William Drummond FSA, art dealer, died in April.
 
An appreciation appears in Fellows Remembered below. The section also contains further notices on the late Gordon Forster FSA, the late John Warren FSA and the late Vera Evison FSA.
 
‘It looks as though our “blue paper” was not legible,’ writes Edmund King FSA about Salon’s ‘nice appreciation’ of Peter Gordon FSA, ‘as his date of birth was 4 November 1927’. I had written 1924 (the blue paper is blank on the matter). We do not know the date of his death.

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The Wiltshire Museum in Devizes has dedicated its latest exhibition to the memory of Paul Robinson FSA (left), who died last year. Telling Wiltshire's Story: 30 Years Of Support from Art Fund (12 May to 24 June) features ‘an eclectic mix of art and artefacts such as depictions of Wiltshire landmarks and landscapes, a Roman coin hoard, a collection of Medieval floor tiles and a set of 19th century Druid medals.’ Highlights include works by Henry Moore, John Piper, David Inshaw, Robin Tanner and Anthony Vandyke Copley-Fielding. Stonehenge is well represented. The coins (gold and silver) are in the Stanchester Hoard, discovered in 2000 by a schoolboy from Marlborough, exhibited with the newly reconstructed pot in which they were found.
 
Anna Somers Cocks FSA talks entertainingly about a career of experiences in the art world, and the forces operating on contemporary collecting, in a recording made at Art Talks London under the heading Women in the Art World (The Art Newspaper, 18 April). Topics include whether our institutions should accept money from the Sacklers, counting private jets arriving at Art Basel Miami, Nick Serota wondering in 1991 if anyone wanted to see contemporary art, and advice to her audience: keep your accounts under control, don't work too hard, and enjoy your family.
 
Jeremy Montagu FSA has added the conch to the musical instruments considered in his remarkable series of studies. The Conch Horn is published on Montagu’s website as a free PDF download. ‘One day’, he tells Salon, ‘it might appear as a print-on-demand book, but not yet anyway, so for the moment it can only be read on screen (it’s a bit long to print off, but anyone is welcome to do so). It covers conchs from Palaeolithic (only one known!) through Neolithic to modern times worldwide.’ The Conch Horn is a substantial publication, with 29 good colour photos, a 12-page bibliography and an index. Chapters cover Europe and around the Mediterranean, Africa and nearby, the Indian Sub-Continent, South-East Asia and the Orient, Oceania and the Americas. ‘The most practicable way to establish [the length of its interior helix] is simply to blow the conch,’ writes Montagu, ‘measure its pitch, and then to compare that pitch with the known lengths of our orchestral instruments… This method would be forbidden in most museums today, but I am free to do it with my own conchs, and museums were not so fussy about such things back in the 1950s and ’60s when I first started researching these and other instruments.’
 
David Adshead FSA is serving as Interim Secretary to the Georgian Group from April until the end of September 2018, while the amenity society’s Secretary David McKinstry is on sick leave. Adshead can be contacted secretary@georgiangroup.org.uk. 

It was the birthday of the Society’s President on 19 April, a moment recorded by the Times. The paper further honoured Gill Andrews FSA with a baronetcy, promoting her to join Kay Andrews FSA, Baroness Andrews of Southover and former Chair of English Heritage. You can’t have too many.

Stonehenge and its landscape has been judged by the Reverend David Ison, Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, to be one of ten ‘Faith and Belief places’ for A History of England in 100 Places. Organised by Historic England, the scheme invites the public to propose places for different categories, which are then winnowed down by invited judges. Other faith places include Greensted Church in Essex, which has late Anglo-Saxon timber walls, and the Guru Nanak Gurdwara in Smethwick, near Birmingham, built in the 1990s and housing one of the largest Sikh congregations in the UK. ‘These ten places,’ said Duncan Wilson FSA, Chief Executive of Historic England, in a statement, ‘show how England has a long history of people from different faiths leaving their mark in a legacy of special buildings and places which still make a strong spiritual connection today.’
 
