Vronwy Mary Hankey

Vronwy Fisher was born in the rectory at Stilton, Huntingdonshire, on 15 September 1916. She read classics at Girton, having been taught Greek by her father, and was awarded a first. Physically short and slight, she was fearless on the hockey field and won a Blue. The study of classical Greek led her to archaeology, a burgeoning discipline at Cambridge in the 1930s, and she developed a particular interest in the Mediterranean Bronze Age. Interest became aptitude, to such an extent that Professor Alan Wace urged her to undertake research at the British School at Athens, to which she won a studentship in 1938. With Vincent Desborough, a fellow student, she joined the Curator, Richard Hutchinson, at his excavation of a Minoan Tholos tomb on the Kephala Ridge at Knossos, and in the following year she dug with Wace at Mycenae. Having obtained permission to photograph the contents of eighteen Late Helladic tombs near Khalkis, excavated between 1906-11 by G. Papavasileiou, but unpublished at his death in 1917, Vronwy wrote a descriptive catalogue of the finds for The Annual of the British School at Athens (1952). As the storm clouds gathered she re-joined Hutchinson in 1940 to excavate another tomb south of the Palace of Minos; now wholly committed to Aegean archaeology and remarkably successful in its practice, what looked set to be a distinguished academic career was nipped in the bud. Shortly after her return home Vronwy married Henry Hankey, the youngest son of Lord Hankey, Minister without Portfolio in Churchill’s wartime government, and embarked on a fresh chapter of life as a diplomat’s wife and mother of four children, without ever losing her enthusiasm for Mycenaean archaeology. The war years were spent in Madrid, followed by a rewarding term in Rome where Hankey was able to excavate through the auspices of the British School. Although some postings, such as San Francisco, Santiago and Panama, were barren territory for her research, Hankey always kept abreast of current excavations and discoveries. She maintained her contacts through attendance at conferences and extended them during her fruitful stint in Beirut (1962-6) when she was able to return to fieldwork Hankey’s research into Aegean Late Bronze Age cross-contacts with the Middle East date from this time, much enriched by exchanges with her new archaeological colleagues in Cyprus, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. She learnt Arabic, used her diplomatic status to bypass political obstacles and her Celtic charm to facilitate her studies, now concentrated on the widely distributed Mycenaean pottery. From the time she set foot in Beirut until her departure four years later she visited most of the Late Bronze Age sites in the Antioch district of Turkey, in Syria, Lebanon and Jordan and examined the Mycenean pottery in the local museums. Her comprehensive paper `Mycenaean pottery in the Middle East: notes on finds since 1951’, covering fifty-three sites in the area, was published in the Annual of the British School at Athens (1967). Her husband’s last overseas posting was as ambassador to Panama from 1966-9, after which Hankey was free to follow her own bent, although he was always a staunch supporter of her archaeological projects, and illustrated some of her publications with his own drawings. (He was also a mischievous cartoonist, much to the entertainment of their friends.) In 1970 Gerald Cadogan invited her to join the British School at Athens’excavation at the Minoan town of Myrtos Pyrgos on the southern coast of Crete, working on the stone vessels and pottery from the site and publishing a paper on the former in the Proceedings of the Fourth International Cretological Congress 1976 (1980). For many years Hankey was a popular lecturer on Swan’s cruises in the Aegean and on the Nile, an experience which led to her study of the widely dispersed Mycenean pottery from Tell el-Amarna in Middle Egypt, with the aim of solving the vexed question of dating the Mycenaeans. Elected an honorary Fellow in Egyptology of University College London, Hankey became deeply attached to the university’s Petrie Museum in Gordon Place.With Peter Warren she published Aegean Bronze Age Chronology in 1989. Hankey will be remembered at Burlington House for the lecture she gave on the techniques of early Lebanese potting, in the dark and without a projector, during the power cuts of the winter of discontent, 1978-9. Her serenity was never breached, nor her seemingly spontaneous flow of graphic prose, and her audience responded with what can only be described as `rapt attention’. The British School at Athens, to which she owed so much, has created a fund for Aegean Studies in her name and when her husband died some months after her he asked that donations be sent to the memorial fund. She died on 11 May 1998.