Sharon Cather FSA, art historian and wall-painting conservator, died in June. An appreciation appears in Fellows Remembered below.
 
The section also contains further notices on the late Bernard Hamilton FSA, the late John M Lewis FSA and the late Claire Donovan FSA.

*
 
Congratulations to 10 new Fellows who were elected on 27 June:

Katherine Barker, a Research Fellow with a distinguished career as an historical geographer focusing on the early medieval West Country.
 
Adrian Corder-Birch, Parish Council Clerk, author of studies of Essex local history and industrial archaeology, former President of the Essex Society for Archaeology and History.
 
Susan Greaney, archaeologist and properties historian who is researching Neolithic monument complexes in Britain and Ireland. She is one of ten UK researchers selected as 2019 New Generation Thinkers by BBC Arts and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
 
Francis Green, archaeologist working in the New Forest National Park, and archaeobotanist with interest in Roman and medieval urban sites.
 
Christopher Jones, Associate Professor of History and currently President of the Australian and New Zealand Association of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, with many publications on the history of medieval political thought.
 
Peter Kurrild-Klitgaard, Professor of Political Science who is an authority on heraldry and military orders on which he has published extensively.
 
James Monroe, archaeologist and Associate Professor of Anthropology who researches the historical intersections of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, anthropologies of space and landscape, and archaeologies of the state.
 
Eric Nye, Professor of English and specialist in the Romantic period, and collector of rare books, which he binds and restores. 
 
Greg Sullivan, art historian and curator specialising in British sculpture from the late 17th to the mid-19th centuries, and online editor of the Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain.
 
Andrew Woods, museum curator who has published widely on early medieval coinage and was 2017 winner of the Blunt Prize for a significant contribution to the study and interpretation of numismatics.
 
For details see Ballot Results. Further details can be seen in the Ballot Archive (Fellows only).
 
As always, I'm particularly keen to hear about the activities of new Fellows. Please let me know what you’re up by emailing Salon at saloneditor@sal.org.uk.

*

Oliver Urquhart Irvine MVO FSA was made a Member of the Royal Victorian Order on 14 December 2014 by the Queen in private audience at Windsor Castle. He recently became Director of Library and Learning Services at SOAS University of London, having been the Royal Librarian for five years.
 
Our Fellow for the planet, Sir David Attenborough FSA, was serenaded by singing whales as he walked onto the Pyramid stage at the Glastonbury Festival in front of a vast, cheering crowd on 30 June (‘The biggest cheer of the afternoon,' tweeted @BBCEarth). He thanked the event for ‘going plastic-free’ – the sale of single-use plastics had been banned on the site. Attenborough is ‘just a legend,’ Ian Simmons told the Guardian. ‘He’s looking out for the people of the future,’ said Dean Cousins. Photo David Levene/The Guardian.
 


Jack Hanbury-Tenison FSA writes to say that Clytha Park, a large 18th–19th century garden around a lake with wide lawns and specimen trees originally laid out by John Davenport, will be opening to the public on 14 July through the National Garden Scheme. ‘This year’, says Hanbury-Tenison, ‘will be a Bastille Day special, and the theme will be tricouleurs and sans-culottes, with a touch of the gilets jaunes. Even the flowers will be red, white and blue.’ The Clytha gardens are known for their historic lakeside setting and the walled garden, set in spectacular countryside on the old A40 between Raglan and Abergavenny. The open day will feature stalls and displays, food and drink, and a chance to relax in the shade of Giant Redwoods. Details online.
 
Claire Breay FSA has won the Longman-History Today Trustees' Award 2019, for the promotion of history (seen in the photo with Paul Lay, History Today Editor). Among many other achievements, says the citation, Breay was lead curator of the British Library's exhibition Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War. The exhibition, which closed in February, was a popular and critical success, awarded five stars by the Guardian (‘discover a culture of barbaric splendour and fierce vision’) and the Evening Standard (‘by some distance, the most significant exhibition in London’), and described as ‘glorious’ by Time Out.
 
