britain is fantastically placed to create global impact … [the Science Museum Group], and Britain’s wider museum sector [the report namechecks the British Museum and the V&A], are rightly celebrated as unique and powerful players in cultural diplomacy.’ Read it here.
 
The British Museum has published its first annual review under its new Director, Hartwig Fischer FSA (right) and its panel of Trustees who include Clive Gamble FSA and Sir Paul Ruddock FSA. Research and activities of many Fellows feature in the report – in the museum, across the UK and around the world. Fischer himself reflects on the year in the museum blog. ‘It has been an extraordinary year,’ he says. ‘With substantial changes in the world around us, public institutions such as ours need to think and reflect on what they mean, and respond.’ Three major new or refurbished permanent galleries will open soon. ‘Our vision is to create a museum which tells more coherent and compelling stories of the cultures and artefacts we display, and to allow comparisons to be made across cultures and timeframes. … This will involve a new narrative for the collections, an emphasis on the interconnectedness of cultures, the renovation of the building and improvement of facilities for our millions of visitors, and, of course, digital.’ The Round Reading Room will be at the heart of this Museum. ‘We are at the very early stages of our thinking,’ he adds, ‘this will be a major project over many years. But it is a project that fills me with excitement.’
 
Arts Minister John Glen has placed a temporary export bar on a drawing of a waterfall by Joseph Anton Koch. UK buyers have until 27 December to express a serious intention to raise the asking price of £68,750 + VAT. The drawing is a preparatory study for Koch’s best known composition, The Schmadribach Waterfall in the Lauterbrunnen Valley, Switzerland (1811), and was in the collection of the late art critic, Brian Sewell. Koch, said Reviewing Committee member Lowell Libson FSA in a statement, ‘is a pivotal figure in the European Romantic movement at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries and enjoyed a significant relationship with British patrons and collectors who particularly appreciated his “heroic” Alpine landscapes. Very few of Koch’s many important works originally in British collections now remain in the UK. The retention in this country of this beautiful and important drawing would greatly add to the way in which British institutions can tell the story of European Romanticism and of the development of British taste and patronage.’

The National Museum of the Royal Navy, with help from the Art Fund and an anonymous charitable trust, has acquired a rare portrait of a midshipman who survived the Battle of Trafalgar. Painted by a young George Henry Harlow (1787–1819), who trained under Sir Thomas Lawrence, the work shows John Windham Dalling (1789–1853) as a 16-year-old in the Royal Navy. This is only the second portrait of a midshipman in the museum’s collections. It was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1806, and bought by the museum from Dalling’s descendants in 2011. Dominic Tweddle FSA, Director General of the National Museum, said in a release, ‘We are thrilled to acquire this portrait. Our collection is incredibly rich in Nelson, Admirals and other high-ranking naval officers. But we have very few depictions of youth and sacrifice.’

Buckfast Abbey, Devon, will celebrate its millennium in 2018. The present Benedictine community has planned a range of celebrations to mark the occasion, among them a book launch. Peter Beacham FSA has edited Buckfast Abbey: History, Art and Architecture, which will be published in the autumn. The book chronicles the abbey’s history. The first monastery was absorbed into the Cistercian Order in 1147, and dissolved during the Reformation. In the early 19th century a Gothic-style mansion was built on the abbey ruins. A group of exiled French Benedictine monks settled at Buckfast in 1882 and rebuilt the medieval abbey church: the foundation stone was laid in 1907, and consecration took place in 1932. Beacham tells Salon that the book's various chapters are almost all written by Fellows. On 7 October several of them, including Marian Campbell FSA, Bridget Cherry FSA, Roderick O’Donnell FSA, Nicholas Orme FSA and David Robinson FSA, will speak about the abbey, at the abbey, at a conference to launch it. See Other Forthcoming Heritage Events, below.

