Love's Obsession (6 page)

Younger generations have sometimes blamed him for sinning against their own standards, forgetful that the immense stretch of his working life extended long after his period of intellectual receptiveness had passed. We might as well blame Xerxes for not deploying torpedo-boats at Salamis.
20

For part of Petrie's fourth season at ‘Ajjul, from November 1933 to April 1934, Jim and Eleanor worked on his dig. It cannot have been a happy visit. Petrie's diaries make it clear that, although the couple were on site for forty-four days, for almost a quarter of that time wet weather made work impossible, and in any case both Petrie and his wife Hilda were sick for much of the month. A terse note on 13 January 1934 simply records, emphatically, ‘Stewarts both left'.
21

Jim made detailed notes of the work at 'Ajjul and the experience gave him the opportunity to boast of having worked with one of the great men of archaeology. Later he would claim that Lady Petrie had hoped he would return to the site to re-investigate it,
22
but there is no way to know whether this is true, and correspondence between Sir Flinders and Lady Petrie makes no mention of Jim. Many years later Jim admitted that Petrie ‘poured scorn' on him and was a harsh teacher and critic. But in time he was grateful for this training and acknowledged that it was Petrie who impressed on him the need for a broad understanding of the Near East by encouraging him to study not just the prehistoric past, but Crusader, Byzantine and Islamic history. Jim maintained that Petrie was one of those with an ‘intuitive grasp' of the past. ‘In archaeology, as in any human subject,' Jim said, ‘there are facts that one can master by instinct, but that are not at the time capable of proof. And this instinct can only be acquired by wide knowledge'.
23
'Ajjul was to be important in Jim's archaeological development and he always claimed that his later work on Cyprus was aimed at solving chronological problems first encountered there.

Jim and Eleanor were engaged in April 1934, two months before Jim's final exam results were published in
The Times
. In Jim's class of twenty students completing Section A of the Archaeological and Anthropological Tripos, only Glyn Daniel was awarded first class Honours and Jim always claimed that he would have done better had he not spent so much time at the weekends courting Eleanor. Jim's father possibly met Eleanor around this time because he certainly travelled to England late in 1933.
24
Jim and Eleanor married on 1 July 1935 and lived in a house they both loved, Park Cottage, in Somerset.
25

In 1935 and 1936 Jim received the Cambridge University's Wilkins fellowship
26
to support continued archaeological work or, as the Kings ‘old boy' reported, he went abroad ‘to Palestine or somewhere in the neighbourhood'.
27
It was on this trip that he encountered the young, genial Alfred Westholm of the Swedish Cyprus Expedition and made his first recorded visit to Cyprus. This visit set in train all that followed.

Before taking up the fellowship, and a month after their wedding, Jim and Eleanor sailed for Australia. This was Eleanor's first trip to Australia and no doubt she was keen to meet her husband's family, but according to Jim the visit was not a success. Jim's father had remarried and Jim complained about the ‘female avariciousness' of his step-mother Hope who, he believed, had ‘annexed' his mother's china and silver. He and Eleanor were ‘hard at it restoring lost prestige etc.' Their (or was it only his?) problems made them both more determined to ‘stay as archaeologists'.
28
Jim reported to his Cambridge lecturer Alan Wace that they had both decided they could not ‘under any circumstances' live in Australia, which at least ‘clears the field'.
29
On the other hand they used the visit to collect household things for England and also discovered that Australia was an excellent place to buy camping gear, acquiring equipment in preparation for fieldwork. At the same time they investigated Leica camera gear so they could experiment with ‘photomerography' as a way of distinguishing types of pottery, fabric and design. They began to prepare what they grandly called a ‘Corpus Vasorum' for their reference. Simply put, this was a ‘scrapbook' of photographs of objects taken from existing publications to use later as a reference in the field.

In the 1930s it was possible to imagine that the whole of the past could be understood. Few people truly appreciated the depth of antiquity or its complexity; fewer still recognised how much would increasingly be discovered through scientific methods as yet unknown. The 1930s was the age of the ‘corpus', enormous catalogues of museum material collated and categorised. It seemed only reasonable to Jim and Eleanor that a similar body of work could collate Near Eastern material.