Susan Oosthuizen FSA has written The Emergence of the English, an essay in four chapters (and many footnotes) that challenges the traditional idea that English origins lie in fifth- and sixth-century immigration from north-west Europe. Focusing on the agricultural landscape, she argues that the nascent English should rather be sought among late Romano-British communities, evolving, adapting, and innovating in a post-imperial context. Oosthuizen also explores themes of universal interest, says the blurb – ‘the role of immigration in cultural transformation; the importance of the landscape as a mnemonic for cultural change; and the utility of a common property rights approach as an analytical tool.’

Cambridge University is promoting two of its archaeologists. Chris Evans FSA, Executive Director of the Cambridge Archaeological Unit which he co-founded in 1990, will become Director of Research. Evans (left) has a long career in archaeology, publishing several major British excavation and research monographs as well as directing fieldwork projects in Nepal, China and Cape Verde. The British Academy recognised his work on key development-led archaeological sites by making him a Fellow in 2018. Hratch Papazian, the Herbert Thompson Lecturer in Ancient Egyptian Language at the Department of Archaeology, is to become a Senior Lecturer. His research focuses on ancient Egyptian social and economic history, especially earlier periods (3100–2200 B.C), though he teaches modules on all stages and scripts of the ancient language across four millennia. Both appointments at the Department of Archaeology take place on 1 October 2019.

The Heritage Alliance, of which the Society is a member, has published what it describes as five heritage fiscal and funding priorities for 2019. ‘Our heritage is our future,’ says the Alliance in Backing the Bedrock. ‘It has never been more important to our nation’s identity. It is our great national asset and an integral part of “Brand Britain”. It breathes life into our towns, cities and countryside, creating places that people want to live and invest in, and underpins the success of other sectors from construction to the creative industries. It tells our nation’s stories, supporting social cohesion, pride in place, learning and identity. Its positive effects on health save the NHS money and improve quality of life. England’s heritage industry is valuable, it directly generates at least £13.1 billion in gross value added (GVA) and indirectly generates 2% of national GVA (£29 billion) – more than the agriculture and aerospace sectors combined. Heritage jobs account for 1% of total national employment. Heritage tourists spend £16.9bn each year at our sites.’ The manifesto can be read online.

In the last Salon I reported how the Society co-hosted a talk by Chris Skidmore MP FSA, in which he spoke powerfully on the importance of the humanities in modern society. Alice Thomson addressed the same subject in the Times, where she is an editor and columnist, on 26 June. Maths, she writes, is now ‘by far the most popular subject’ at A Level: ‘University candidates and their parents often feel they should do maths A Levels even if they want to study the arts, but STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) students don’t feel as obliged to appear well-rounded… The problem is’, she adds, ‘that English, history, philosophy, fine art and languages are now coming to be seen as second-rate degrees… But an arts training can lead to stimulating, rewarding, lateral-thinking careers.’ The next day the paper published several supportive letters, among them one from Sir David Cannadine FSA (left). ‘Research from the British Academy’, he wrote as the BA’s Director, supports Thomson’s case: ‘graduates from [the arts, humanities and social sciences] are highly employable and able to weather the changes of a fluctuating job market. They move between sectors and roles with ease and have the flexible, adaptable skills that employers prize.’
 
Chris Skidmore MP FSA, meanwhile, was another Fellow in the public eye to highlight the unprecedented and destructive impact of people on the natural world. Working through his red box, he came across ‘a document called Climate Change Act (2050 target amendment) Order 2019. While it might sound dry,’ he wrote in the Times (28 June), ‘this is one of the most important slips of paper to ever pass through the Whitehall churn.’ The Act commits the UK to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050. ‘Signing that seemingly insignificant piece of paper’, he added, ‘made us the first major economy to legislate for … ending our contribution to global warming entirely. As a Tudor historian by trade with a few books under my belt, I can safely say it’s the most satisfying pen stroke of my career.’
 