The World Monuments Fund (WMF) has launched a £500,000 scheme to train Syrian refugees in and around the Zaatari camp on the Jordanian border in traditional stone masonry. The aim, reports the Art Newspaper, is to develop skills so that cultural heritage sites damaged or destroyed in conflict can be rebuilt when peace returns to Syria. ‘There has been enormous destruction in Palmyra, Nimrud and Aleppo,’ says John Darlington FSA, Executive Director of the WMF Britain. ‘When the dust settles, one of the things that will stop restoration is that we will see money going into places like Palmyra but the skills on the ground won’t be there. … The idea is to train people who will become trainers themselves.’ The British Museum has a comparable scheme training Iraqi citizens in the UK and Iraq, backed by £3 million from the UK government.
 
Up to 90% of antiquities sold may have illicit origins. Traded illegal antiquities and art have an annual value of €2.5–5 billion, an area of international crime exceeded in value only by arms and narcotics. With such references, on 13 July the European Commission announced proposals to cut down the illegal import of cultural goods used to finance terrorism. The plans apply to objects older than 250 years. ‘It is not expected,’ says a statement, that ‘art dealers, museums and traders who import cultural goods from third countries … will be unduly impacted’: they should ‘already be aware and complying with those countries' laws and regulations on the export of cultural property.’ The new law, which will ban the import into the EU of cultural goods exported illegally from their home countries, enters into force in 2019. As the UK is expected to leave the EU in March of that year, it seems likely the law will not be imported into British law.
 
The Heritage Alliance reports positive response in government to its Heritage Manifesto. Phillip Hammond, the Chancellor, agreed ‘that investing in heritage can create places where people want to live, work and visit as well as boosting jobs growth and well-being'. Boris Johnson, Foreign Secretary, noted ‘the magnificent representation of our country that [our heritage] offers overseas’, adding that he was struck by ‘the truly collaborative approach your organisation has taken as it strives to work across Government’. Lizzie Glithero-West, the Alliance’s Chief Executive, and Loyd Grossman FSA, Chairman, met John Glenn, the new Heritage Minister, at a sector breakfast brief. Grossman discussed heritage tourism.

Dora Thornton FSA, Curator of Renaissance Europe and of the Waddesdon Bequest at the British Museum, has co-edited with Pippa Shirley of Waddesdon Manor A Rothschild Renaissance: A New Look. The book collects papers given at a British Museum conference in 2015, at the opening of a new gallery for the Waddesdon Bequest, an extraordinary collection of Renaissance treasures left to the museum by Baron Ferdinand Rothschild MP in 1898. The gift, nearly 300 objects, emptied Waddesdon Manor’s New Smoking Room, and now fills the museum’s only gallery dedicated to a single collection. Subjects in the book include new attributions for sculptures, a detailed discussion of the making and marketing of forgeries by Salomon Weininger, Frederic Spitzer and Alfred Andre, and new research on jewellery and its presentation.
 

Cecilia Western FSA died on 4 May aged 99. She was elected a Fellow of the Society in May 1972. Kay Prag FSA has written this tribute:
 
‘A C (Cecil) Western FSA died just months short of her 100th birthday. Her career reflected the progress of archaeology in the 20th century. The photo on the right, taken at Hazor in the 1980s, shows (from right), Cecil Western, Claire Epstein, Kathleen Kenyon FSA and Yigael Yadin (Ancient Jerusalem Archive, Council for British Research in the Levant).
 
‘From 1936 to 1938 she trained for a Royal Horticultural Society Diploma at the Studley Agricultural Centre in Warwickshire. Early in 1940 she responded to an appeal for women to assist in war work, and after some training in radar maintenance was sent to Plymouth, then to Dorchester (Dorset) and Grimsby.
 
‘After she was demobbed, she decided that she would be interested in a career as a museum conservator, particularly of antiquities. There were no courses at the time, so she wrote to several museums asking whether there was an opening for a volunteer trainee. She was accepted by Manchester Museum, and worked there in all departments from 1946 to 1948. She followed this by going to the V&A, where conservation work led her to the Institute of Archaeology in Regent’s Park, as an assistant to Ione Gedye.
 
