Love's Obsession Read online

  Having passed the matriculation examination for entry into the University of Sydney, both Jim and his father assumed he could avoid the Cambridge entrance exam, but the headmaster of The Leys demurred. The whole affair seems ill considered and chaotic. In a letter to Trinity Hall, The Leys headmaster admitted that he had not yet received information from Mr Stewart as to which Tripos his boy would be taking at the university, and the boy himself did not seem to be sure.4 Jim entered Trinity Hall to read history and archaeology, a choice that is likely to have been his, rather than his businessman father’s.

  Now in his first year at Cambridge, at the end of January 1932 Jim’s mother died suddenly in a hotel in Edinburgh. He was nineteen. Florence Stewart’s estate was valued at £8652 and £7000 was set aside for her only son.5 The newspaper notice of his mother’s death makes no mention of other family members and it is not clear whether anyone accompanied her remains to Australia, but she was buried at Wentworth Falls, in the Blue Mountains, in April of that year. Jim was certainly in Australia later for the university holidays.

  Eager for adventure, Jim decided to take a side trip on his return to England, leaving his ship to travel by bus, train, and plane overland from Bombay to Port Said. Well travelled, confident and energetic, Jim had not only the exuberance and confidence of youth, but the services of Thomas Cook to pre-arrange details and his family’s money to prop him up should things go wrong.6

  In Karachi Jim boarded a small bi-plane called the Kannibal for the flight to Persia. There were only two other passengers, an Italian on his way home from Kabul and an army officer on leave. Sitting with large-scale maps on his lap, Jim tracked their progress, scanning the landscape laid out below. Baluchistan looked an awful place, he thought, bare of vegetation. He traced the shadow of the plane across its vast baked sand plain. They landed to collect another passenger and ate lunch soon after take-off:

  Beautiful asparagus, cold chicken and ham, peaches and cream, cheese and a bottle of beer, Imperial Airways do you well. It seems so funny to be having this over the desert wastes of Baluchistan.

  He spent the night at Jask on the shores of the Persian Gulf. With the other passengers, Jim went swimming in the Gulf, naked ‘as an anti shark remedy’ and they slept on the beach ‘under [the] moon with a hot breeze which was very refreshing and with the noise of the uneasy Persian Gulf beating on our ears … It is amazing. Breakfast in India, lunch in Baluchistan, evening swim in Persia’. Jim wrote home, ‘Oh Dad how you would love this trip. I am just lost in wonder and interest’.7

  At the end of the First World War, Britain had assumed control of areas previously part of the defeated Ottoman Empire. In what is now Iraq, British Arabists like Gertrude Bell promoted the region’s history and archaeology. She became the unpaid Director of the Department of Antiquities in Iraq and founded the Baghdad Museum. In the same way that classical texts led scholars to investigate the archaeology of ancient Rome and Athens, biblical writings provided the impetus for much archaeology in the Near East.

  In 1922 Sir Leonard Woolley began excavating the ancient biblical city of Ur, sponsored by the British Museum and the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania.8 A prodigious talent, Woolley originally trained as a theologian and hoped that his excavations would shed light on the Old Testament by providing evidence for the life of Abraham and the Biblical Flood. In 1925 a young Max Mallowan joined his excavation team and, together with hundreds of local labourers, they discovered a royal cemetery containing over two thousand graves. All were excavated and recorded in exemplary fashion. Woolley understood the importance of popularising archaeology and regularly reported the results of his excavations in the Illustrated London News. These reports fed popular fascination with the area and its archaeology. In 1928 Margery Dray had joined the milling crowds at the British Museum to view the exhibit of material from Ur and three years later both Margery and Grannie Mills attended a public lecture given by Woolley himself in Bournemouth.9

  In 1929 Woolley had uncovered evidence of human sacrifice. Bodies of men and women, gorgeously clothed in golden head-dresses, together with fantastic objects of gold and lapis lazuli, alabaster, silver and marble, were discovered lying at the entrance to the king’s tomb beside their slaughtered horses. This was something Jim longed to see.

  Irresistibly close to Ur, Jim insisted on taking a side trip and walked with an Arab guide to the diggings. ‘The surface is covered with shards of pottery and shells’, Jim told his father. ‘We climbed the ziggurat …’ Jim was in his element. He passed Woolley’s bungalow (‘built of bricks from Ur!’) and the guard laid out a rug in the shade and they squatted, Arab-wise, to drink hot sweet tea.

  It was wonderful, this dream tea in the court of a house of bricks from Ur in the desert and nearby was a dog kennel addressed ‘Mrs Leonard Woolley, Basra’ and a case of what was once beer.10

  The train to Baghdad was full of desert sand and Jim advised future travellers to go by river! Thomas Cook was efficient as always, although Jim disputed the cost of the hotel. It was hot and he slept on the rooftop. He was disappointed with the Baghdad Museum and visits to mosques were forbidden. Nonetheless he visited local markets, where he bought a goat’s hair rug, which proved its worth during cold nights in the desert. ‘Please don’t think I used my letter of credit for it, for I paid for it myself’, he assured his father.