Benjamin Gearey, Suzi Richer, Seren Griffiths FSA and Michelle Farrell FSA have edited a special issue of Internet Archaeology, featuring presentations given at a Theoretical Archaeology Group Conference in Bradford in 2015. In his introduction, Gearey notes how contributors ‘question assumptions about why environmental archaeology is a worthy subject of enquiry and how this value is defined, developed and communicated’. In ‘Pinned Down in the Trenches? Revisiting environmental archaeology,’ Terry O'Connor FSA takes up this theme with gusto. ‘If we cannot satisfactorily define and theorise environmental archaeology,’ he asks, ‘then is it time to quietly pack the term away into a stout box and place it in archaeology's crowded loft alongside invasion hypotheses and diffusionism? We could simply fold environmental archaeology into archaeology and stop making the distinction. Although this is very tempting … I am not persuaded that it would be a good idea given the current theoretical trends in archaeology. To be blunt, some threads within theoretical archaeology are now so far away with the fairies that our firmly grounded, evidence-based discipline needs to keep itself distinct.’ ‘Environmental archaeology is a science,’ he adds, ‘based on hypothesis testing and evidence, not on rhetoric and argument from authority.’ The diagram is from a contribution by Lisa Lodwick FSA.
 
English Heritage is focusing on Stonehenge as a place from which to watch the skies, after a midsummer solstice event on 21 June with an unusually clear and dry sky and a perfect sunrise. An interactive website called Skyscape is designed to allow visitors to see the sky as if viewed live from among the stones, 24 hours a day. Susan Greaney FSA and space scientist Maggie Aderin-Pocock introduce the project with a video shot at the site. ‘The entire monument is aligned around the movements of the sun,’ says Greaney. In Skyscape, a 3D photographic representation of Stonehenge is seen from the site’s centre against a sky that reflects both time of day and weather; it can be watched as live, or historically in hourly steps. Astronomical information such as the paths of the sun or visible planets can be added at the touch of a button. Within ten days the Skyscape site had attracted nearly 100,000 users. Five lectures on themes of astronomy and Stonehenge will take place at the Stonehenge visitor centre between 10 July and 16 October. Aderin-Pocock’s talk and night visit to the stones for 12–17 year-olds is already sold out, but free places are available for lectures by Greaney and Heather Sebire FSA (21 August) and Clive Ruggles FSA (18 September).
 
Mobile steel flood-gates between the Venetian lagoon and the Adriatic Sea, meant to be ready in 2011, are currently scheduled to start operating in 2021. That may be further delayed, suggests Anna Somers Cocks FSA in the Art Newspaper (1 July), by works needed to repair the gates, already suffering severe corrosion, which are estimated to take ten years at a cost of €34m. Dragged out by a ‘huge corruption scandal’, it is now thought that the project needs nearly €300m for completion, and will have consumed a total of €8bn. If the gates are ever done, the running cost as presently estimated will be €80m a year.
 
Kenneth Aitchison FSA is the new Chief Executive Officer of the Federation of Archaeological Managers and Employers (FAME). A founder and director of Landward Research Ltd, Aitchison has been actively involved with UK and European agencies, representing the archaeological profession and commercial archaeological practice. At Landward he has specialised in labour market research. FAME’s Chairman, Tim Malim FSA, said in a statement that ‘I and the board are all excited to harness the experience and contacts that Kenneth brings, so that we can explore fresh opportunities which will help grow our advocacy and member services during the next three years and beyond.’

James Stevens Curl FSA is proposing to bring out a facsimile edition of J C Loudon’s On the Laying Out, Planting, and Managing of Cemeteries; and on the Improvement of Churchyards (1843). Illustrated with 60 engravings, Loudon’s seminal work on cemeteries was originally published on very poor-quality paper, says Curl, and with an extremely small font. The new limited, numbered edition, available by subscription from Curl by no later than 1 September 2019, will be on good paper with an enlarged font, and will include a new introductory essay, a bibliography, a colour portrait of Loudon, a facsimile of Loudon’s Obituary of 1844, a list of subscribers and an index.
 