Two Fellows featured in Sacred Spaces, an episode of Radio 4’s Beyond Belief (23 April). Robert Beckford led a discussion about sacred spaces, ‘from a beach, mountain top or sports ground to the grandest sacred spaces created by the world's religions’. Jon Cannon FSA (author of The Secret Language of Sacred Spaces, 2013) said his favourite such space was Inglesham church in Wiltshire [in whose restoration William Morris FSA had a hand; photo left from Wikipedia], delicately layered with the accumulated deep feelings of generations. Beckford cut an interview into the show with Simon Jenkins FSA (author of England's Thousand Best Churches, 1999, and England's Cathedrals, 2016). A church offers an experience comparable to that of going to a great opera or symphony concert, says Jenkins, an atheist: ‘A really good museum does it for me.’ Cannon hopes for a future in which ‘The potential of that multifariousness of voice about the divine [within Britain] could be heard and fulfilled.’
 
Gail Boyle FSA has been appointed a Trustee to the Treasure Valuation Committee. The Committee recommends valuations to the Secretary of State of items deemed Treasure under the Treasure Act, drawing on the advice of independent experts. Senior Curator at Bristol City Museum and Chair of the Society of Museum Archaeologists, Boyle tells Salon that she will be representing museums. ‘This will be a new challenge’, she says, ‘and one that I am very much looking forward to.’ She will join, among others, Colin Renfrew FSA, Marian Campbell FSA and Roger Bland FSA.
 
Herbert R Broderick FSA writes to say that his Moses the Egyptian in the Illustrated Old English Hexateuch (London, British Library, Cotton MS Claudius B.iv) was published last year. He argues that motifs in the famous illuminated 11th-century manuscript, in particular an image of the horned Moses, have a Hellenistic Egyptian origin. The visual construct of Moses may have been based on a Late Antique prototype, no longer extant, influenced by works of Hellenistic Egyptian Jewish exegetes, who ascribed to Moses the characteristics of an Egyptian-Hellenistic king, military commander, priest, prophet, and scribe. These Jewish writings were used in turn by early Christian apologists such as Clement of Alexandria and Eusebius of Caesarea. The analysis ranges widely across religious divides, art-historical religious themes, and classical and early Jewish and Christian sources. ‘This is a fascinating, innovative, thoughtful, and thought-provoking work,’ says Michelle Brown FSA on the back cover.

An exhibition featuring highlights of the FRAGSUS project (full name, Fragility and Sustainability in Restricted Island Environments: Adaptation, Cultural Change and Collapse in Prehistory) can be seen at the National Museum of Archaeology, Valletta, Malta, until 15 June. Concluding after five years, this ERC-funded project involved Queens University Belfast (Principal Investigator Caroline Malone FSA – showing visitors an excavation, right – with Michelle Farrell FSA and Rowan McLaughlin FSA), and the universities of Cambridge (Simon Stoddart FSA), Malta (Anthony Bonanno FSA, Reuben Grima FSA and Nicholas Vella FSA), Liverpool John Moores (Christopher Hunt FSA) and Plymouth (Nicki Whitehouse FSA). The project explored the rise and fall of island civilisations, focusing on the contexts of change, adaptation, sustainability and collapse.

The opening sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey, says Chris Stringer FSA, does not ‘reflect current thinking’. A group of half-human apes are turned into aggressive fighters by a mysterious monolith, an idea of what drove early human evolution (aggression, not aliens) derived from anthropologist Raymond Dart and popularised by Richard Ardrey. ‘Bones may have been used as tools,’ Stringer tells Robin McKie in the Observer (15 April), ‘but for digging for roots and insects – not as clubs. That said, 2001 is still one of my favourite films – dazzling and mystifying in equal measure.’ The film was released 50 years ago this April. Did it inspire any Fellow to enter archaeology? • The poster can be bought from Pamono ($2,010 + delivery – it’s signed by Gary Lockwood, who played Frank Poole in the film)
 
Christopher Evans FSA, Executive Director, Cambridge Archaeological Unit, University of Cambridge, writes about a major 1960s excavation at Mucking, Essex, in the latest Historic England Research online magazine. Dug with barely a day off between 1965 and 1978 by Margaret Jones FSA and her husband Tom Jones, Mucking was a monster that awaited publication after the Jones’ deaths. The huge area excavated and the immense number of finds having already defeated other teams, analysis was finally completed with striking success under Evans’ leadership and the publication of two monographs in 2016. The work ‘took some eight years,’ writes Evans, ‘and was both a daunting challenge and a great privilege.’ • A bequest left by Margaret established the Society’s Margaret and Tom Jones Award, to support archaeological fieldwork and research.
 