‘At the Institute she met Nancy Lord, then working as a secretary for Gordon Childe FSA, and also practising photographic work with Maurice Cookson (“Cookie”) and Marjorie Conlon. This is also where Cecil and Nancy first encountered Kathleen Kenyon and began a life-long friendship, and, as with so many others, under Kenyon’s influence their work moved into new directions. Cecil and Nancy were at Jericho with Kenyon in 1952–53, Cecil working as conservator, where, with Peter Parr, she excavated the first of the Neolithic plaster skulls.
 
‘The discovery of preserved wooden furniture and artefacts in the Middle Bronze Age tombs at Jericho (c 1600 B.C.) led to her interest in wood, especially its identification and conservation. In 1956 she moved to the Forestry Institute at Oxford. Her contribution to the study and identification of ancient wood and charcoals was well described by Eleni Asouti in 2006.
 
‘Encouraged by Kenyon, Cecil was a pioneer in the field of charcoal macro-remain studies. She travelled and excavated widely, collecting samples, and was awarded a BSc at Oxford for a thesis on this work in 1969, partly published as ‘The ecological interpretation of ancient charcoals from Jericho,’ Levant 3, 31­40 (1971). At the instigation of Gordon Hillman she donated her significant collection, which included (besides seeds) wood, charcoal, archaeological specimens of wood, and pressed herbarium specimens, to the Institute of Archaeology at UCL in 1984.
 
‘All this was in addition to her career from 1957 as Head Conservator at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, up to her retirement. She was a happy gardener, a staunch friend, with strong views and dry humour, and part of Kenyon’s inner circle of good friends.’
 
• In her blog, Eleni Asouti notes that Western obtained a degree in history from Birkbeck College in 1950, and in 1955 took a year out to travel with friends. They entered Greece via Belgrade and Skopje, on to Turkey via Sparta and Mycenae, through Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and south through India to Madurai in the southernmost state of Tamil Nadu, finally taking a boat to Australia.
 
Western’s work, says Asouti, ‘contributed to opening the road for wood, and particularly charcoal macro-remain studies, to become a truly integrated part of bioarchaeological science and specialist fieldwork. She belonged to a pioneer generation of archaeological science specialists who chose (when circumstances permitted) to work in the field instead of being confined in their laboratories.’ The photo above (2004) is by Asouti.
 
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Bridget Allchin FSA died on 27 June aged 90. She was elected a Fellow of the Society in March 1984. Danika Parikh recently wrote a tribute on Allchin’s 90th birthday in February for the Ancient India and Iran Trust’s blog. Much of what follows is taken from that and an obituary of her late husband, Raymond Allchin FSA, by Robin Coningham FSA.
 
Bridget Allchin FSA (née Gordon) was inspired as a child to study prehistory. She began a course of history and ancient history at UCL, from where she was able to join other students excavating Neolithic sites at Dorchester-on-Thames, Oxfordshire. After a year, however, she moved to South Africa with her parents, where she took a degree in African Studies at Cape Town under A J H Goodwin, a pioneering Cambridge archaeology graduate.
 
She returned to London in 1950 to study for a PhD. Having been told her ‘colonial degree’ was inadequate, she ‘stormed to UCL' and demanded to see Gordon Childe FSA. She started at the Institute of Archaeology that autumn, planning to research later African prehistory and ethnoarchaeology. That changed when she met Raymond Allchin. They married in March 1951, and she joined her husband on a research trip to South Asia. She was eight months pregnant with the first of their two children when they reached south India.
 
Her subsequent doctoral thesis was published as The Stone-Tipped Arrow: Late Stone Age Hunters of the Tropical Old World (1966), foreshadowing a distinguished career as a South Asian prehistoric archaeologist and lithic specialist. She and Ray studied Indian archaeology together, co-authoring The Birth of Indian Civilization (1968), The Rise of Civilization in India and Pakistan (1982), and Origins of a Civilization: The Prehistory and Early Archaeology of South Asia (1997).
 
Her husband, who died in 2010, had an exceptional career as a South Asian archaeologist based at Cambridge University. They worked together closely, describing their early adventures in From the Oxus to Mysore in 1951: The Start of a Great Partnership in Indian Scholarship (2012). However, notwithstanding the Times obituary’s description of Ray as ‘for many years the only archaeologist and cultural historian of Ancient India working in Britain,’ Bridget also researched and published extensively on her own, on Indian and South Asian prehistory and ethnoarchaeology.
 