 Hadrian’s Wall: A Study in Archaeological Exploration and Interpretation, brings to print the Rhind Lectures given by David J Breeze FSA to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland this May. Two chapters focus on the history of research on Hadrian's Wall over the last 200 years, while two explore the changing function and operation of the frontier over its 300-year life. The impact of Rome on life on and around the frontier is the subject of the fifth chapter. The final chapter considers how we study Hadrian's Wall and looks forward to future research. The chapters reflect closely the lectures, the main change being the addition of references.

Historic England has published Illustrating the Past, about archaeological reconstruction artists and their work. It features seven illustrators: Alan Sorrell, Terry Ball, Ivan Lapper, Frank Gardiner, Peter Dunn, Allan T Adams FSA and Judith Dobie. An introductory chapter covers aspects of the history of archaeological reconstruction drawings, including how they have been used to inform archaeologists, sometimes leading to new ideas of site interpretation. ‘All the illustrators worked for English Heritage, its predecessor organisations or Historic England, including myself,’ writes Adams. ‘I wrote the chapter that describes my development and techniques though Judith Dobie wrote most of the rest of the book. Judith still works for Historic England, and is well known in archaeological circles having worked in the field for many years. I began my career in Winchester, then moved to the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England. In 2000 RCHME merged with English Heritage and then became Historic England. I “retired" in 2016 but still occasionally do commissions.’
 
Neil Jackson FSA writes about his two new books, Pierre Koenig: A View from the Archive and Japan and the West: An Architectural Dialogue. ‘These two titles are not as disparate as they might seem,’ he says, ‘for both California, where in Los Angeles Pierre Koenig (1925–2004) worked, and Japan share very similar seismic conditions resulting in the use, in domestic architecture, of lightweight structural frames and consequently open-plan, flexible spaces. The book on Koenig is the result of time first spent as a guest scholar at the Getty Conservation Institute in 2013, and examines his work from the evidence of his extensive archive held at the Getty Research Institute. Famous in the 1960s for his two steel-framed Case Study Houses, Koenig lived long enough, as Time magazine said, to be “cool twice”, following the resurgence of interest in mid-century architecture.'

'One building,'continues Jackson, 'Koenig's Johnson/Riebe House in Carmel Valley, California (1961), is also discussed in Japan and the West, a book which describes how Meiji Japan first seized upon Western architecture as a way towards modernisation and how Western architects soon discovered in traditional Japanese architecture something profound and meaningful, whether that be the purity of the design or the notion of ma, the pause or space between. The book concludes that while neither architecture, Japanese nor Western, could have developed as it did without the other, the architecture of the West owes more to Japan, than that of Japan does to the West.’
 

Sharon Cather FSA died on 6 June aged 71. She was elected a Fellow of the Society in March 1993. Paul Williamson FSA, Keeper Emeritus and Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Victoria and Albert Museum, has kindly offered this obituary of a pioneering art historian and specialist in the conservation of wall paintings:
 
‘Very few scholars can claim to have fundamentally changed the approach to a subject, both theoretically and practically. This is precisely what David Park FSA and Sharon Cather FSA did, however, when they persuaded the Director of the Courtauld Institute of Art of the University of London, Professor Peter Lasko FSA, to agree to the setting up of a new postgraduate course on the conservation of wall paintings in 1985. The real work started from there, with the need to raise funds for the course's survival, and with the establishment of a close and mutually advantageous relationship with the Getty Conservation Institute, the first partnership of its kind. More than 30 years later, the Courtauld's course is a world leader, driving the research agenda and training the best conservators and academics for the future. Without Sharon Cather none of this would have happened.
 
‘There was little in Cather's background to suggest that she would devote most of her working life to the conservation of wall paintings, much less those of the English Middle Ages and in places very much further afield. She was born in Berkeley, California in 1947, and went on to graduate in art history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She was to spend a further ten years in the offices of the art department there, before going to Princeton University for her MA and starting work on a doctorate on the Italian Renaissance architect Sebastiano Serlio, under Professor John Shearman. She was also at the American Academy in Rome in 1981–82, and helped Professor Irving Lavin, the pre-eminent authority on Bernini, with an exhibition on the artist's drawings.
 
