Barbara Craig

First Class Potential; Waste and Obligation

The following paper on Barabara Craig (1915 - 2005) was delivered to the Society's Women in the Heritage Day on 4 April 2008 by Lisa French. FSA.

The slides that accompanied this paper can be downloaded here (PowerPoint file, 987KB).

What were the expectations of and possibilities for a woman with a double first in Greats in 1938?  Unfortunately this was one subject that never arose between Barbara Craig and me as we worked in Nauplion over the pot tables or sat drinking our strong neat ouzos during the evenings. Barbara  had been awarded the Craven Fellowship to the British School in Rome and the Goldsmiths’ Senior Studentship. She started out busily with her study of “Sicilian History and the Antiquities of the Fifth Century”.  Mussolini’s Italy must have had its overtones  but I know from my own family how naive the academic world seems to have been about an impending war. 
 
Any potential advances in that life were not to be, and in retrospect we can consider that her career had four stages. First the war years, which brought to her, as to many, maturity and a range of experience which she might never have otherwise encountered.  Her head of section in the Ministry of Home Security and Production was the source of many good anecdotes. Having married James Craig - who had been the librarian at the Rome School - in 1942, she embarked in 1946 on stage two of her career with gusto and dedication: to be a British Council wife. As with everything she did, Barbara gave her full attention to the task in hand and there was plenty to do.

However fate intervened and after a first posting to Rio de Janeiro, they were sent to Baghdad in the early 1950's.  This was a different scene - though still plenty for the wife of the British Council Director to do - but enlivened both socially and intellectually by the active archaeological surroundings.  Max Mallowan’s work at Nimrud was producing unparalleled material. At just this point Sir Leonard Woolley endowed a Fellowship in memory of his wife Kathleen at Somerville, her college.  Barbara who had consistently retained her friendships among those who had remained in academia applied for this - I have not been able to discover whether she was invited to apply or merely urged to do so by her friends.  In any case it was awarded for  the subject “The Relation Between Greece and Asia During Approximately the 9th to the 6th centuries BC”, a theme of which Woolley himself strongly approved when told of it by the Principal Dame Janet Vaughan.

Barbara with James or, when he was busy, with other friends took the opportunity to travel widely in the Aegean and Near East.  Two things however become obvious: it was a vast subject and one which had its origins back in the Bronze Age.  So when she was in Athens in the late summer of 1955 with Anne Jeffrey and met my father, Alan Wace, over tea in the Finlay Library of the British School, she gladly accepted the invitation to join his excavations of 1956 - for Mycenae was producing quantities of ivories which compared closely with those known from Megiddo and elsewhere in the Levant.

However there was no excavation for us in Greece in 1956 because of the Cyprus situation. So Barbara became part of a bizarre trio, with David French and Dick Hope Simpson, working on a deposit of pottery under the guidance of my father. ( I was there too but deep in the first stages of my PhD.)  It was Barbara’s first exposure to the real thing though she had of course spent the intervening time reading up on everything Mycenaean.  She reported to Dame Janet - (I may say it was Barbara herself who kept the draft reports  - Somerville archives could not find them, alas,  though I owe them warm thanks for strenuous looking) in a telling sentence: “ I can think of no quicker way of learning about Mycenaean pottery than doing the job we were given and it was gratifying to find how much can be learnt, though much more slowly, from books”.

In retrospect it is somewhat surprising that as well as becoming uniquely knowledgeable about the site of Mycenae, she became absolutely expert in Mycenaean pottery for at first glance it is very much a  “hands on” subject but her decisive mind soon found that it can be make to make sense. In the spring of 1963 she helped me with the last stages of David’s and my study of the West Wall deposit at Tiryns - Here are the sherds and her notes - though the photograph is mine - she never took to photography nor to section drawing and was expert in getting others to carry out these tasks for her.  (Like driving where her attempts to pass the test in various countries were more source of anecdote and typing which James did for her).

She worked with us, in some way or other, more or less every year for ten years.  After my father’s death,  Billy Taylour asked her to complete the publication of the complex known as Tsountas’ House dug in 1950.  She conducted supplementary work here in 1959 and 1960.  1964 found her dumped with being in charge of all the finds - pottery and everything else.   It was daunting but she managed (with most useful assistance from the husband of one of the team). 

The next year was a study season in Nauplion where she worked with, among others, the wife of Dorothy Hodgkin’s nephew (who was thus able to give a first hand account of  Barbara’s relations with younger persons).    And so it happened that early in 1966 she was pre-elected to succeed Dame Janet at Somerville.   

After this,  her time with us was severely restricted though luckily she was able to be present, at least part of the time, during the unexpectedly busy and rewarding seasons of 1968 and 1969.  Here is a page from the 1968 Control Book (her 1964 invention) with her entries on some of the Figures which now take pride of place in the Mycenae Museum.

Somerville took almost all her attention from then on and that is not my story.  Barbara  published only one small note.  Tsountas’ House and her detailed TSS on it have been passed to another.  The college was a loving obligation to which she devoted herself whole-heartedly though she did once lament to me that there was no place for her archaeology in the hierarchies of Oxford..   I think the college were a little taken aback at the wonder ful archaeological reunion which her memorial service became.

Somerville’s gain was our great loss:  Mycenae and Mycenaean pottery lost perhaps the most  astute mind ever to study them.