Eric Stuart Wood, B.A., M.I.F.A.

Eric Wood was born in London on 22 November 1912 and educated at St Olave's School, Southwark and King's College, London, where he read French and German. He joined the Civil Service, first in the Inland Revenue then, during the war, in Aircraft Production, and later served as a principal in various departments including the Treasury, Technology, Aviation and, finally, Trade and Industry from which he retired in 1972. It was his wartime sojourn in Harrogate, to which the Department of Aircraft Production had been evacuated, that generated Wood's interest in archaeology. He joined the Harrogate Group of the Yorkshire Archaeological Society, participated in the excavation of the Neolithic and Bronze Age barrow at Green Howe, North Deighton and published The Ancient Buildings of the Harrogate District (1946) - an early indication of the archaeological range which was later to become a feature of his work. Back in London, Wood built on his Yorkshire experience by researching the Neolithic and Bronze Age of north-east England under Professor Gordon Childe at the Institute of Archaeology in London, but did not complete his thesis, and in 1958 he and his first wife undertook the secretaryship of the semi-moribund Surrey Archaeological Society, of which they had been members since 1948. At the end of their eight-year term of office the S.A.S. had been reinvigorated into the centre of excellence it is today. It was during his secretaryship that Wood published his scholarly, but popular, Collins Field Guide to Archaeology in Britain, (1963) which he was to revise five times over the next twenty years, a sixth revision being requested just before his death. The success of the publication encouraged the publishers to set up the Collins Archaeology series with Wood and Cherry Lavell as joint editors but, though their choice of titles was imaginative and innovative, the project was killed off after the appearance of only six of a proposed forty books. Wood was chairman of the Southwark and Lambeth Excavation Committee from 1967-81 and London's first ever professional unit was set up under him (an amateur) in 1972. Wood's last work was an encyclopaedic volume, Historical Britain: a Comprehensive account of the development of rural and urban life and landscape from prehistory to the present day (1995), an apt summary of the life's work of an enquiring mind. Wood was a member of the Council of the Prehistoric Society while, wearing another hat, he was investigating the early stages of the glass industry in the Surrey Weald with excavations of the fourteenth-century furnace at Blundens Wood and the sixteenth-century furnace at Knightons, Alfold, work which resulted in his presidency of the Surrey Industrial History Group. In 1981 Wood and his second wife went to live in Selborne, Gilbert White's village. Their interest in the many periods of its history and concern for its preservation endeared them to the local community and Wood's period as chairman of the Selborne Association is remembered as one of achievement and dedication. An elder of the Society of Friends, which he joined in mid-life, Wood was always serene, self-effacing and hard-working; a writer of poems and reader of philosophy, but well aware of the social problems of the day. He died on 21 May 1996.