‘In 1982 she came over to Cambridge and lectured in the art history department of the University. It was here she met David Park, who was engaged in marshalling the material for a comprehensive survey of the wall paintings of Great Britain, and together they formed a dynamic double act. Park was the affable, witty and apparently laid-back – but actually remarkably driven and hard-working – Englishman, Cather the extremely efficient, tech-savvy, straight-talking and tough American.
 
‘Park and Cather realised that the conservation and restoration (the latter a dirty word in some circles) of wall paintings was at that time a hit and miss affair, with little scientific rigour, an over-emphasis on repair rather than preventive conservation, and with inadequate opportunities for professional training of those who wanted to enter the field. So, with a chutzpah perhaps thankfully blind to the manifold challenges ahead, they decided single-handedly (but with the wise and prescient support of the Courtauld Institute) to remedy the situation. Within an astonishingly short period they developed and built the course into one that attracted students worldwide and that transformed the accepted norm of conservation strategy for wall paintings. “Treat the causes rather than the symptoms of decay” and “understand how to do as little as possible” became their catchwords.
 
‘The practical conservation was at first concentrated on English wall paintings, but gradually – through access to funding partnerships and pragmatic opportunities, and because the course was attracting international praise – the department was invited to advise and work on an ever-increasing roster of work abroad. Eventually this was to take in paintings in Cyprus, Jordan, Malta, Georgia, China, India, Bhutan and elsewhere, and with this spread came a surge in applications by students from overseas – a good thing both for the university and the outreach of the course. Alumni now occupy positions of influence in many countries.
 
‘Cather was at the heart of the course – teaching, planning the curriculum, supervising dissertations, selecting staff, raising money, and negotiating and organising the conservation campaigns in the many different places that work was carried out. She drove herself relentlessly, and the cliché that “her work was her life” would be hard to deny; it was common knowledge that throughout her career she could often be contacted in the office well into the night. Holidays were rarely taken, but she knew how to relax: a brilliant cook, with a repertoire based firmly on her time in Italy, she and Park were stimulating and highly amusing hosts, with friends and close colleagues from numerous countries. She loved works of art of all sorts, and enjoyed expeditions to antique shops and Portobello Road market in the hunt for treasures. Her homes, especially that in Greenwich (where she lived for longest), were always impeccably and tastefully appointed, and shared by an indulged cat or two.
 
‘Fearlessly outspoken, she rarely tempered her views and opinions out of false politeness, and one or two of those who did not know her well wandered into an unexpected verbal broadside. But even these unfortunates would have admired her sharp intelligence; and it was a refusal to accept received wisdom that served her so well in her professional life and earned her the respect of her peers. She was loved by her students, who learned quickly that they had to perform to the high standards she set, but were then supported wholeheartedly. Many became close colleagues and friends as they progressed through their own careers.
 
‘In addition to teaching, Cather published widely, with numerous co-written scholarly scientific articles in specialist journals, and she edited several volumes of conference transactions. Her immense contribution to the conservation and art-historical worlds was recognised by her Fellowships of the American Academy in Rome (1982) and the International Institute for Conservation (1995, later Member of Council and Vice-President) as well as her Fellowship of this Society, as a guest scholar at the Getty Conservation Institute in 2000–01, and by invitations to advise on the running of allied courses abroad.
 
‘The international status of the Courtauld course was underlined by foreign plaudits, including the People's Republic of China Friendship Award in 2014 (China's highest award for foreign experts) in recognition of her work with the Dunhuang Academy on the murals of the Mogao caves; and recently Cather was the project director and taught regularly on the Leon Levy Foundation Centre for Conservation Studies at Nagaur in Rajasthan. She was appointed as the first Shelby White and Leon Levy Professor of Conservation Studies at The Courtauld in 2015, and in 2017 her career was crowned by the award of the Plowden Medal by the Royal Warrant Holders Association for “an outstanding contribution to the conservation profession”.
 
