Beatrice de Cardi

The folowing memoir comes from an interview with our Fellow Beatrice de Cardi, recorded by our Fellow Pamela Jane Smith in the autumn of 2007, and it covers covering the first thirty-five years of her life, from her birth in 1914 to her return to the UK to take up the post of Assistant Secretary to the Council for British Archaeology in 1949.

To read an account of further stages in Beatrice's life and career, see the Independent newspaper's profile of Beatrice, entitled 'The World's Oldest Archaeologist', which is in turn based on a fuller memoir written by Beatrice and published in Antiquity Volume 82, Number 315, pages 165-177, called 'Exploring the lower Gulf, 1947-2007' (online access to the latter requires a pay-per-view payment or a subscription to Antiquity, but a copy of the journal is available in the Society's Library).

We are grateful to Professor Valeria Piacentini and Antiquity Publications Ltd for the photograph of Beatrice at work in the United Arab Emirates.

I was born in London on 5 June 1914 just before war started. My
earliest recollections are sitting in the cellar during the air raids.
Apart from that, World War I had little effect upon me. As a child, I went
to a local preparatory school in Ealing Common where we were living at the
time. It was surprisingly rural and I can remember a herd of cows being
driven across the road that I had to cross to get to school. The road was
particularly dirty; it particularly impressed one with the need to carry
one's indoor shoes to school in a bag.

When I was eight, my mother took me to America to visit her relatives.
Then, a year later, I entered St. Paul's Girls School in the third form. At
that time the Head Girl was Kathleen Kenyon. I have known her for a very
long time in a rather distant fashion. Surprisingly the relationship of
'head girl to young child of nine' seemed to continue throughout my life.
At St. Paul's, I did well for the first two years but, then, unfortunately,
I was put up by a whole year and no one took the trouble to fill in the
subjects that I would have learned if I had not been put up. As a result I
never learned any English grammar. That is something I have always
regretted.

A number of serious illnesses resulted in my removal from school before I
reached the top form. This ill health resulted in my being taken away and I
lived at home in an invalid state. Fortunately, I outgrew the ill health
and I was entered for University College for an Arts degree. I didn't know
what I wanted to come out of that. As a child, I had set my heart on being
a ballet dancer but that was ruled out when I developed an athlete's heart.
I therefore went up to college without much interest and did a general
degree. All I knew was that I didn't want to take an Honours degree and
find myself teaching history for the rest of my days. I read economics with
Hugh Gaitskill as my tutor. His strength was economics, history and Latin.
Latin had been the subject that I learned for ten years; it has been a dead
loss to me every since.

While at UCL, I heard that Dr R.E.M. Wheeler was giving a course of
lectures on Roman Britain and I was allowed to attend in addition to my
other studies. The course was held in the London Museum at Lancaster House
and I naturally took part in the excavations at Maiden Castle during the
vacation.

Just before graduating, my father died suddenly. Virtually overnight, my
mother, my sister and I were left with a heavily mortgaged house and no
income. My sister and I had to become completely self-supporting. My sister
was fortunately qualified to teach French and piano because she had been to
the Royal Academy of Music and had an LRAM. Staff at UCL was helpful and
urged me to take a secretarial course because in the 1930's there were few
posts open to women with degrees. With a loan from a society for a
promoting of the training of women, I took a good secretarial course and
was nearly at the end of my six months training when Wheeler invited me to
become his personal secretary at the London Museum. His secretary at that
time was leaving to get married and live in South Africa. He said it would
be good experience and if I didn't like the post at least it would be a
stepping-stone to something else.

It has to be remembered that I had barely finished my training and Wheeler
was a very difficult person to work for. To that extent it was extremely
good training for me. I felt that if I had survived as Wheeler's Secretary
I could survive virtually anything.

