Wakefield Press

LOVE’S OBSESSION

Judy Powell is an archaeologist and historian with a PhD in classical archaeology. Judy has worked on excavations in Cyprus, Greece, Jordan, and was a Fellow at the Australian Archaeological Institute at Athens. She has undertaken a range of Indigenous and historical archaeology projects in the course of over fifteen years in the cultural heritage and museum sector in Queensland. She is an adjunct lecturer in the Archaeology program at The University of Queensland.

Judy lives in the Sunshine Coast hinterland with a placid and ever-expanding family of kangaroos.

Jim and Eve Stewart, Singapore, 1955 (DES archive)

Wakefield Press

1 The Parade West

Kent Town

South Australia 5067

www.wakefieldpress.com.au

First published 2013

This edition published 2013

Copyright © Judy Powell 2013

All rights reserved. This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced without written permission. Enquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

Cover designed by Stacey Zass

Front cover illustration: Early Cypriot III–Middle Cypriot I pottery sherds, excavated by J.R. Stewart at Palealona Tomb 3A in 1961 Courtesy Nicholson Museum catalogue number NM 2009.120.1–4 and NM 2009.114

Edited by Penelope Curtin

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Author:    Powell, Judith, author.

Title:    Love’s obsession: the lives and archaeology of Jim and Eve Stewart / Judy Powell.

ISBN:    978 1 74305 274 7 (ebook: epub).

Notes:    Includes bibliographical references and index.

Subjects:

Stewart, James Rivers Barrington 1914–1962.

Stewart, Eve.

Archaeologists—Australia—Biography.

Classical antiquities.

Cyprus—Antiquities.

Dewey Number:    930.1092

For my father, Owen Powell (1921–2013)

I believe that Archaeology is so unimportant, so divorced from modern life, that it is worth taking seriously.

J.R.B. Stewart, 28 December 1943

Foreword

Some stories you seek, while others come knocking at your door. That’s how it was at the Australian Archaeological Association conference at Noosa in 2008. A combination of events conspired and I was soon to discover the joys and frustrations of serendipity, which plays a crucial role in the decision to embark upon a biography, as it does in the survival of the sources with which a biographer has to work.

On the night of the conference dinner, there was a crush in the dining room. A line of people snaked out the door, moving slowly into the dining area, where clusters of tables made movement difficult. Professor David Frankel stood behind me and, although I didn’t know him very well, the few glasses of champagne I’d had encouraged me to congratulate him on the paper he had given earlier in the day. He had spoken about his recent work on Bronze Age Cyprus and it was, for me, nostalgic. I hadn’t worked on anything Mediterranean for over a decade, but I love Cypriot pottery and the landscapes of his talk were those I was once familiar with, and still love. I told him this.

A group of people were standing nearby and I was introduced to Dr Laila Haglund, who of course I knew by name but had never met. ‘Have you been to Cyprus?’ she asked. ‘I have a lot of papers about Cyprus that I really must get around to sorting through. It’s been a few years …’ And so the journey began.

Jim Stewart was a name I knew, but only vaguely. Eve Stewart was completely unknown to me. In the 1980s, as a student of archaeology, I had frequently seen reference to Jim Stewart’s excavations on Cyprus but, apart from a short article with the delightful title ‘The tomb of the seafarer’, I had seen little written by him and idly wondered why. As an archaeologist I knew that ‘it all began at Sydney’,1 but I was then a student at the University of Queensland and had not heard all the stories.

I arranged to visit Laila at her home in country Queensland, with its views of Mount Barney and kangaroos in the front yard. The papers she had mentioned at the conference were in large plastic archive boxes that lined the back verandah, among pot plants and the ephemera of daily life. Inside each, buff-coloured manila folders were concertinaed row upon row. Each folder was labelled, and familiar names leapt out: Alan Wace, Winifred Lamb, Hector Catling, Vassos Karageorghis. I couldn’t resist riffling through them. In one folder—marked simply ‘bibliographies’—was an envelope addressed to Lieut J. Stewart, Oflag VIIB. Slips of paper and flattened out cigarette packets spilled out, each covered with tiny neat writing in pencil. I felt the same excitement holding these letters and files that I had the first time I dug up an artefact. These papers were real. Many of them had not been read for decades but, like the bone fishhook and the obsidian blade I had excavated so long ago, they belonged to real people and were touched by their humanity.