In Australia Jim spent time trying to raise funds for future excavations, admitting to Wace that he had to ‘shelter a lot behind Sir Flinders Petrie and the British School in Egypt … His name here is very nearly magical'.
30
It is probably on this visit that he first made contact with Walter Beasley, a Melbourne businessman, devout Christian and owner of Young's Transport. With luck, Jim might tap into this financial resource, writing his first published paper on three Cypriot pots in Beasley's collection of Biblical antiquities.
31
Besides the Wilkins Fellowship, Jim was prepared to use the couple's wedding money on excavations if necessary.

Full of plans, they boarded the SS
Maloja
late in 1935 bound for the Near East. ‘The family still considers I am insane but the obstacles have been cleared away.
'
32
They would travel to Turkey, where they were to join excavations directed by the archaeologist Winifred Lamb. Eleanor's experience made her the perfect excavation cook.
33
Noel Wheeler, who they had met at 'Ajjul, invited them to join him on Cyprus, where he was digging for the Cyprus Museum. Although they knew nothing of the place, Jim speculated: ‘I suppose Cyprus is a Greek land, because it seems to me, heretically I suppose, that several Asia Minor problems can be understood by Cypriot studies.' En route they planned to visit Jerusalem, Damascus, Istanbul, Ankara, Troy and Pergamum. Jim left with ‘some regrets for my old home but keen anticipation for our wanderings'.
34

By November Jim and Eleanor were in Jerusalem. They met up with Sir Flinders Petrie, who took them to a meeting of the Palestine Oriental Society, where discussions concerned ‘some wretched Biblical site' but ‘the German nearly made one weep—and Père Abel's French was inaudible'.
35
They were charmed by the German archaeologist Kurt Bittel, met friends of the American Hetty Goldman and planned site visits with the biblical archaeologist William Albright, but these were cancelled because of bad weather. Eleanor was developing into an excellent draughtswoman and photographer and Jim spent time visiting museums investigating Luristan daggers. Both scoured the markets for souvenirs as all young tourists do—they bought embroideries and an old Armenian chest.
36

At the end of the month they sailed for Cyprus, where Noel Wheeler met them and became their host and guide. They were enchanted with the island and its people and antiquities. Not only did Jim come to love the island's landscapes but he believed they taught him more about the effects of erosion and deposition than anything he had encountered in print. Looking at the mad shapes of the Pentadactylos, those five fingers of the Kyrenia Range whose stumps leer up at the sky like a madman's curse, he felt he had ‘a much better understanding of the influence of the environment which must had led to such weird pot forms. I feel that if I had been a Cypriot Bronze Age potter I would have made some very extraordinary shapes'.
37
No one who has wondered at the bulging mounds of the Pentadactylos Mountains could disagree.

For some time Jim and Eleanor stayed with the Director of Antiquities, John Hilton, who also lent them his car to explore the island, and through him met the curator at the Cyprus Museum, Porphyrios Dikaios. Dikaios was interested in the earliest periods on Cyprus; Jim moaned that he had ‘Neolithic on the brain'. But Dikaios was helpful, and together they enjoyed debating theories and issues of disagreement—were the Neolithic connections of Cyprus with Anatolia? Was it a true Neolithic or rather Chalcolithic? Dikaios had excavated tombs in an Early Cypriot cemetery complex at Vounous in Northern Cyprus and recently the French archaeologist Claude Schaeffer had worked there as well. Jim puzzled at the pottery from these tombs, such crazy and bizarre shapes. Jim met all the people then working at the museum, recently reorganised and incorporated into a new Department of Antiquities. The assistant curator, Joan du Plat Taylor, had only just returned from two months leave in England during which time she had excavated a Roman forum site in Leicester with Kathleen Kenyon and it is likely the Stewarts met her at the museum. Perhaps they discussed her plans for a new handbook of the collection.