I made many friendships in those days because John Ward Perkins had just
joined the Museum staff and was engaged in compiling the "Mediaeval
Catalogue". We became firm friends and I helped both in the field,
searching for churches with mediaeval remains, and also in typing the
catalogue. Gerald Dunning was working on mediaeval pottery in London at
that time. He was a great cat-lover and we naturally had many things in
common. I also met other people working in the Museum. I never established
any relationship with Martin Holmes, the Assistant Keeper. I got on well
with the staff including the accountant, Henderson, who was a tower of
strength to me whenever Wheeler was in a bad temper. Some of the staff
there later migrated to the Institute of Archaeology, notably Iona Geddy. I
knew Delia Parker and a fellow student on Wheeler's course, Kim Norfolk.
She married a naval officer during the war who was killed. Kitty Richardson
and Molly Cotton, a Canadian archaeologist, were also, at that time,
working on material excavated at Maiden Castle.

At Maiden Castle, I was among those to whom Tessa Verney Wheeler would
explain the results of our day's work in her bedroom at the Antelope Hotel,
Dorchester. Sadly, she died a month or so after I joined the Museum staff.
Molly Cotton broke the news to Wheeler who had been abroad in Syria at the
time of her death. I remained a friend of Molly's until her death. She was
later instrumental in shaping my career.

The outbreak of World War II saw the departure of all the male members of
the Museum staff and I became temporary Museum assistant. While the Museum
was open to the public, there was much to do. Material of secondary
importance, which had not been removed from Lancaster House, was utilized
in special displays and I also arranged a travelling exhibition for the
troops organized by the Army Bureau for Current Affairs.

Such activities ceased when the intensity of air raids forced the Museum to
close. Then my only duty seemed to be traveling once a month to
Buckinghamshire to ensure the Coronation robes did not fall prey to moths.
I was thus in a mental state prepared to leap at any offer of more
interesting employment.

It came with a call from Molly, by then working in the Ministry of Economic
Warfare, who inquired whether I would be prepared to go to China as
personal assistant to J.T. Asquith, an engineer and 'Old China Hand' who
had been Industrial Adviser to Chiang Kia-Shek. He was returning as
Representative in China of the Allied Supplies Executive of the War
Cabinet, a Foreign Office appointment and hoped to take with him someone
who would be able to travel under all conditions and remain unflappable.
Molly thought that I had those qualifications. Asquith and I met for half
an hour in the London Museum during February 1944 when I asked most of the
questions. He was to meet me in Calcutta a month later. I had to get all my
injections and buy suitable clothes, no easy task in mid-winter during
war-time conditions.

As I was no longer working for Wheeler, who was in the Army abroad, the
Museum agreed to lend me for the period of the War; no one stated
specifically which war I was taking part in. The Foreign Office sent me out
in a Sunderland Flying Boat with five Army officers and an elderly Rear
Admiral. We flew from Poole packed tightly into the rear cabin which became
exceedingly cold as we climbed high to avoid a dog-fight in the Channel
below. It took four days to reach the Indian sub-continent. We had a
re-fuelling breakfast stop at Gibraltar where the men went down to the RAF
mess and I was sent up to the Rock Hotel. Back in the air, the security
shutters had been removed and I peered through the port-hole window
throughout the flight to Djerba where we spent the night under canvas. Next
day, even the Army remained awake as we flew within sight of the route of
El Alamein, the desert scored by innumerable tracks and littered with
burnt-out tanks and other hardware. From Cairo onwards, I remained by the
window trying to identify features along our route. We refuelled on Lake
Habbaniyah, west of Baghdad and flew over Babylon. The stretch along the
Makran coast was spent searching for any sign of survivors from a plane
that had crashed a few hours before.

On reaching Karachi, our group split up leaving me with a couple of
companions to New Delhi and ultimately to Calcutta. I had expected to be
met by Asquith but he was still in China and I found that no arrangements
had been made for my accommodation or funding in India. Fortunately, I had
made friends en route, and I was introduced to a charming couple who very
kindly put me up until Asquith arrived from Chungking.

It was a very stressful introduction to life out east for someone who had
never been further afield than Paris. It was, however, an appropriate start
to some sixteen months moving usually at short notice between China and
India across the Himalayan Mountains. The flight over 'the Hump' in a DC3
was notoriously dangerous. In one week alone no less than 37 planes had
crashed, their wreckage clearly visible in the jungle. Electrical storms
caused turbulence which together with lack of oxygen laid low many
passengers. I found it exhilarating and was glued to the window admiring
the rhododendron forests below.