Also in the above edition of Historic England Research is a piece by Marcus Jecock FSA and Sally Evans, about an ancient hilltop enclosure on Warton Crag, Lancashire. Traditionally said to be an Iron Age hillfort, three arcs of ruined stone walls emerged from beneath tree and scrub cover after detailed aerial mapping using specially commissioned lidar imagery as something different: Bronze Age stock pens. Barney Sloane FSA introduces the magazine, noting the retirement of Steve Trow FSA, ‘a long standing member of Historic England and Director of Research, under whose watch many of these projects happened.’
 
The Rev Robin Griffith-Jones FSA and Eric Fernie FSA and have edited Tomb & Temple: Re-imagining the Sacred Buildings of Jerusalem. Richly illustrated essays do justice to Jerusalem’s evocative architecture, from the Sepulchre itself, the Dome of the Rock and the later depiction and significance of the Jewish Temple, to the links between Jerusalem and Byzantium, the Caucasus, Russia and Ethiopia. Chapters on Charlemagne's chapel at Aachen, the role of military orders in spreading the form of the Sepulchre, a gazetteer of English rounds, and studies of London's New Temple bring northern Europe into focus. Contributors include Alan Borg FSA, Cecily Hennessy FSA, Philip J Lankester FSA, Robin Milner-Gulland FSA, David W Phillipson FSA and Denys Pringle FSA, as well as Fernie and Griffith-Jones.

Charlotte Higgins FSA has interviewed Hartwig Fischer FSA, director of the British Museum, for the Guardian (13 April). It’s two years since Fischer succeeded Neil MacGregor FSA, and he's planning ‘a major renovation project that will culminate in a complete redisplay of [the museum’s] galleries.’ Higgins jokes that this ‘can’t be as big as the Palace of Westminster’s renovation, which will cost at least £3.5bn,’ to which Fischer replies ‘that the museum has more rooms than parliament – 3,000 versus 1,100 – and that the state of the essential services, such as electricity, gas and water are in dire need of repair, just as they are at Westminster. He has in mind something as grand and decisive as the “projet grand” Louvre.’ Commenting on the interview in the Times (20 April), Richard Morrison, congratulating Tate for a new scheme to offer exhibition discounts to 16–25 year olds, expresses ‘incredulity’ that Fischer ‘utters not a word about the crisis in arts education, let alone the potentially catastrophic consequences it might have for his august institution… Yet unless that challenge [of engaging teenagers and young adults] is placed at the heart of the British Museum’s thinking the place will become hopelessly and indefensibly irrelevant within a generation.’

Writing in the Observer (22 April), Fiona Maddocks is wowed by the British Museum’s inaugural music festival, Europe and the World, curated by Daniel Kühnel, Intendant of the Hamburg Symphony Orchestra. It opened with Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen among the Parthenon sculptures, and continues in different galleries with Spanish flamenco, Japanese spiritual music, Chinese Kunqu Opera, Cage and Stockhausen. Happening to be in the Great Court on Saturday, I thought I’d join the audience in the Reading Room for a performance of Ligeti’s Poème Symphonique: but the free tickets had all gone. The series ends back in the Reading Room on 29 April (Bartók, Toshio Hosokawa and Luigi Nono). Did any Fellows attend? What do you think of music in museums?
 
Also free at the BM (until 15 July) is Charmed Lives in Greece, featuring the work, lives and houses of artists Niko Ghika and John Craxton, and writer Patrick Leigh Fermor. David Attenborough FSA, an early collector of Craxton’s luminous paintings, talked to John Wilson on Radio 4’s Front Row in March. ‘He had a great feeling for prehistory,’ said Attenborough. His early drawings show ‘mythic animals, rather frightening personifications of the landscape. When he got to Greece, and he started bringing these vibrant, thrilling colours in pictures, then it got really exciting.’ He knew how to live, and eat and drink, says Attenborough, remembering ‘lovely evenings in harbour cafes in Chania’.

‘Every book tells a story,’ says Cristina Dondi FSA, ‘but a story that goes beyond the words written in it. It is about the people who used it, and their notations, and the drawings they left in the margins.’ Dondi is speaking in a promotional video for an exhibition in Venice called Printing Revolution: 1450–1500, Fifty Years that Changed Europe (at the Correr Museum 1 September – 7 January 2019). It will feature the work of 360 European and American libraries and 140 editors who contributed to the 15cBOOKTRADE Project at the University of Oxford (2014–2019), of which Dondi is Principal Investigator. ‘If a book tells a story,’ she adds, ‘thousands of books make history.’
 
