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Arnold Wilson FSA, curator, died in March 2018.
 
Virginia Glenn FSA, medievalist, died in December 2018.
 
Pamela Willetts FSA, librarian, died in January.
 
Thomas Davies FSA, medical historian, died in January. 
 
Bernard Middleton FSA, bookbinder, died in January.
 
Appreciations appear in Fellows Remembered below.

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Lamia al-Gailani, who was not a Fellow, has died in Jordan, where she was attending a training workshop for curators protecting and promoting the cultural heritage of Iraq and Syria. She was aged 80. Based in London, where she studied Mesopotamian cylinder seals for her PhD at UCL, after degrees at Cambridge and Edinburgh, she spent much time in Baghdad since 2003 dealing with the effects of the destructive looting of the National Museum of Iraq. ‘In the early 20th century,’ writes the Economist (7 February), ‘Western archaeologists more or less took what they wanted. That plunder had been stopped by one intrepid Englishwoman, Gertrude Bell FSA, who was her heroine for all kinds of reasons. Of course, she was a colonialist; but she was still devoted to the country, founded the National Museum and set rules for the export of antiquities, a fearless woman in a man’s world.’ Al-Gailani had been a curator at the National Museum from 1960, before returning to the UK in 1970.
 
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Ten new Fellows were elected on 7 February:
 
Jennie Bradbury (endangered archaeology and cultural heritage in the Middle East and North Africa).
 
Jane Eade (European religious history and visual culture).
 
Alice Forward (post-Conquest and Early Modern period archaeology, especially in Wales).
 
Naoise Mac Sweeney (ancient Greece and Anatolia).
 
Ingrid Mainland (archaeozoology).
 
Anne Preston-Jones (archaeology and historic landscape of Cornwall).
 
Andrew Rudd (Romantic period literature and culture).
 
Dale Townshend (architecture, antiquarianism and Gothic literature in the long 18th-century).
 
Katherine Walker (Neolithic stone industries).
 
Katy Whitaker (archaeology, archives and public engagement).
 
For details see Ballot Results. Further details can be seen in the Ballot Archive (Fellows only).
 
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Norman Hammond FSA writes to clear up something that might have been puzzling some Fellows, regarding columns by himself and Huon Mallalieu FSA, and paid-for obituaries, in the Times: ‘Readers of Salon who are also readers of the Times will have noticed the recent absence from the Saturday Register section, following the obituaries, of the alternate-week articles by Huon Mallalieu on antiques, and myself on archaeology. This results from a redesign of the Register, with fewer pages (military history, pet obituaries, and quite a lot of religion have gone as well), and the introduction of paid-for obituaries as Readers’ Lives. Huon is still writing his weekly antiques column for Country Life, and we both continue to contribute to the Times. The paper’s coverage of archaeology on the News pages remains strong, especially in its scientific aspects, under Tom Whipple and Rhys Blakely and in reports from overseas correspondents.’

The Fortification of the Firth of Forth 1880–1977, by Gordon J Barclay FSA and Ron Morris, will be published by the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland early in March. A lavishly-illustrated hardback, it tells the story of the development of the Forth Fortress from 1880. Increasingly complex defences were built between the Isle of May and the Forth Rail Bridge to detect, block and sink enemy warships and submarines. The defences reached their zenith in 1916–17 as preparations were made for the Grand Fleet to move from its northern anchorage at Scapa Flow. The estuary was re-armed in 1939, and the coast defences were wound up in 1956 before being finally abandoned in 1977. Many of the surviving features remain visible in and around the Firth of Forth today.

I noted Robin Derricourt FSA’s Unearthing Childhood: Young Lives in Prehistory last summer. In January it won the Archeology & Ancient History subject category in the 2019 PROSE award from the Association of American Publishers. Londinium: A Biography. Roman London from Its Origins to the Fifth Century, by Richard Hingley FSA, won the Classics category. In last year's Salons I somehow missed this book,  which draws together a huge amount of published information into a readable narrative of urban history; a table of excavation site codes runs to nine pages, footnotes fill nearly 80 and bibliography and index are appropriately exhaustive. As well as such documentation, Hingley identifies themes (his key two being the definition and inhabitation of spaces) and presents new perspectives to stimulate debate.