Asquith's brief was not only to screen all supplies to China from the
Sterling Block but to take care of the 1939-41 loans to China and also the
1944 Sino-British Credit. He was confronted by irreconcilable objectives
with the British Government anxious to keep supplies to a minimum and the
Chinese determined to extract as much as possible. Applications for goods
and machinery had to be investigated in relation to the projects for which
they had been sought, a process involving much travelling in the interior
of western China. Cargo arriving in India went astray and had to be tracked
down in godowns between Karachi and Assam.

Living conditions in Chungking were at first unacceptable as the Embassy
accommodation was far from salubrious or healthy. The lavatories were next
to the kitchen and I found lice on my bedroom walls. I effected my escape
by scraping the evidence into an envelope and leaving it on the Charge
d'Affaires' desk with an explanation. I was soon transferred to a room in
the British Council which was then directed by Dr Joseph Needham.

In compliance with the Official Secrets Act my letters home were generally
descriptive and give little information as to the various industrial sites
we visited in western China. In some regions where efforts had been made to
impede the Japanese advance it was necessary to travel in old stone-paved
tracks in the mountains either riding small ponies or carried in sedan
chairs. Inspections in Szechuan could usually be undertaken from our base
in Chungking but visits to sites in Yunnan and Shensi often involved
accommodation in villages under very primitive conditions. Invariably the
tour of a factory would be followed by a meal of many courses and several
days of traveling could become something of a gastronomic marathon.
Railways could be relied upon to upset an itinerary and a six hour journey
on the Lunghai railway took us over nineteen hours. In one area where only
two trains ran daily a bogey pedaled by four men had to be put on the track
to get us to our destinations.

I was fortunate in being able to meet several Chinese Government Ministers.
From the outset Asquith had insisted that I should attend discussions and I
found myself invited to dinner parties as well. The Sino-British loans were
explained to the Ministers of Finance and War and the latter, General Yu
Ta-Wei bluntly pointed out that the Chinese did not appreciate credit with
which they could buy nothing. Dr Wong Wen-hao, the head of the War
Production Board and Minister of Economic Affairs was a geologist by
profession. He was also keenly interested in archaeology and told me much
about Neolithic pottery in Kansu and Shensi. Both he and Dr T.V, Soong
invited Asquith to accompany a cotton yarn and cloth mission to India
planned in hope of reducing the price of those commodities in China. In the
course of discussions with the India Government the mission visited Bombay,
Benares, Delhi and Calcutta and its purchase of cotton yarn was given much
publicity in China. I was kept busy helping members of the mission to buy
gifts for their wives.

By 1945, I felt confident that I knew my way round the relevant Indian and
American Government departments in Delhi and was delighted when the British
Embassy sent me to India alone to explain changes in the loan procedures. I
was given a lift over 'the hump', my tenth flight, in General Carton de
Wiart's private plane. One had to wear a parachute but mine was far too
large. The crew simply produced safety pins and cheerfully assured me that
they would not hold if an emergency arose. In Delhi no problems arose and I
was able to see Wheeler briefly before we caught our planes for opposite
directions. It was one of the few times that our paths crossed while I was
in China.

I expected to return to Chungking but found instead that Asquith was
proceeding to London so I found myself there when the war with Japan ended
abruptly and, with it, our work in China. To some extent I was disappointed
because I had planned, on my return to India to go back into China up the
Burma Road. That would have been an adventure. Instead, I found that my
post abroad had ended suddenly and when I went to take up my post at the
London Museum, I was astonished to find that it had been filled in my
absence. The reason was that I had not returned at the end of the war. I
had not realised that I was expected to return at the end of the European
War because I was fighting the war out East and no one had enlightened me!

The Foreign Office offered me an appointment but not in the China section,
where I could have been useful. Instead, I was assigned to a section
dealing with the economic situation in Greece a subject about which I knew
nothing. After six weeks I realized that my future with the Foreign Office
was rather poor and resigned; I had no languages and women were not allowed
to enter the Foreign Office bar which was reserved solely for men. I
couldn't therefore meet colleagues on an equal basis.

I applied on impulse to the Board of Trade where I was appointed to a post
which took me back to New Delhi, as an assistant UK Trade Commissioner. Sir
Roland Owen, the Senior Trade Commissioner in India, was experimenting with
the use of to see if they would be successful in that post. I was one of
three appointments made at that time. It had never been given to women
before in that territory.

