Jessie Jacquetta Priestley, O.B.E., M.A., D.Litt.

Jacquetta Hopkins was born on 5 August 1910, the younger daughter of Nobel Laureate Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins, O.M., F.R.S., and grew up in a freethinking academic household in Cambridge. She was educated at the Perse School and Newnham College, Cambridge, where she was the first student to take the archaeological and anthropolological tripos. She gained a first and a travelling scholarship which enabled her to go out to Palestine to join Dorothy Garrod, F.S.A., at the Neanderthal cave sites on Mount Carmel. On her return to Cambridge in 1933 she married Christopher Hawkes, F.S.A., whom she had met as a volunteer on his excavation at Colchester during her student days, and later collaborated with him on their popular Pelican, Prehistoric Britain, 1943. They excavated jointly and individually until the outbreak of war when Jacquetta joined the civil service and worked at first in the cabinet office. In 1941 she was appointed Assistant Principal of the Post-War Reconstruction Secretariat and in 1943 Secretary of the U.K. National Committee for UNESCO, a post she held until 1949. It was while attending a conference in this capacity in Mexico City that she met J. B. Priestley, whom she married six years later in 1953 after their previous marriages had been dissolved. Rigorous and scientific though her approach to archaeology was, Jacquetta had always been appreciative of poetry (Gerard Manley Hopkins was her father's cousin). After the war and a love affair with Walter Turner, which ended with his early death, and her first meeting with Priestley, she turned more and more to creative writing on metaphysical themes. Symbols and Speculations, a book of verse, was published in 1948 and her first post-war publication, The Land, 1951, was an evocation of the evolution of Britain and drew widely on her reading of the British poets from Beowulf to Robert Graves. It proved popular and was followed by Man and the Earth (1954), Man and the Sun (1962) and The Dawn of the Gods (1968), which elaborated the theory (previously advanced by Robert Graves in The White Goddess) that the first human instinct was to worship a goddess, not a god. Meanwhile, she had continued to publish strictly factual archaeological works such as, in 1963, with Sir Leonard Woolley, F.S.A., volume I, part 1 of The UNESCO History of Mankind; The World of the Past (1963); The First Great Civilizations (1973); The Atlas of Ancient Archaeology (1975) and The Atlas of Early Man (1976). Her marriage to Priestley, despite their different backgrounds and temperament, was supremely happy, and together they helped to found the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and both became keenly involved in local affairs in Stratford-on-Avon, near Alveston where they lived for many years. In 1982 Jacquetta published her biography of Mortimer Wheeler, F.S.A., Mortimer Wheeler: Adventurer in Archaeology, her friend for forty years, and one of her last appearances at Burlington House, still strikingly beautiful in her seventies and stylishly dressed, was at the inauguration in 1986 of the Society's `Wheeler Room' across the courtyard - the room which had been his office when he was secretary of the British Academy. She died on 18 March 1996 and in her will left a bequest to Newnham. A memorial meeting, organized by her son, Nicolas Hawkes, was held in the Society's Meeting Room on 18 October attended by many admirers, friends, relations and former colleagues.