Amara Thornton FSA has put together a website featuring an excavation diary which could serve as a model for similar records, of which there are many, often containing important information that is otherwise unavailable. The diary, says Thornton, was written primarily by team members George Horsfield FSA (1880–1956), Chief Inspector for the Department of Antiquities in British Mandate Transjordan, and Agnes Conway (1885–1950), an archaeologist, historian and writer; they married in 1932. It is from the first intensive excavations at Petra, an important archaeological site and tourist attraction in Jordan, written in March, April and May 1929, and as well as a transcription the website includes photos, essays and indices. The photo on right shows Agnes Conway Horsfield (UCL Institute of Archaeology).

In Two Huguenot Brothers: Letters of Andrew and James Coltée Ducarel, 1732-1773, essays by Randolph Vigne on the Huguenots in 18th-century France and by Robin Myers FSA on the life and times of the brothers precede a fully annotated transcript of letters from James in France to his brother Andrew in London. They provide a hitherto unknown resource for students of the French Enlightenment, giving a picture of the last years of the ancien regime with its growing anticlericalism and increasing violence. James’s lively, gossipy style, his accounts of hazardous travels through France as he attempts to recover the family patrimony and hunts for books and drawings, and his visits to abbeys and cathedrals for his brother are vivid and engaging. The book is illustrated by colour portraits and miniatures from oil paintings in the possession of the family, a map of old Normandy and facsimile pages of seven of the letters. It will be published in March in a limited edition of 250 copies. For details contact Alice Ford-Smith at a.ford-smith@quaritch.com.

In its 25-year history the Heritage Lottery Fund has awarded over £7.1 billion to more than 40,000 projects run by not-for-profit organisations. About a quarter of UK National Lottery ticket income goes into a grant fund, which awards a variety of ‘good causes’. Last year 40% of this Lottery Fund went to arts and heritage. The HLF has celebrated its 25th anniversary with some rebranding: it is now to be known as the NLHF, or National Lottery Heritage Fund. Ros Kerslake, CEO, tells Loyd Grossman FSA in a video that the change is to highlight the role of Lottery players, who surveys show are not all aware of what happens to their money. So not just a response to a fall in tickets sales, asks Grossman? ‘Absolutely,’ says Kerslake. The Heritage Fund website details other changes.
 
William Gibson FSA has edited The History of Lambeth Degrees: Sources and Studies. The book examines the history of degrees awarded by the Archbishops of Canterbury from 1539 to the present day. ‘Lambeth degrees’ have a history rich in controversy, and the book brings together an important series of primary source material and articles. These include the complete text of Bishop Francis Gastrell’s legal claim in 1717 that Lambeth degrees were not the equivalent to university degrees; a complete list of Lambeth degree recipients 1539–1995; and an examination of Charles Franklyn’s claim that the degrees are really ‘state’ or royal degrees.

Joanna Brück FSA has written Personifying Prehistory: Relational Ontologies in Bronze Age Britain and Ireland, which draws on new and unpublished finds from the many developer-funded excavations carried out over the past 20 years. It is, says the blurb, the first book on its subject area to apply contemporary archaeological theory to this rich dataset. Brück explores the impact of the post-Enlightenment 'othering' of the non-human on our understanding of Bronze Age society, sensing that the familiar conceptual boundary between the active human subject and the passive world of objects was not thus drawn in the Bronze Age; the self was constructed in relational rather than individualistic terms, and aspects of the non-human world such as pots, houses, and mountains were considered animate entities with their own spirit or soul.
 

Arnold Wilson FSA died in March 2018 aged 86. He was elected a Fellow of the Society in March 1979. What follows is based largely on a tribute, written by Sidney Blackmore in 2017, to Wilson as a long-standing Friend of Holburne Museum, Bath, where he had been Chairman of the Trustees.
 
Arnold Wilson grew up in London; his father, Robert Arthur Wilson, was an artist of strikingly vibrant abstract paintings, and his brother Arthur Wilson and his nephew Richard Wilson are also artists. He studied in Cambridge and at the Courtauld Institute, working first at the Museum of London Print Room, then Aylesbury Museum, and later as Keeper at the William Morris Gallery, Walthamstow.
 
He moved to Bristol City Art Gallery as Curator of Paintings, where he rose to Director in 1968. When he retired in 1987, the gallery raised funds to buy Corot’s Fontainebleau, en Forêt in recognition of his service.
 
He wrote A Dictionary of British Marine Painters (1967) and A Dictionary of British Military Painters (1972), and co-authored with Nicholas Thomas an exhibition catalogue, Ceramics in Bristol: Bristol Fine Wares 1670-1970 (1979). He contributed articles to Apollo, The Burlington Magazine, Connoisseur and Country Life. He was also a Fellow of the Museums Association.
 