‘Retirement from the Courtauld for both Cather and Park came in 2018, and they headed north for a different life away from the politics of university life. Buying a splendid wing of a grand house in Kirklees in Yorkshire, they had just started planning its improvement when Cather suddenly fell ill in December, never to recover. This was just before a conference held at the University of York in honour of David Park, where the assembled company's great affection for her was self-evident. Had she been there, no doubt at least some of the papers would have been met with her characteristic friendly but firm response to anything she disagreed with: “Really?”’
 
The photo shows Sharon Cather monitoring the condition of the wall paintings in St Gabriel's Chapel, Canterbury Cathedral, in 1990 (the Courtauld Institute).

*
 
Brendan O'Connor FSA writes about Bernard Hamilton FSA, who died in May:
 
‘I was a student at Nottingham University in the early 1970s and would like to pay tribute to Bernard Hamilton as a teacher. His first-year undergraduate lectures on the Byzantine Empire and the Arabs were a revelation at the time and would be even more apposite now. His more rigorous third-year special subject, the Albigensian Crusade, provided excellent preparation for postgraduate research, albeit in archaeology. Nearly 50 years later I can increasingly appreciate just how valuable all this was.’
 
*

Blaise Vyner FSA has kindly written an obituary of John M Lewis FSA, who died on 4 June aged 92. He was Assistant Keeper of Medieval and Later Antiquities at the National Museum and Galleries of Wales, Cardiff:
 
‘John Masters Lewis was brought up in Mountain Ash, a Glamorgan coal-mining community, where his father was a teacher. He went up to Balliol College, Oxford, where he read English, afterwards embarking on the Education Diploma, although with diminishing enthusiasm, as he explains in his evocative memoirs. He joined the Oxford University Archaeology Society, where he was involved in a field project to trace the course of a potentially Saxon earthwork, Ave’s Ditch. The experience encouraged him to sign up to a summer excavation at Verulamium.
 
‘He had begun teaching Latin, along with some English, at Llandaff Cathedral School, but he was becoming hooked on archaeology and signed up to an external degree at the University of London, eventually opting to take a diploma in European Prehistoric Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology (now UCL). He described his time at the Institute (1952–54) as “the happiest days of his life”.
 
‘His account of Sir Mortimer Wheeler FSA’s Verulamium excavation, and his second dig, with Hubert Savory FSA at Pipton, a Breconshire chambered cairn, and others afterwards, are intensely evocative of British field archaeology in the 1950s. This is all recorded in his highly entertaining, but still largely unpublished, reminiscences, all well observed and gently amusing. The recent war loomed large in his memories of the thread-bare Llandaff Cathedral School and of excavations peopled with diggers who, unlike him, had military experience and brought, depending on character, either a disciplined or a light-hearted approach to their work – John favoured the latter. Many of the archaeological assistants John encountered were to become well known in the 1960s and 70s.
 
‘He finished at the Institute of Archaeology in 1954 and was recruited by John Hurst FSA into the Ministry of Works as an “occasional” supervisor on emergency archaeological excavations. It was while he was thus engaged – at a deserted medieval village near Kettering – that he met his future wife, Clemency, who had been a previous incumbent of his “digs”. John’s newly married status necessitated a more permanent post, and he acquired one at Wakefield Museum, but it proved not to be a successful move and after three months he resigned. Fortunately, soon afterwards he was appointed to a temporary post in the Ministry of Works as an Assistant Inspector of Ancient Monuments, based in London, and assigned to its Welsh section, where, in his words, “it was considered that at least he would be able to pronounce the place-names”.
 
‘His line-manager was Oswin Craster, newly elevated Inspector for Wales. In 1958 the section was outstationed to Cardiff, initially to offices in Gabalfa, afterwards to Cathedral Road. John had occasionally to deal with castles (he discovered a Roman fort at Caerphilly) and other medieval monuments, but his principal interest was in prehistory, in particular standing stones, of which he excavated at least five. John liked to recall Oswin Craster’s dictum that the only qualifications essential for an Assistant Inspector of Monuments were a high crotch and a driving licence. John lacked the first of these, and on the occasion of being chased by a guard dog on the site of a Milford Haven Palmerstonian fort, Oswin had to lift him bodily over a barbed-wire fence.
 
