Ruth Daniel, MA

Ruth Langhorne was born in Exeter on 5 July 1915, the daughter of a clergyman, and went to the Maynard School there before reading geography at St Anne’s College, Oxford. During the war she was commissioned into the WAAF and served as a photographic interpreter in India, where she met her husband-to-be, Glyn Daniel, who was then a Wing Commander. They were married in 1946 in the Grandisson Chapel in Exeter Cathedral and set up home in Cambridge, where Glyn Daniel was a Fellow, and Steward, of St John’s College.

Ruth Daniel studied calligraphy at the local technical college and drew maps for her husband’s archaeology books and some of those he commissioned from other specialists. He was archaeological adviser to Penguin Books and was appointed editor of Thames and Hudson’s Ancient Peoples and Places series in 1955 and of the quarterly periodical Antiquity in 1958. It was then that Daniel came into her own. She joined her husband as production editor of Antiquity but it was not an auspicious start since it was immediately obvious that the Daniels did not see eye to eye with Harold Edwards and his wife, publishers of the periodical, which had been founded by O G S Crawford in 1927 and edited by him until his sudden death in 1957. In 1960 Edwards agreed to sell Antiquity to the Daniels for £5,000, which they set about raising by begging letters, telephone calls and judicious arm-twisting. Donald Margary and Richard Atkinson each separately offered to underwrite the whole sum required but, in fact, the response was generous and immediate and the money subscribed was sufficient to buy the periodical and vest its ownership in a charitable trust. For the next thirty years Daniel worked alongside her husband, ensuring the accuracy of the articles he chose and setting high standards of printing, production and distribution. She coped with block-makers, printers and advertisers and, in those days of traditional printing methods, pasted-up galley proofs four times a year. After retirement in 1986 Daniel continued to proof-read books and papers for colleagues and publishers and to play an elegant part in Cambridge life. A talented musician herself, she was a strong supporter of St John’s College choir and contributions to the Glyn and Ruth Daniel Memorial Fund, administered by the Senior Bursar of the College, will be used to promote graduate research in archaeology or music. Daniel died on 4 April 2000.