John Evelyn Bartlett, M.A., F.M.A.

John Bartlett was born in 1924 and educated at St Paul's School in London. The war was on when he left and he trained as a pilot in the R.A.F. before going up to Christ Church, Oxford, in 1946. After graduation he began his curatorial career as an assistant keeper in Liverpool but soon moved to head Carisbrooke Castle Museum in the Isle of Wight. In 1953 he was appointed to the newly created post of deputy director of Sheffield City Museum, where his new-broom enthusiasm was immediately felt both within the museum and in archaeological circles outside. The re-display of the holdings was his first concern, especially the unique collection of cutlery and Sheffield plate. And then, essentially outward-looking, he quickly established the museum as the recognized meeting place for Sheffield university's department of extramural studies and relevant specialist societies. Such liveliness, rare among provincial institutions in the immediate post-war years, helped to attract the British Association to Sheffield in 1956 for its annual meeting, with Bartlett acting as local secretary for the archaeology section; and in 1958 he was instrumental in organizing the first spring conference of the Society for Medieval Archaeology at the City Museum. Opportunities for further radical activity arose in 1960 when Bartlett was appointed Director of Hull Museums, where his flair and professionalism in museum management and archaeology were sorely needed after the wartime destruction of much of the collections and the bombing of the main Albion Street premises, established under the museum's legendary, long-serving head, Thomas Sheppard. Sheppard's remarkable series of inexpensive museum publications (HMP) from no. 1 in 1901 to no. 213 in 1941 had lapsed when he retired in that year and it was with pride that Bartlett produced no. 214 in 1963 and continued with a regular series of reports and bulletins ending with the publication of J. N. L. Myres' and W. H. Southern's report on the Anglo-Saxon Cremation Cemetery at Sancton (HMP no. 218) in 1972, at the popular price of £1.00 for 119 pages. To Bartlett's bitter disappointment, ambitious plans for a new purpose-built museum in the city were abandoned for lack of finance and he moved back to Sheffield in 1972, this time as director of museums. He repeated his role of new broom: the geological and archaeological galleries were re-modelled and the city's group of museums augmented from two when Bartlett took over (Sheffield City Museum and Abbeydale Industrial Hamlet) to six, with the addition of the sixteenth-century Turret House at Sheffield Manor; the sixteenth-seventeenth century Bishop's House; Shepherd Wheel, a water-powered grinding-wheel workshop, and, his crowning glory, the new industrial museum at Kelham Island on the river Don which, after a frantic three-year building and fitting-out programme, was opened in May 1982 a few months before Bartlett's retirement to the Peak District. He was active in the Prehistoric Society, the C.B.A., the Hunter Archaeological Society and the East Riding Archaeological Society, and was a member of the Antiquaries' Council for the session 1969-70. He died on 18 April 1996.