In the immediately post-war period the promotion of British exports was of
paramount importance. It was a relief to be actively engaged and I enjoyed
the work immensely. There was the added bonus of occasional meetings with
Wheeler who was then Director General of Antiquities in India. He was
generally dashing about the countryside; we met very infrequently but I
remember most vividly upon arrival inviting him to lunch at the hotel in
which I was billeted. We lunched satisfactorily and then returned to my
living dorm but after about half an hour, we found that we were being eaten
alive by bugs in the furniture. It was a meeting that always raised a
laugh.

On arriving in India, Wheeler had focused on the need to establish a cadre
of trained archaeologists and by 1945-6, the students of his training
school at Taxila were available for excavations in southern India on the
Indo-Roman trading station of Arikamedu near Pondicherry. Although invited
to visit him there I was not allowed to take leave as a Treasury official
was visiting the various British posts in India and I was tied to Delhi. It
was something I bitterly regretted for I never had the chance to get to
southern India.

I spent about nine months in New Delhi and because of my interest in
archaeology I was usually deputed to take visiting businessmen around
archaeological sites in the vicinity. As the partitioning of India drew
near, the staff of the Trade Commission office was given the choice of
either staying in India or transferring to the new Pakistan. I opted for
Pakistan, enticed there largely by the Indus Civilisation and found the
post in Karachi an exciting one. As the capital of a new country, it was
the international diplomatic centre until eventually Islamabad was built. I
helped to organize the new office and was later sent to Lahore to assist in
setting up a post there as well. Karachi, however, was a key point in my
career for I was able to meet both senior ICS officials and business
magnates, among the latter, the general manager of Burmah Shell. At that
time, the company was engaged in geophysical prospecting in Baluchistan and
the general manager told me that there were many archaeological sites
scattered through Kalat province. On its own the information left me
unmoved until Wheeler sent me Ancient India 3 (1947) containing an article
by Stuart Piggott on a new ceramic in the Quetta area.

Piggott had been stationed in New Delhi during World War II. His spare time
had been spent browsing through the reserve collections in the Central
Asian Antiquities Museum where he had found some potsherds labeled as from
locations in the Quetta region. All were in a buff ware decorated with
distinctive black designs which he regarded as culturally significant.
During his next local leave, Piggott flew to Quetta and with the help of a
local taxi-driver tracked down the four sites on which the sherds had been
found. His article describing the sites and Quetta-ware aroused my
interest. I could not believe that a ware decorated in so sophisticated a
style could have such a limited distribution. I immediately decided to see
if I could extend its range by spending my next leave in Kalat.

I wrote to Wheeler who was against such a risky trip and told me I would be
murdered, raped or both. However when he saw that I was adamant, he gave me
all the assistance he could. Maps of Baluchistan were not available in
Pakistan so he sent me, from India, those needed for the area of my
proposed study. He also persuaded the newly formed Pakistan Department of
Archaeology to lend me the services of Sadar Din for a month. Sadar Din had
worked as foreman on excavations by both Leonard Woolley and Wheeler. He
was a Muslim and when the Department of Pakistan Archaeology was formed,
Sadar Din was transferred to Pakistan. He was absolutely invaluable, was
completely illiterate, having rejected a school education, but had a
wonderfully retentive memory. I discovered that going out on surveys with
Sadar Din, he looked at the landscape with the eyes of a peasant farmer. He
saw instantly where people would have settled at all stages and I am sure
that I owe my ability to locate early sites almost entirely to him.

The manager of Burmah Shell gave me contacts in Kalat and arranged for me
to stay in Quetta with the Agent to the Governor-General in Baluchistan,
Sir Cecil Savidge, until Sadar Din arrived. My time there was spent
visiting sites discovered by Sir Aurel Stein and returning with potsherds
which I spread on the polished floor of my bedroom to the horror of the
Agency staff. The agency was a lovely two-storey house which was unusual in
Quetta.

Eventually Sadar Din arrived and the Khan of Kalat sent up a vehicle
complete with armed retainers to take us south to his capital. There I was
helped immensely by the Defense Minister, Brigadier Purvis, and the Khan's
Prime Minister, Douglas Fell, who were both interested in archaeology. I
was provided with a clapped-out jeep and Brahui driver and allowed to go
wherever I wished provided I returned to base at night.