She co-directed fieldwork in the Great Thar Desert (1969–76), published as The Prehistory and Palaeography of the Great Indian Desert (with Andrew Goudie and K T M Hegde, 1978); a reviewer commended their success in completing eight seasons’ fieldwork on a total budget of £12,000. Bridget and Ray were joint Directors of the Cambridge University Archaeological Mission to Pakistan, which became the British Archaeological Mission to Pakistan and ran a Palaeolithic project. In 1987 she gave the Sir George Birdwood Memorial Lecture at the Royal Society, on South Asian Rock Art; she speculated that recent Indian sacred folk art could help understand prehistoric art. She edited the pioneering Living Traditions: Studies in the Ethnoarchaeology of South Asia (1994).
 
Bridget Allchin was a Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge; a founding member of the European Association of South Asian Archaeologists (1971); a founding Trustee (1987), and later Secretary and then Chair, of the Ancient India and Iran Trust; the founding Editor of the journal South Asian Studies and Editor of the journal Afghan Studies. In 2014 she was awarded the Royal Asiatic Society Gold Medal, as a ‘pioneering female field-archaeologist in South Asia’. The Annual Allchin Symposium of South Asian Archaeology was established to commemorate Ray and Bridget’s work.
 
• The funeral will be at the West Chapel in Cambridge Crematorium at 1.30 pm on 20 July, followed by a reception at Wolfson College, Cambridge at 3 pm. Her family have asked that no flowers should be sent, but donations for Alzheimer’s Research can be made c/o Gordon Barber Funeral Director, 2 St Williams Way, Norwich NR7 0AW.

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Jo Draper FSA died on 24 June aged 68. She was elected a Fellow of the Society in May 1987. A celebration of her life and burial of ashes will be held at Higher Ground Meadow, Corscombe, Dorset, DT2 0QN, on 24 July at 11.30 am. All welcome. Dress code: colourful and casual. Further details from alison.taylor47@ntlworld.com.
 
Jo Draper FSA (Josephine Chaplin) worked in archaeology and museums in Dorset for more than 40 years. Between 1980 and 1995 she edited the Proceedings of the Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society, to which she was also a frequent contributor, on subjects including excavations in Dorchester, medieval and more recent pottery, and the history of Dorset County Museum.
 
She researched and led the cataloguing of the collection at the Philpot Museum, Lyme Regis, during major repairs and the preparation of new displays designed by Robin Wade. After it re-opened in 1999 (at a ceremony fronted by Sir David Attenborough FSA), the museum won the first Museum of the Year Special Design Award (now known as Lyme Regis Museum, it opened a new £1.5 million Mary Anning Wing extension this 17 July). Championing the achievements of the 19th-century palaeontologist, she wrote Mary Anning's Town: Lyme Regis (2004), and Lyme Regis Past and Present (2006).
 
Earlier books include Thomas Hardy's England (with John Fowles, 1984) and Thomas Hardy: A Life in Pictures (1989). The Dovecote Press describes her as one of its best-known authors. Her Dorset: The Complete Guide (1986), it says, has sold nearly 20,000 copies, and remains in print. It took three years to research and compile, during which time she visited every text entry – repeating the journeys for a second edition (2003). She also wrote Hampshire: The Complete Guide (1990), along with, among other books, Post-mediaeval Pottery, 1650–1800 (2001), Dorset Country Pottery: The Kilns of the Verwood District (with Penny Copland-Griffiths, 2002), and Dorset Barns (with David Bailey, 2010).
 
Her husband, Christopher Chaplin, archaeologist and land surveyor, died in 2015.

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Jonathan Coad FSA, Edward Harris FSA and Peter White FSA recently learnt of the death of Collin Carpenter FSA, on 23 June 2015 aged 92. ‘Collin was a remarkable person,’ says Coad, ‘who made very significant contributions to the field of historic ordnance, and deserves his place in history.’ They have written the following obituary. Their photo shows Carpenter (left) at Crownhill Fort, Plymouth, in 1997, ‘in characteristic pose’ talking to Harris.
 