‘As his post at the Ministry of Works remained temporary, advancing years, a growing family and an increasing unwillingness to undertake the extended travelling his job entailed, persuaded him to apply for the post of Assistant Keeper of the Post-Roman Collections at the National Museum of Wales, to which he acceded in 1965. At the Museum John’s colleagues were Hubert Savory FSA (prehistory) and George Boon FSA (Roman antiquities), both considerable scholars. Although not without their eccentricities, they were amenable colleagues and John was able, largely, to pursue his own interests.
 
‘In the museum environment John will be remembered for his re-casting of the existing exhibition of rather grey and dusty Early Christian monuments into a coherent, colourful and interesting display which lasted 20 years. He was also responsible for the new Medieval Gallery of the late 1970s, while the White Monks in Wales was a memorable temporary exhibition. In these John was aided and encouraged by George Evans, the ever-enthusiastic and resourceful Departmental Assistant.
 
‘At the Ministry he had embarked on the excavation of a standing stone and associated features at Rhos y Clegyrn, St Nicholas, Pembrokeshire, a project which he completed while at the Museum before embarking on the excavation of Loughor Castle, near Llanelli. Here he discovered, to George Boon’s delight, his second Roman fort, but Boon’s desired hat-trick eluded them.
 
‘The Museum encouraged research and publication in the areas of its collections. In John’s case this resulted in a series of illustrated booklets: Welsh Monumental Brasses (1974), Welsh Paving Tiles (1976), Medieval Pottery and Metalware (1977) and a wider study of a country pottery, The Ewenny Potteries (1982). In the mid-1970s, in an initiative not previously contemplated by the Archaeology Department, John worked with younger archaeologists in establishing the Welsh Medieval Pottery Research Group, whose Journal John edited for ten years. John’s friendship, encouragement and wise advice were much appreciated by a wide range of visiting archaeologists, as was the hospitality which he and Clem provided at their house in Howells Crescent, Llandaff.
 
‘Towards retirement John took on some new projects, which he continued to work on for some years – the catalogue of The Medieval Tiles of Wales (1999) was perhaps the project that he enjoyed most; he also completed the revision of sections of Early Christian Monuments of Wales (2007). The report and publication of his Loughor Castle excavations was also finally achieved (1993).
 
‘In archaeology, as in all other areas, John was a modest and self-effacing man. He was keenly interested in music and a proficient pianist. Despite having abandoned teaching, he retained an enduring interest in literature and poetry, being especially fond of Anthony Powell’s Dance series and the poems of Philip Larkin and Douglas Dunn. Together with Clem, he weekly scanned the TLS for likely reading material. Perhaps less well known, John Lewis was an accomplished poet with poems published in The Anglo-Welsh Review and Borderlines, and one selected as the Late Night Poem on Harlech Television.
 
‘John Lewis’s early reminiscences, “Llandaff Cathedral School 1949-52, a View from the Staff Room”, are published in North of the Green Baize Door: Memoirs of a Teacher and Pupil, 1948–53 (Llandaff Society Occasional Paper 15, 2008). He remained typically modest about publishing later reminiscences, and, indeed, much of his poetry, being finally persuaded to issue Maestro at a Valley Festival and Other Poems in 2014.’

The photo is thought to show John Lewis at Loughor Castle in 1973 (Blaise Vyner).

*

Paul Stamper FSA adds this note about Claire Donovan FSA, who died early in June:
 
‘Claire Donovan was, of course, a scholar in her own right and a worthy FSA. But many of us first met her when she married Colin Platt FSA – gaining thereby not only a husband but also the introduction to a host of ex-Platt students who thought the world of him. Many of us became regular guests at Littlempston in Devon, enjoying their legendary hospitality. Her untimely death, so soon after Colin’s in 2015 – she edited a Festschrift, A Fresh Approach, for him in 2014 – is felt by all who knew them.’