Hilton's appointment as the Director of Antiquities was not to last for much longer. Jim complained to Alan Wace that Rupert Gunnis, then Inspector of Antiquities, had ‘fomented complaints', which had led to Hilton's dismissal and imminent removal. According to local villagers, Gunnis also dealt in antiquities. This was more or less generally known, Jim said, both on the island and abroad amongst archaeologists—the Wellcome Museum in London had bought some of Gunnis's collection and further pieces were sold at Sotheby's in 1933. It was rumoured that Gunnis even instigated the plundering of a tomb by night and got the contents out either by signing his own export permits or by carrying it in his personal baggage, but there was no single incident that could be proved. Jim believed that Sir George Hill, Director of the British Museum, was trying to secure his dismissal for the tomb robbery and thought Porphyrios Dikaios at the Cyprus Museum could supply relevant information. Jim wrote to Wace in some length ‘because it seems to me a very serious matter'.
38

Jim's concern is telling. A collector himself, wherever he travelled Jim hunted down coins and sat in cafes waiting expectantly for villagers to offer objects for sale. He had no qualms about this and most of what was offered he purchased legally. Most authorities granted export licences for antiquities bought from reputable dealers, although growing nationalist voices raised objections and changes would later come. Collectors feared these increasing restrictions, but the issue is complex. Everyone collected; being a serious archaeologist was irrelevant. During this period Jim collected sherds and bought pots for Lewis Clark at the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Jim wrote regularly to Alan Wace describing the material he was sending and there is no suggestion of impropriety. Commercial dealing in antiquities by an Inspector of Antiquities was another matter, however, and Jim was scandalised.

After Cyprus the Stewarts sailed for Greece but found Athens a disappointment and Jim thought the National Museum ‘a horrible mess'. They celebrated Christmas at the British School, enjoyed meeting Peter Megaw, who was about to take up a position in Cyprus, but found few other kindred spirits and in any case ‘Jim had a cold'. Greece suffered, he decided, by comparison with Cyprus.
39
In January 1936 Jim and Eleanor finally arrived in Istanbul to prepare for the archaeological research the Wilkins Fellowship was to sponsor.

Archaeology evokes mystery and romance. Eager young students dig into the earth with fine tools and fierce concentration, sifting through layer upon layer of dirt and mudbrick, searching for pottery sherds and listening for the dull clunk of metal. People squat in the dirt, their hair, clothes and heavy boots caked with mud or clay. Others stand at the sieves picking through small stones and grass for slivers of bone, while the director bends down with a tape measure to talk intently with a workman.

The reality rarely meets expectations. Mostly, it is boring and routine and not all of it involves excavation. The Stewarts spent six months in Turkey but only a small proportion of this time involved excavation. For the remainder of the time, Jim and Eleanor visited museums and villages and walked or drove through the countryside with a notebook and camera. They drew and photographed objects in museums, all the while building a visual reference for use when they visited other museums, or when excavating. Their collection of photos and drawings, begun earlier in Australia, was little more than a personal field guide, but to Jim it was the beginning of something more, a ‘corpus', a body of work. A collector at heart, Jim needed to hold things in his hands, to feel the shape and texture of objects, to own them. It was how he understood things.

Collecting is a way of creating order, of grouping things, of putting them in place. It was then fashionable for children to collect objects, and boys and girls the world over filled albums with stamps or coins from countries they had scarcely heard of—Liechtenstein, Monaco, Bechuanaland. Most children lose interest quickly. Others become collectors. They sort and arrange, fiddle with cellophane packets and catalogue. But the dilemma—always—is how to arrange these stamps or coins. Should it be by date or colour, by country or size? How many different categories are there? Which is best? With fifty stamps it makes sense to sort one way, but what about when you have five hundred or five thousand? Maybe if you could collect all the stamps or coins you would know how best to arrange them, what categories to use. You would find the solution. This idea—of collating everything in order to understand it—was to remain with Jim. He needed the whole before he could understand the component parts. He pursued the idea and in turn it ensnared him.

In the bazaars of Istanbul the Stewarts searched for antiquities and antiques. Jim joked that the dealers must read
The Times
40
because they knew exactly what the Wilkins Fellowship was worth and adjusted their prices accordingly. In nearby villages they visited popular cafes where locals brought objects to them. They bought some but were careful not to be fooled by forgeries, although Jim was equally fascinated by the skills of ancient metalworkers and modern forgers. Most of all Jim and Eleanor wanted information about where the objects came from, a time-honoured method of ‘finding' sites. Although some villagers were forthcoming, others were not. A site with saleable objects was valuable, a bank to be drawn from, and there was little incentive to give it away. Jim had to win their trust.