‘The redoubtable Austin Collin Carpenter FSA was one of the country’s leading experts in the field of historic weaponry, and did more than anyone else to research, conserve and accurately display historic heavy ordnance in appropriate original locations. These were mostly on what are now English Heritage properties such as Dover, Hurst and Pendennis castles and Fort Brockhurst, but he also “re-armed” other fortifications throughout Britain, as well as carrying out notable work on the rich legacy of artillery fortifications on Bermuda.
 
‘During the Second World War, Collin served with the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (REME) developing his skills as an engineer. Afterwards he served his apprenticeship as a carpenter on the Dunster Castle Estate, before moving to work for Ancient Monuments Branch of the Ministry of Works at Cleeve Abbey. By the 1960s he was based at Devonport as Superintendent of Works for guardianship properties in Devon, Cornwall and the Scillies,
 
‘From an early age Collin developed an interest in arms and armour, and he built up a personal collection which included some rare and unusual firearms. He was also a skilled model-maker and collector, amassing a remarkable collection of models of heavy ordnance, some of which was donated to the National Museum of Bermuda. He was consulted by the local police on ballistics matters, and by Sotheby’s on antique firearms, visiting the United States on their behalf. He developed a very strong relationship with colleagues at both the Tower Armouries and the V&A Museum.
 
‘From the mid-60s he made a most unusual and highly regarded contribution to the work of the (then) Ancient Monuments branch. Many guardianship properties had artillery pieces, often mounted inappropriately or not at all. With the support of Andrew Saunders FSA, then Principal Inspector of Ancient Monuments for England, and T A Bailey FSA, Senior Architect, a programme was devised to conserve, repair and accurately display in their correct locations this collection for visitors. An essential prerequisite was sufficient knowledge to recognise the type and date of the artillery, then to research the design of carriages appropriate for it. Only then could the highly skilled business of designing and fabricating replica carriages go forward. Collin was able to take on all these tasks, and an early and very challenging tour de force was the carriage for the 16th-century Pevensey Castle gun.
 
‘Initially the carpenters based at Dartmouth Castle took on the work. Soon, however, with increasing demand as more gun barrels were retrieved from harbour quaysides and civic spaces where they had been buried muzzle-down as bollards, the cramped workshop with its poor access was replaced by a purpose-designed facility at Totnes.
 
‘Collin’s background as a craftsman was essential for the project, but his real personal achievement was his research. Self-taught, he acquired an encyclopaedic knowledge of the subject. For example, the casting and proofing details which identify many gun barrels were stamped on the face of a trunnion, a feature which was often damaged or broken off. Invariably Collin could instantly date and place a gun barrel from its shape and decorative details, knowledge that was critical if the correct carriage was to be constructed and the piece relocated on an appropriate monument. He did not waste the opportunities provided by contact with Ministry of Defence colleagues in adjoining offices at Devonport. Among the last pieces to be completed at Dartmouth were examples destined for Pendennis and the Scillies. Their transport? Slung beneath the newly commissioned Sea King helicopters as a “training exercise”!
 
‘The Totnes workshop specialised in the construction and repair of wooden gun-carriages for smooth-bore weapons with outside foundries supplying metal parts. But Collin’s expertise also included working with foundries to produce replicas of the more durable cast-iron garrison carriages. From there he moved on to supervising construction of massive and complicated all-metal traversing carriages for the two 38 ton RML gun barrels at Hurst Castle, and later worked with the Landmark Trust on the even more complex task of building a Moncrieff Counterweight Disappearing Carriage for an emplacement at Crownhill Fort at Plymouth. His work included not just the conservation of the weapons and construction of their mountings, but also the accurate replication of appropriate ammunition and the rammers, mops and sponges used by the guns' crews.
 