Oliver Impey FSA and Arthur MacGregor FSA edited The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe (1985). It was, writes MacGregor, reprinted twice by Oxford University Press then deleted, ‘since which time I've been trying to get it reprinted; an unsatisfactory edition appeared in 2001, with the pagination and images changed, but perhaps fortunately the print-on-demand publisher went bust almost immediately.’ It has now been reprinted in an edition which reproduces the text of the original edition page for page, with colour plates where appropriate instead of the original’s black and white. ‘It seems still to be regarded as the standard book on the subject,’ adds MacGregor, ‘and has been fetching staggeringly high prices on the second-hand market hitherto.’
 
Maev Kennedy FSA was one of Tom Sutcliffe's guests in Radio 4’s Saturday Review on 21 April. They talked about Let The Sunshine In (a French film starring Juliette Binoche), Tina (a West End musical), Happiness (a novel by Aminatta Forna), Marina Amaral’s work colourising older monochrome photos, and BBC TV's series adaptation of Wilkie Collins' The Woman In White. Kennedy was not impressed by Tina, nor Let The Sunshine In (‘dreadful’), and colourising Auschwitz photos was ‘troubling’. But she enjoyed Happiness and The Woman In White (was any other Fellow impressed with the costumes and the variety of carriages?).

Caroline Dakers FSA has written Fonthill Recovered: A Cultural History. Drawing on histories of art and architecture, politics and economics, she explores the rich cultural history of this famous Wiltshire estate, where writer and collector William Beckford built his Gothic fantasy house – Fonthill Abbey – at the end of the 18th century with money from Jamaican sugar plantations. The collapse of the Abbey’s tower in 1825 made the name Fonthill a symbol for overarching ambition and folly. Fonthill is, however, much more than the story of one man’s excesses. The book traces the occupation of Fonthill from the Bronze Age to the 21st century. The wealth of some owners surpassed Beckford’s, and his Abbey is only one of several important houses to be built on the estate since the early 16th century, all of them eventually consumed by fire or deliberately demolished, and all oddly forgotten by historians. Published in May, the book will be available as a free download.

In Bacchus Uncovered: Ancient God of Ecstasy, Bettany Hughes FSA investigates Bacchus, ‘god of wine, revelry, theatre and excess, travelling to Georgia, Jordan, Greece and Britain to discover his origins and his presence in the modern world, and explore how “losing oneself” plays a vital role in the development of civilisation.’ She opens her story in the restored Temple of Mithras underneath the new Bloomberg HQ in London (‘in its final years’, she says, dedicated to Bacchus), and concludes with ‘the god's modern embrace in Nietzsche's philosophy, experimental theatre and the hedonistic hippie movement.’ The film can be watched on BBC iPlayer until 29 April. The Times gave it four stars, and the Financial Times five (‘scholarly and enthusiastic’). Paul Cartledge FSA was among Hughes' guests.
 

William Drummond FSA died on 1 April aged 83. He was elected a Fellow of the Society in October 2004.
 
An obituary in the Times (13 April) is headed, ‘Gently anarchic art dealer with a talent for sniffing out junk shop gems who employed a young Sarah Ferguson as his assistant.’ The paper’s photo (right) shows him at the Garrick Club.
 
The first such gem mentioned was a print which Drummond bought from a shilling box outside a shop on Kings Road, Chelsea in 1964. It was an impression of Goya’s El Coloso, and after Drummond sold it he bought his first house with the proceeds.
 
Later he was able to prove that a ‘dirty little oil’ (cleaned up, below), bought from Bonham’s by his brother for £38 and by William from Nicholas for £150, was a view of Brightwell, Suffolk, painted by John Constable in 1815. Drummond exhibited the work at his Covent Garden Gallery in 1980. He 'is in no hurry to sell it,’ reported Geraldine Norman in the Times (30 May), ‘but expects to do so when he finds the right client.’ That turned out to be the Tate Gallery, which paid £110,000 (around half a million pounds today).
 