  From Baghdad Jim travelled by bus to Damascus and Aleppo, making a detour to visit the ruins at Baalbeck. His overland adventure was complete when he passed through the Alicia Gates in the Taurus Mountains.

  It is more beautiful than the Alps, not so fierce, for everything seems to smile from the little peaked shaped bridges to the very rocks themselves, towering above us … This pass has seen more history than any other.11

  Jim’s love affair with the Near East had begun. He returned to Trinity Hall in Cambridge at the end of his visit to Australia, fired with determination to become an archaeologist. The Near East and archaeology were inextricably linked, and for Jim archaeology was always and only ever associated with exotic places.

  Cambridge studies were hardly onerous. The archaeologist Glyn Daniel, one of Jim’s class of 1932, described the study of archaeology at Cambridge in the early 1930s:12 there was no formal supervision in either archaeology or anthropology and the Disney Professor of Archaeology, E.H. Minns, never expected students to come to his lectures and they obliged. Fortunately, there were other more successful teachers: Miles Burkitt lectured on the Old Stone Age and Toty de Navarro taught the Bronze and Iron Age in Europe, although it stretches credulity to think this was done effectively as he did not believe in using illustrations. By the time Jim graduated, Alan Wace had been elected as Laurence Professor of Classical Archaeology. The Director of the British School at Athens from 1914 until 1923, excavator of Mycenae and Deputy Keeper in the Victorian and Albert Museum, Wace brought a wealth of professional archaeological and museum experience to the department. Jim looked to Wace for support and guidance, and Wace thought highly of him.

  One of the Research Fellows at Glyn Daniel’s college was Louis Leakey, who would work at Olduvai Gorge in East Africa, and revolutionise our understanding of human evolution. Daniels remembers a field trip taken by a group of students to investigate flint mines near Brandon in Suffolk:

  We were being driven back at breakneck speed by my contemporary, James Stewart … Louis, who was sitting in the back with me, leaned forward after a while and said ‘When the inevitable accident occurs, as it will do if you go on driving like this, could you see I am not killed? I have a great deal of important work to do in Africa’. We arrived back in Cambridge safely.13

  Reports on Jim’s university life filtered back via the old boy network to his former school, The Kings School in Sydney. He coxed the Trinity Hall first boat14 but a year later, at ten stone, had become ‘a spectator on the tow-path, having outgrown a coxing weight’.15 He took his degree in Archaeology and Anthropology in 193416 and was said to be leading a halcyo
n existence. The ‘old boy correspondent’ for The Kings School magazine wrote laconically that for Jim, ‘doing research amounts to rising at 10 a.m. and spending week-ends in Devon and places; and as a reward for these labours he wins a scholarship, just recently announced’. Stewart was, it seems, a golden-haired boy.

  Jim’s weekends were spent in Somerset, not Devon. Eleanor Neal’s family owned property in the parish of Kingsdon and Jim was friends with her brother at university.17 Eleanor was a graduate of the Gloucester School of Domestic Science and a few months older than Jim. Sometime in the early 1930s she taught at a school in Birmingham but the details are lost.18 During university holidays Jim had his first opportunity to join an archaeological excavation, and Eleanor went with him.

  In 1933 Sir Flinders Petrie, a towering figure in the history of archaeology, was aged eighty and undertaking what was to be his last excavation, at the ancient mound of Tell el ’Ajjul in present-day Gaza in Palestine. Sir Matthew Flinders Petrie was named for his grandfather, Matthew Flinders, the great seafarer, navigator and cartographer who sailed with William Bligh, and who between 1801 and 1803 was the first person to circumnavigate the continent of Australia. Matthew Flinders did not invent the name ‘Australia’ but was certainly the first to encourage its use for this new continent. Matthew Flinders died in 1814 aged forty, and ten years later his widow and daughter were belatedly voted a pension by the Government of New South Wales. Although the pension arrived too late for his widow, now dead, his daughter announced that she would use the money for the education of her son. This son, Flinders’s grandson, was Matthew Flinders Petrie who went on to become one of the earliest and most prolific of Egyptologists.

  The ’Ajjul excavations, however, were not a success. Petrie’s methods were out of date, he did not understand the stratigraphy of the site, and he had no interest in what other excavators in the same area were doing. Although he published material promptly, most archaeologists now disagree with his chronology for the site and his findings. To condemn all this, however, is churlish. Even the British archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler, someone only too happy to denounce poor excavation methods as ‘digging for potatoes’, recognised the unfairness of judging by the standards of a different age. In 1936 he had visited the Near East and would have written more but ‘The intricacies of the law of libel are beyond my ken … It will suffice to say this: that from the Sinai border to Megiddo and on to Byblos and northern Syria, I encountered such technical standards as had not been tolerated in Great Britain for a quarter of a century’.19 Nonetheless Wheeler acknowledged Petrie’s formidable powers:

  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 fellowship26 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 m
ade 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.