Philip de Jersey FSA writes from Guernsey about a memorial to Frederick Corbin Lukis FSA, a Fellow, he says, who is not actually identified as such. ‘His first intended resting place,’ he adds, ‘is about to be reopened to the public after some 50 years of neglect, following restoration by a small group of volunteers (myself included).’
 
*
 
‘There is a vault in the Brothers’ Cemetery, St Peter Port, Guernsey, which bears the name F. C. LUKIS discreetly at the base of the eastern side of the tomb (right). Alongside him to the north is a vault inscribed I. LUKIS, for his father, John, and to the south another for his brother-in-law, Thomas Mansell (later Rear-Admiral Sir Thomas Mansell). As far as I can establish, this triplet of vaults was constructed between about 1815 and 1820, when Frederick (born 1788) was still a young man. By the time of his death, in 1871, the popularity of the Brothers’ Cemetery as a final resting place for the upper echelons of Guernsey society had much diminished; a new cemetery just up the hill at Candie had opened in 1831, and after a slow start it soon received all the local notables, including members of the Lukis family. In about 1853 or 1854 they had built for them a rather splendid grey and polished pink granite confection (top), with a fine view over St Peter Port and out towards Sark, and it was there that Frederick Corbin Lukis was buried (below).
 
‘Lukis’s tomb in the Brothers’ Cemetery did not go completely unused: on 31 December 1848 his youngest son, Ernest William, was interred there, following his death at Marlborough School, aged 15. But we have a note in the Lukis Archive at Guernsey Museum recording that his body was removed to the family tomb in Candie Cemetery in 1854, presumably just after the completion of that vault.
 
‘The Brothers’ Cemetery continued its slow decline through the 19th century: burials became increasingly rare after 1900 and the last recorded interment was in 1951. Almost all of the headstones were destroyed in 1954, and in about 1970 the cemetery was locked up and more or less forgotten. In 2011 the parish authorities put forward a proposal to the local Ecclesiastical Court to clear the site, removing all but one of the 130 or so vaults still surviving. I opposed this proposal, both in my professional capacity and with a personal interest: my great-great-great-grandfather is buried in a vault in the cemetery. The Ecclesiastical Court sided with me and my fellow objectors, and so in 2012 we started to restore the vaults with the aim of making the cemetery safe and accessible to the public once again. After nearly seven years and several thousand hours of work, all of it voluntary, we are delighted that the cemetery will reopen on 1 July. I’ve been writing a blog on our progress, and further information specifically on Frederick Corbin Lukis’s tombs is available in a post on Vault no. 52 and vault no. 53.
 

In the last Salon I included a note about Cardiff University, which will be celebrating a century of archaeology teaching in 2020. I included an email address with which alumni could contact the Archaeology Department in regard to an event in June next year, and for help in tracking down other alumni and former staff. There was a typo in the address, as Catherine Johns FSA experienced: ‘As a member of one of the oldest generations of Cardiff graduates still alive,’ she writes, ‘and more or less compos mentis, I want to keep informed about [next year's centenary]’. The correct address is archaeology100@cardiff.ac.uk. My apologies.
 
*



In the last Salon Mark Samuel FSA asked about an image he’d found online of a Roman carved elephant. Iain Ferris FSA was the first of several Fellows who were quick to point out that the scene was a detail from the front panel of a sarcophagus from Via Salaria in Rome, now displayed in the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, USA. Robert Hannah FSA and Jack Ogden FSA say that the ‘splendid elephant’ can be found on the Walters’ website. ‘The triumphal march of Dionysus’, the description says, ‘(or Bacchus, as he was generally known in Rome) through the lands of India was equated in Roman thought with the triumph of the deceased over death. … Dionysus rides in a chariot pulled by panthers. Preceding him is a procession of his followers and exotic animals, including lions, elephants, and even a giraffe.’

‘It took me about a minute to find the details simply by typing “elephant roman sarcophagus” into Google,’ writes Jon Bayliss FSA, who adds, ‘I presume the sculptor had no knowledge of different sub-species of elephants.’ A similar search trick, I found, can be achieved by copying the image into Google.