After National Service in the East Surrey Regiment, with a stint in the Suez Canal Zone, Drummond worked for a City insurance broker. ‘Lunch hours might be spent in mudlarking for clay pipes in the Thames at Queenhithe,’ says the Times. ‘Later, even when besuited in the West End, he was a keen skip-diver, securing such diverse prizes as a pair of 18th-century candlesticks, and much-needed electric fans during heatwaves.’
 
He joined Sidney Sabin, a Cork Street picture dealer, in 1956. He opened the Covent Garden Gallery in 1976, since demolished during the rebuilding of the Royal Opera House.
 
‘Convivial to a fault,’ reports the Times, ‘he was a member of the Royal Corinthian Yacht Club at Burnham-on-Crouch as well as the Garrick, and was often to be found at that 18th-century throwback, the Academy Club in Soho. He was also a proud Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. As he succumbed to dementia, he continued to enjoy opera and sometimes expressed himself in French.’

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Northern History 55:1 (2018), contains an obituary by Simon J D Green FSA of Gordon Forster FSA, who died in July last year.

Forster was associated with the School of History at the University of Leeds for more than 65 years, says Green – as a graduate student, attached to Tawney’s seminar in the Institute for Historical Research, then as a Research Fellow in Sheffield, from his admission to read for what was then the ordinary BA degree, to his eventual election as Chairman of the School. ‘Many might now consider that something akin to a life sentence,’ says Green, but ‘Gordon was both sufficiently fortunate in his timing, and properly grateful by disposition, to regard it as a privilege. He had a vocation for scholarship and teaching. But he did not presume that the world owed him a living. An academic career then afforded opportunities that would not otherwise have come his way. He resolved to make the best of them. By and large, he succeeded.’
 
Nobody noticed, adds Green, when ‘Gordon formally retired from his post at the School in 1993. He retained sole responsibility for Northern History until 1997, and was jointly in charge of the journal until the issue but last. He continued to teach in the School’s several MA programmes and to supervise postgraduate students for years – actually decades – afterwards. These services he furnished unpaid.’
 
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Philip Warren has written in the Guardian (23 April) about his father, John Warren FSA, who died in January.
 
John ‘relished the challenge of bringing both a practical architect’s eye to understanding and decoding important buildings,’ says Philip, ‘and a historical literacy to their conservation.’
 
‘He fought the destruction of historic buildings in the wholesale redevelopments that were common in Britain in the 1960s and 70s, and was responsible for saving many of them. He was involved in the creation of the Weald and Downland Living Museum of historic buildings and the Amberley Museum of industrial history in West Sussex, and carried out building conversions for the Landmark Trust.
 
‘His interests included industrial history, growing fruit and the contemplative purposefulness of the Quakers. A skilled artist, he had work displayed at several Royal Academy summer exhibitions.’

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Reading my piece about Vera Evison FSA, who died in March aged 100, Julian Munby FSA was ‘amused to be reminded of a fine archaeological vendetta!’:
 
'The report on the supposedly controversial views of the late Vera Evison and the review comments by Sonia Chadwick Hawkes FSA on her “very curious state of mind” take me back to the Oxford lecture room in the 1960s. By some chance as an errant Oxford schoolboy I managed to hear not only the Dark Age history lectures by our late President Nowell Myres FSA, but also a complete series by Sonia Hawkes on Dark Age archaeology (this was an achievement, as famously these later became somewhat intermittent). A recurrent (indeed almost obsessive) theme of these lectures was the “curious state of mind” of Vera Evison, puzzling to the uninitiated, but of course it rather led one to the speculation that the reverse might equally be the case.'
 
Lynne Keys FSA reports that Evison ‘had left instructions concerning her funeral service (beautiful), and was accompanied in death by a dark blue glass beaker (which I would have given my eye teeth to have had a closer look at) mounted on her woven casket; she was despatched to her cremation to the tune of Wagner's Magic Fire Music from Die Walküre. What more fitting farewell for one with her life story and areas of archaeological interest?’
 
Valerie Cooper (Evison’s long-time research assistant) later told Keys that the glass beaker had to be removed before cremation, ‘owing to health and safety rules prohibiting glass (probably originally intended to deal with closed bottles of alcohol which would explode during cremation). Valerie says the beaker was made either by Vera or her older sister, Hilda, who was keen on making glass objects and from/with whom Vera learnt so much by practical experimentation. The beaker is now back at Vera's old home.’

• Hawkes’ view that Evison suffered from ‘Frankophilia’ is taken up below in The Wisdom of Fellows.