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Virginia Glenn FSA died on 28 December 2018 aged 77. She was elected a Fellow of the Society in April 2006. Marian Campbell FSA has kindly written this tribute, illustrated with a photo from a family album and thought to have been taken in the 1960s.
 
‘Virginia Glenn died in Edinburgh after a brief illness, just short of her 78th birthday. A medievalist and specialist in the decorative arts, especially goldsmiths’ work and seals, she spent most of her career as a museum curator. Never afraid of challenging authority, Virginia brought sparkle and verve to her professional and private lives. She was gregarious, quick-witted and wonderfully hospitable, a giver and lover of parties.
 
‘Her PhD, entitled The Emergence of the Gothic Style in 13th Century Parisian Goldsmiths' Work, was awarded by the Courtauld in 1991. Her publications included articles on seals, especially Scottish ones, Welsh ceramics (Perlau'r Parlur = Pride of the Parlour: A Selection of Victorian Welsh Pottery, 1984) and importantly, Romanesque & Gothic: Decorative Metalwork and Ivory Carvings in the Museum of Scotland (2003).
 
‘She was Honorary Secretary of the British Archaeological Association (1980–82), and became a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in 1995.
 
‘Virginia Glenn was born on 16 January 1941 in Armagh into an artistic family. Her father collected clocks and antiques, one aunt was a fashion designer, an uncle was a cartoonist and illustrator, and her mother and uncles were involved in amateur dramatics. She went to schools in Armagh and Belfast, and studied art at the Belfast College of Art and in Edinburgh. Here she met Brian Pow, and they married in 1966, although they separated and divorced a few years later. Her first job was as assistant in the Royal Scottish Museum in Edinburgh.
 
‘Going from Edinburgh to London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, Virginia worked on tapestries as an assistant conservator. Realising that she really wanted to be a curator, for which a degree was desirable, from 1969–72 she studied for her BA in Art History at the Courtauld Institute, and in her last term there got a curatorial job in the Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery. Here she helped organise and catalogue the important exhibition of Birmingham silver: Birmingham Gold and Silver 1773–1973: An Exhibition Celebrating the Bicentenary of the Assay Office (28 July–16 September 1973). From Birmingham she went on to the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff, where she helped catalogue the major Burges exhibition, The Strange Genius of William Burges, "Art-architect" (1827–1881): A Catalogue to a Centenary Exhibition (ed J Mordaunt Crook FSA, 1981).
 
‘Finally, to her great pleasure, she returned in 1985 to the National Museums of Scotland, in Edinburgh, a city she loved. A range of activities in the museum included refurbishing the European ceramics and glass galleries, and arranging new European decorative arts galleries, for which she commissioned a huge and ornate silver vase from Malcolm Appleby, goldsmith and gunsmith. Professional advice given included to the Heritage Memorial Fund, over the fitting-out of the Clyde paddle-steamer Waverley. Taking early retirement in 1996 from a Museum she regarded as having become tiresomely bureaucratic, Virginia enjoyed research and its attendant trips all over Europe, and the company of her friends.
 
‘Her generous bequest of her estate to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland will hugely benefit all those who share her interests, now and in the future.’
 
• Intrigued by the photo, I sought help on Twitter for identification of the aircraft. The Department of Anthropology, University of Victoria, Canada, (@UVicAnthro) thinks it’s an ERCO Ercoupe, which has a twin vertical tail and a very similar plexiglass arrangement and angle. The closest among those pictured on Wikipedia seems to be the Forney/Fornaire Aircoupe, of which apparently only 138 were made in the late 1950s (photo above by Ad Meskens).

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Pamela Willetts FSA died on 25 January aged 89. She was elected a Fellow of the Society in January 1990.
 
Pamela Willetts will be best known to most Fellows as author of the Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Society of Antiquaries of London (2000). As Heather Rowland, Head of Library and Collections, puts it, ‘we constantly refer to the manuscripts catalogue and just refer to it simply as “Willetts”, as in “Have you checked in Willetts?”.’ This was the first printed catalogue of the Society's manuscript collections to be published since 1816, and details Fellows’ interests since the Society’s foundation in 1717. ‘Inevitably,’ she wrote, ‘in a collection built up over three centuries and moved from Chancery Lane to Somerset House in 1780 and to Burlington House in 1874, there have been some losses,’ and she listed some ‘more recent acquisitions [which] cannot at present be traced’.
 
