Back to Past Antiquity

The first editorial of Professor Glyn Daniel

Vol. XXXII No.125 March 1958

Click photo to enlarge

This, the 125th number of ANTIQUITY, is the first issue which does not contain from the pen of O.G.S. Crawford some of those Editorial Notes which, for the last thirty years, have enlivened our reading at the beginning of each quarter and endeared the late editor to us all. As he sent the December 1957 Editorial Notes to press Crawford had just heard of the death of Gordon Childe, and wrote:' He will be mourned by archaeologists all over the world, and not least by the writer of these words, who had known him for over thirty years.' In the same week as these words were being published the writer of them was buried in Nursling Churchyard. He died in his sleep during the night of Thursday/ Friday, 28/9 November. That evening he had returned home from giving evidence at a public enquiry held by the Minister of Town and Country Planning in Southampton about Southampton Corporation's proposals for the replanning of the city. He was there as President of the Friends of Old Southampton and had handed to the Ministry Inspector his own plan of medieval Southampton.

It has not been the practice of ANTIQUITY to devote any pages to obituary notices - to what the French, in a phrase that always seems peculiarly appropriate to archaeological journals, call nécrologie. If it had been so, this issue would be full of praise of the dead, for 1957 saw what seems to a member of a younger generation a holocaust of great men who had founded and practised modern archaeology. It suffices here to mention only Professor Séan Ó Riordáin, Dr J. F. S. Stone, Dr Paul Jacobstahl, Dr Charles Seltman, Dr George Leisner, Professor A. J. B. Wace, and Professor Gordon Childe, as well as Crawford himself, to show what a loss good scholarship and sound learning have sustained in the last twelve months. Obituary notices of most of these will be found in The Times, which published a full account of Crawford's life and work in its issue of 30 November. But there must be exceptions to rules, and the founder of ANTIQUITY and its editor for thirty years must be one. We begin, then, this first non-Crawford ANTIQUITY with a note of the late Editor's life and work in so far as it concerns this journal; it is less an obituary than a funerary oration in that characteristic style with which Sir Mortimer Wheeler has for so many years graced (and peppered) the pages of ANTIQUITY. Crawford and Childe are gone, but Wheeler himself, Sir Cyril Fox and Sir Thomas Kendrick remain of that generation of giants who virtually created the new British study of man's ancient past in the twenties. Long may they be with us.

We are happy to be able to publish as a frontispiece a photograph of Crawford, taken by Mr Irwin Scollar, on the Roman Road from Southampton to the Isle of Wight as it crosses Beaulieu Heath. Mr Scollar writes of Crawford: 'He was, as you know, very shy about posing for photographs, and I obtained this one through the ruse of asking him to step into the photo of the road to give it scale.' The photograph was taken in July 1954, and shows the late Editor as many knew him and as all will like to remember him.

Crawford left behind him a book on the medieval roads of Abyssinia which the Hakluyt Society is publishing, and a few reviews which are published in this issue. He left nothing of the book he was going to write on cats, a foretaste of which he had given us in his brilliantly clever recent broadcast on The Language of Cats; and he left no mandate as to who was to succeed him in the very considerable and worth-while task of editing the journal he had started in 1927 at the age of forty-one. In The Times for 31 December, 1957, there appeared this letter from H. W. Edwards, the publisher of ANTIQUITY:

SIR, - In the obituary of Dr 0. G. S. Crawford in your columns on 30 November it is recalled how he had founded ANTIQUITY as a quarterly review of archaeology in 1927, and had edited it for thirty years. In that time it achieved an international status as a vehicle for archaeological studies and interests and, as its publisher, I have received many inquiries as to its future.

While appreciating the essentially personal character of Crawford's editorship, a number of leading archaeologists have agreed that its continuance is highly desirable and Dr Glyn Daniel, of St John's College, Cambridge, has consented to become its new Editor. He will be assisted as advisory editors by Professor Gerhard Bersu, Dr G. H. S. Bushnell, Professor M. E. L. Mallowan, Professor Stuart Piggott, and Sir Mortimer Wheeler, and publication will continue without a break.

Although Crawford did not approve of new-fangled devices like telephones, typewriters and motor cars, he had kept neat records of his plans for articles and reviews in his own clear hand. It is nevertheless possible that some engagements entered into may not have been recorded, and the present Editor would be grateful if those contributors with whom he has not already been in touch, and who have outstanding articles or books for review, would write to him as soon as they can. The new address should be noted: The Editor of ANTIQUITY, St John's College, Cambridge (Telephone: Cambridge 58741). There was only one Nursling; there are many Cambridges - two in England (not counting Cambridge Town in Shoeburyness), one in Scotland, one in Jamaica, one in New Zealand, one in Cape Province, and no less than fourteen (according to the Columbia Lippincott Gazetteer) in the United States of America. Overseas correspondents and publishers please note then, St. John's College, Cambridge, England. The Post Office authorities are very good, and we constantly get letters quixotically addressed to us at' St John's Cottage, Oxford 'with a laconic pencilled superscription' Try Cambridge ' - but let us not overtax them.

The late Editor had drafted some notes for the present number. One began as follows: 'The editing of a journal like ANTIQUITY is a pleasant task, but there are times when the Editor wishes that he did not have to cope with book reviews. There is of course no escape from this; it is necessary to keep our readers informed about the best books on archaeology that are published, and of some others.' We hope that experience proves the truth of the first few words; the pleasantness of editing ANTIQUITY must depend on the ready co-operation of its contributors in writing articles, notes and reviews, of its readers in criticizing what is written and saying what they want to read, and on everyone seeing that the Editor and the Advisory Editors (whose immediate agreement to advise and whose ready advice in the difficult change-over period the Editor and Publisher of ANTIQUITY gratefully acknowledge) 'are kept informed of all relevant developments in the world of archaeological learning. We commend to all the words of Charles Lamb in a letter to B. W. Procter dated 22 January, 1829: 'When my sonnet was rejected, I exclaimed, "Damn the age: I will write for Antiquity!"'

ANTIQUITY 32 (1958): 1-2

Back to Top
Back to Past Antiquity