It was an obligation which I met with difficulty on some occasions. Being
unable to drive, I had no idea of the deficiencies of the vehicle that I
was given. On one occasion, I found myself marooned in a village far away
with two punctures. The villagers kindly provided a bicycle repair kit but
eventually I had to return to Kalat in the back of a grain lorry. Journeys
further afield were possible by joining one or other of the British
officials when they went on tour. The Prime Minister, Douglas Fell, was
interested in archaeology; we went on survey together and he was an
excellent companion.

It was possible during the survey to extend the distribution of Quetta-ware
by nearly a hundred miles southwards into northern Jhalawan and many sites
were discovered. I returned with a modest but representative collection of
pottery and asked Wheeler to look at it. He came down from India for a
weekend and we arranged that I should show him the pottery the following
morning. When he did not appear for breakfast, I became worried and went to
his room where I found that he had a high fever. Undeterred, I decanted
bags of pottery on the floor while he looked at them with a glazed eye. All
he said was "publish them", which eventually I did. Their dating was
problematic in the absence of a ceramic chronology for the region but I
thought they might be third millennium or earlier. An American
archaeologist, Walter Fairservis, was also interested in the Quetta region
but his work was restricted by the Pakistan Government to trial-trenching.
It was not until the discovery of Mundigak in Afghanistan by French Mission
in 1951 that any progress was made.

However, when my next local leave was due in April 1949, I was determined
to trace the distribution of Quetta-ware to the north-east. Wheeler had
toured Afghanistan in his capacity as Director General of Antiquities in
India and he had assured me that I would find provisions and supplies along
my route but he had overlooked the fact that special arrangements had been
made for his visit and I found food in short supply.

I had bought a second-hand Jeep and had persuaded the Commander-in-Chief of
the Pakistan Army to let me have the loan of a trailer. Accompanied once
again by Sadar Din, we a Shinwari tribesman in Peshawar who claimed to be a
mechanic familiar with jeeps. Subsequent mishaps proved him to be a lorry
driver knowing only the route from Kabul to Heart. He had a murderous
disposition and when eventually we parted at the end of the survey in
Quetta, he 'fixed' the brakes of my vehicle knowing they would fail on the
steep down-hill route near Fort Sandeman. Disaster was only averted because
a friend serviced the car before driving us back to Lahore.

It was necessary at the start of the survey to call on officials in Kabul
but one day sufficed for such negotiations. We then headed south for Ghazni
and Kandahar. From Kandahar, I went west and I was reliant to a large
extent on the kindness of the Morrison Knutson Company who was building
roads in Afghanistan. On one occasion, they put me up in their camp and on
several other occasions, I was helped across rivers which were then in
spate. Otherwise I would have had to spend days, sitting, waiting for the
floods to subside. Irrigation ditches across the roads reduced our speed
and upset my programme. We reached Herat having found only one possible
third millennium site and an interesting group of rock carvings. We
returned to the Kandahar region with three days in hand and four routes to
survey. Sadly, we failed to select the route that would have taken us to
the site of Mundigak.

In Afghanistan, we also had an additional passenger who turned out to be a
snake charmer complete with snake, a colourful character. While traveling
in that area, when I was walking across a landslide trying to find a secure
position for the Jeep to follow, I saw a cave with what looked to be
Alsatian dogs outside. I walked on until suddenly I realised that the dogs
were wolves. I hastened back, got my jeep to turn around quickly and we
scurried away in the opposite direction. In Baluchistan, I had seen wolves
and a pack of dogs that inhabited the area near our camp, but this was my
first experience of seeing wolves in daylight.

On returning to Lahore from Afghanistan, I found a telegram from Kathleen
Kenyon explaining that funds were available for the establishment of a
Council for British Archaeology. It was suggested that I should apply for
the post of Assistant Secretary. The suggestion coincided with the news
that my mother was seriously ill and, therefore, I thought it wise to give
up my post in Lahore and return home.

I applied for the appointment at the CBA. I flew home from Lahore with many
regrets for I had enjoyed trade commissioning.