‘Collin was elected a Fellow in February 1991, an honour he always held dear. The Totnes workshop was closed in 1994 when English Heritage disbanded its in-house craftsmen, but Collin’s expertise in the wider world remained much in demand and he enjoyed a busy and active retirement, ably supported by his wife Jenny who accompanied him as his skilled assistant.
 
‘In 1984, Edward Harris invited Collin and Jenny to Bermuda by to carry out an inventory of the remarkable collection there of British artillery, dating back to the earliest decades of the second English overseas colony (settled in 1612). That led to the making of various gun carriages, culminating in the possibly unique carriage and assemblage for an Armstrong 40-pounder of 35 cwt Rifled Breech Loader, now on permanent display at the restored Commissioner’s House (part of the National Museum) within the 16-acre fortifications of the old Royal Naval Dockyard at Bermuda. Naturally, as was his wont, Collin returned to Bermuda in 1990 to “prove” his work by firing that RBL. Bermuda was also writ large in his seminal work, Cannon: The Conservation, Reconstruction and Presentation of Historic Artillery (1993).
 
‘Collin was an extrovert with a taste for fast cars. When he replaced his Cortina GT with the newly launched Capri in gold, comment from colleagues came thick and fast. But however rapid, his cars all had one feature in common – a capacious boot. Frequently to be seen tail-heavy, their proud owner would reveal the reason – yet another gun barrel retrieved, on its way to the workshop to be refurbished and measured up for its carriage. Those who had the pleasure of visiting the Irons Brothers smithery in Cornwall with Collin in later years will perhaps remember with excitement (and no little trepidation) the journey from Devon in his BMW, with the cannon-master at the helm!’

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Martin Aitken FSA, who died in June, has received an obituary in the Telegraph (10 July). He went up to Wadham College, Oxford, says the paper, to read Physics, but his studies were interrupted by the Second World War, in which he served as a technical radar officer in Ceylon and Burma. He became a Fellow of Linacre College in 1965 and Professor of Archaeometry in 1985, retiring in 1989. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1983.
 
He undertook the first archaeological proton magnetometer survey in 1958, says the paper, at the invitation of the archaeologist Graham Webster FSA, on the Roman city of Durobrivae. In 1962 he established a series of conferences in Oxford, which became the bi-annual International Symposia on Archaeometry and Archaeological Prospection. As well as proton magnetometers, he also developed the use of fluxgate magnetic gradiometers and was involved (with Derek Walton) in the development of the first SQUID cryogenic magnetometer to be used in Britain.
 
‘From the 1960s he developed thermoluminescence dating (TL). … He further developed the method by using blue/green light or infrared radiation instead of heat. This optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating has become one of the most powerful methods for the dating of sediments in both archaeological and environmental contexts.’
 
‘As well as his books on archaeometry, Aitken published more than 150 scientific papers. An affable, approachable man, he won the Gemant Award from the American Institute of Physics, and the Pomerance Award for Scientific Contributions to Archaeology of the Archaeological Institute of America.’ In retirement he and his wife, Joan Killick, moved to a small stone house near Clermont Ferrand, France.

Near this Place is Interred the Body of
the Revd. GEORGE ASHBY. B.D. & F.S.A.
Rector of this Parish
Son of EDMUND ASHBY (by ELIZABETH JUDITH, Daughter
of ROBERT LOCK of Dinton in Wiltshire)
of an ancient Leicestershire Family
Who was born 5th. Decr. 1724
And died 12th. June 1808.
He was for many years President of St. John’s College Cambridge
by which Society he was presented to this Living in 1774
and in 1780 obtained by the friendship of Dr. ROSS Bp. of Exeter
the Rectory of Stansfield in Suffolk.
For some years previous to his death he had the misfortune
to become blind, but as a Critical Scholar and an Antiquary
he left many lasting testimonials of superior Abilities.
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Mrs. HANNAH ASHBY
Sister of the Revd. G Ashby
died 1st. May 1805, Aged 79.
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Thomas Lyus of Barrow the constant Companion and Amanuensis of the
Revd. G. Ashby for the space of 28 Years and at last his Testamentary Heir
with all respect and gratitude, inscribes this marble to his memory.

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