I was hooked. From that day, I wanted to find out about these people, to understand their obsessions. In time, the quest became my own obsession and has led me to follow them around the world. To England, where much of the story began, to Cyprus, and around Australia. I met people who knew them, who adored them or hated them, who trusted them or were wary. It has been a different sort of travelling, and has taken me to places I would never otherwise have visited—the wild Karpas in northeastern Cyprus, museum storerooms in Stockholm, a Scottish baronial folly in Bathurst. Along the way I have met people I never thought to encounter—a numismatist specialising in the coins of Medieval Cyprus, a retired major general from the Tower of London, a Maronite lawyer from Kyrenia, a Turkish Cypriot artist.

Jim Stewart was the first Australian to direct an archaeological excavation outside Australia and the first field archaeologist to teach archaeology in Australia. Together with Dale Trendall, he ran what constituted the first department of archaeology in an Australian university and taught the first generation of classical and Near Eastern archaeologists in Australia. Jim Stewart had worked with some of the early pioneers of archaeology in Europe and the Near East, and his excavations on Cyprus between the 1930s and 1960s enriched the collections of museums across Australia, and overseas.2

But these were Eve Stewart’s files and it was her diligence that was so evident in the carefully curated archive. It was she who intrigued me. What was her legacy, I wondered.

Acknowledgements

I am deeply indebted to many people, all of whom gave freely of their time. Indeed one of the most enjoyable aspects of the research for this book has been the opportunity to meet so many interesting characters and work with such engaging colleagues.

Although the internet has made life more complex, it has also made many things more accessible. I am humbled by the generosity of people and institutions who happily shared material across continents.

For their continued support for this project I owe a particular debt of thanks to Peter Stewart, Dr Laila Haglund and Professor Basil Hennessy.

Other individuals who have, in various ways, helped me to complete this work include, in alphabetical order:

In Cyprus: Yiannis and Dora Cleanthous, Petro Colocassides, Professor Tom Davis, Dr Vassos Karageorghis, Ruth Keshishian, Elicos Liatsos, Professor Dimitri Michaelides, Andreas Pitsillides, Dr Rita Severis, Alison South.

In the United Kingdom: Edward Baldwin, Dr Hector Catling, Dr Lisa French, Mary Ann Fishbourne (née Meagher), Dr David Gill, Derek and Sonja Howlett, Professor Michael Metcalf, Major-General Giles Mills, Hallam Mills, Dr Eddie Peltenburg, Dr Rachel Sparks, Sarah Vale.

In Sweden: Elisabet Åström, the Lorimer-Olsson family, Dr Kristian Göransson.

In the United States of America: Dr Paul Hockings, Dr Stuart Swiny, Dr Joanne van Tilburg.

In France: Dr Robert Merrillees.

In Australia: Professor Jim Allen, Dr Craig Baker, Dr Judy Birmingham, Dr Stephen Bourke, the Butcher family, Karin Calley, Professor Alexander Cambitoglou, Dr Chris Davey, Professor Iain Davidson, Robert Deane, Alex Diamantis, Dr Kathryn Eriksson, Professor David Frankel, Linda Hennessy, Ruth Hennessy, Professor Greg Horsley, Suzanne Kelly (née Sneeling), Professor Vincent Megaw, Christopher Morgan, Professor John Mulvaney, Michael Quinnell, Sally Salter, Dr Andrew Sneddon, Dr Jenny Webb.

The staff of the following institutions:

In Sweden

The archives of the Medelhavsmuseet, Stockholm

Lund University archives, Sweden

In the United Kingdom

Imperial War Museum, London

National Archives (UK)

The Leys School, Cambridge

Trinity Hall archives, Cambridge

British Ministry of Defence

University College, London, Special Collections

In Cyprus

State Archives, Nicosia

Cyprus American Archaeological Institute (CAARI), Nicosia

Cyprus Veterans Group

In Australia

University of Sydney Archives

Nicholson Museum, University of Sydney

The Kings School, Parramatta, NSW

Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, Archives

University of New England archives, Armidale

Blue Mountains Historical Society, Wentworth Falls, NSW

Australian Institute of Archaeology, Melbourne

In Greece

The Archive of the British School at Athens

Archives of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens

Manuscript advice was provided by Annette Hughes.

Other readers include Dr Marion Diamond, Margot Duncan, Barbara Heath, Ross Johnston, Catherine Quinn, Michelle Riedlinger and Peter Riedlinger. I want to thank Trish Rea in particular for providing meticulous commentary.

I would like to acknowledge Wakefield Press, who have been supportive throughout the publication process, and my editor Penelope Curtin, who was unfailingly helpful.

Financial assistance for aspects of this work was provided by the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute (CAARI), the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities and the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

A note on terms

Monetary units are given exactly as they appear in the sources and I have made no attempt to convert these amounts to modern equivalents.