As a manuscript specialist at the British Museum and later Deputy Keeper in the Department of Manuscripts, British Library, however, her work focused especially on musical records. Her publications of acquisitions include The Henry Lawes Manuscript (1969), Handlist of Music Manuscripts Acquired 1908–67 (1970), ‘An autograph manuscript of Percy Grainger’ (British Museum Quarterly 1962) and ‘The Ayrton Papers: music in London, 1786–1858’ (1980) and ‘The Elgar sketch-books’ (1985), the last two in the British Library Journal. For exhibitions in the British Museum she prepared Beethoven and England: An Account of Sources in the British Museum (1970) and Ralph Vaughan Williams, 1872–1958: A Centenary Exhibition (1972). She also wrote ‘Patrick Cary and his Italian poems,’ for the British Library Journal (1976).
 
The funeral will be at Great Glen Crematorium near Leicester on 19 February. Her son, Andrew Gordon, is considering arranging a London event in April, if anyone is interested please let Salon know and I will pass it on.



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Thomas Davies FSA died on 26 January aged 87. He was elected a Fellow of the Society in January 2005.
 
‘He was very proud,’ says his wife Rosina Davies, ‘to have been elected a Fellow of the Society. He continued his research into local history and the history of medicine until the very end of his life, and published many articles and books relating to these subjects. His book on the history of medicine in Swansea (his life-time research) is to be published in May this year and will be called To Stand by the Sick Bed.’
 
Tom Davies MD FRCPsych DPM was a consultant psychiatrist with a strong interest in 19th-century Welsh medical history. He grew up in Blaendulais, Neath and worked in Swansea. After retiring he was appointed Honorary Research Fellow in the History of Medicine at the University of Wales College of Medicine, Cardiff. He wrote about the history of medicine, local history and literature, in both Welsh and English.
 
He was also a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists.
 
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Bernard Middleton FSA died on 28 January aged 94. He was a Lifetime Fellow of the Society, having been elected in January 1967.
 
Bernard Middleton was a noted bookbinder and book restorer, who on at least one occasion received the ultimate tribute of being named as adding value to an early Shakespeare folio. When George Bayntun advertised a complete text of The Lamentable Tragedy of Titus Andronicus in 2015, the book (1685) was described as ‘bound by Bernard Middleton in April 2001 (signed and dated in pencil on the rear endleaf) … a very good copy, enhanced by the old style binding by the great Bernard Middleton.’ The volume was priced at £1500.
 
He was commissioned by Mel Kavin to write You Can Judge a Book by its Cover: A Brief Survey of Materials, which eventually expanded to 33 miniature books created by different binders, one of them Middleton himself (below), published in 1994. An illustrated catalogue followed in 1998, with a special edition of six copies signed by all the binders and the production team. One is currently available for $8500.
 
Bernard Middleton was born in London and studied at the Central School of Arts and Crafts (1938–40, now Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design). His father had also been a student there, and in an interview for the British Library’s Crafts Lives he said the school was regarded 'as the sort of Oxbridge of the craft world.’
 
He was apprenticed at the British Museum Bindery in the 1940s, when there were some 80 staff. ‘It was a hard life,’ he told the BL, ‘with an initial salary of £1 a week and only a seven minute tea break each day … it had been five minutes and then two more minutes were negotiated, and then the deputy foreman would bang with a stick on his press to indicate that we should stand up and get on with our work again.’
 
During these years he attended the London College of Printing part time and served in the Royal Navy. He became a Craftsman-Demonstrator at the Royal College of Art (1949–51) and then manager of Zaehnsdorf Ltd, a London bookbinder. He became self employed in 1953.
 
He was a founding member of Designer Bookbinders and served as its President from 1973 to 1975. His bindings have been exhibited extensively and he conducted book restoration workshops in Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the USA and Venezuela as well as in the UK. His publications include A History of English Craft Bookbinding Technique (1963) and The Restoration of Leather Bindings (1972).
 
‘My designs are intended to please the eye,’ he wrote in Recollections (1995), ‘not engage the intellect, principally by the employment of textures, strongly defined shapes and contrasts, and by the play of light on gold, preferably in combination and in a manner which complements the book.’
 
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 1951 and received an MBE in 1986.
 
Photo British Library/Bernard Middleton. Robert Weaver FSA writes that he is deputed to conduct the funeral ceremony, which will be at Mortlake Crematorium on 19 February.