The pound sterling remains the currency of Great Britain. Australian currency consisted of Australian pounds, shillings and pence until 1966, when the country adopted a decimal currency and the Australian ‘dollar’. In Cyprus, the currency was the Cyprus pound divided into twenty shillings. In 1955 the currency went decimal with 1000 mils to the Cyprus pound. This was changed to 100 cents to the Cyprus pound in 1983. Until 1972, the Cyprus pound and pound sterling had equivalent value. In 2008 the national currency became the Euro.

The term ‘Near East’ came into use during the second half of the nineteenth century, and was used to describe areas ruled by the Ottoman Empire. The term has different meanings for archaeologists, political scientists, historians and journalists. From an Australian perspective, Eurocentric terms such as the Near East, Middle East and Far East, have no logic at all, given that Japan and China (the Far East to Europe) are our northern neighbours. The term is retained primarily because it is the term used by J.R.B. Stewart in correspondence referring to Turkey and Cyprus. It is also the term of the professorship at Sydney University, which Stewart held.

Although neither Jim nor Eve Stewart would have understood the terms BCE (before the Common Era) and CE (Common Era), and are unlikely to have approved their use, these terms are used to conform to modern conventions and replace the earlier BC and AD.

Maps

Prologue

Cyprus 1947

The car bumped and ground its way along the rough road that wound its way up and over the Kyrenia Range. In the back a young woman sat numb, emotionless after months of waiting and preparation. She glanced back. Only the faint brushstroke of Turkey separated the sea from the sky. They dropped down into the vast sprawling plain of the Mesaoria. As they drove through Nicosia she bade a silent farewell to the museum, then they passed through the city gates and headed south.

Hassan parked near the wharf at Limassol. Cypriot travellers called to relatives, waving scarves. A small boy sat on a pile of boxes. A mother cradled a baby in her arms and turned towards an elderly couple standing at the edge of the crowd. Four hundred passengers were boarding, along with all their goods and chattels, on the SS Misr, embarking upon a new life in an unseen continent. The air was heavy with anticipation.

Her father directed Hassan to unload the baggage and find someone in charge. Tom Dray was aged seventy, tall with a neat white moustache to balance his receding hair, and a tendency to lean to the right to favour his good leg. Formally dressed in a double-breasted grey suit, he looked anxious but had little influence on his daughter’s decisions. At thirty-three Eve was no longer a child. He fidgeted with the car keys and looked at his boots, wondering how long she would be gone and when she would come home.

She stepped from the car, drawing her cardigan close, and for a few minutes stood looking out at the translucent waters of the harbour. With plenty of time to board, she left the luggage to the men and set out along the foreshore.

She took a seat at her favourite café and watched fishermen in a rowboat as they untangled their nets. To her left, a man in baggy breeches was being shaved, and a hunter sat at a nearby table, his gun propped against the wall.1 She ordered coffee and searched her purse for a sheaf of letters. She unfolded them carefully, with a caress, and began to read. Not that she needed to—she had all of his letters word perfect.

Eve, my darling … All this western country is magical today and the sun seems brighter than ever before … So far from feeling ashamed, this is the first day I’ve really felt peaceful since I came home … Your courage and quiet dignity took me first, then your mental probity; now your personal glory, your eyes, yourself, your lovingness, the way you dress. How futile it was for me to pretend that it was only an emotional entanglement … P.S. For god’s sake don’t go weaving pretty pictures round me. I’m a most unpleasant person really—selfish, self-centred, dogmatic, pompous, cowardly, unsensitive, stupid, affected.

She fingered the brooch he had given her that Easter.

The commonest mistake which we all make is to assume that our own personal miseries are worse than anyone else’s. Please, my darling, accept this brooch … with some blessing in its original owner. The people of Castelorizo were evacuated to Cyprus (I think during the Dodecanese battles) for the safety of their lives, and were then left destitute. The women had to sell their ornaments to find money for food … May it be a symbol of hopelessness destroyed forever, and of joy and love and comradeship for all living future. It is nothing in itself, base island silver re-gilt. But it is survival of an old East-Mediterranean art, old already when Mycenae was young.2

She smiled at the memory. He had gone with Petro to a Turkish village near Paphos in search of coins, his first love. They were welcomed with cheers and roars of delight from former soldiers of the Cyprus Regiment, and quite a celebration ensued.

‘When Turks drink they do it properly’, he said. ‘Even the cats have raki instead of milk.’3

Back at the house Hassan had helped her stuff the car with bags and boxes. She had packed linen from Ayios Philon and summer clothing. How different could the weather be? Would it be like a Cyprus summer? Winter in Cyprus, summer in Australia; a topsy-turvy world. What a lot of luggage. Pots were wrapped carefully, each in crumpled newspaper, and pottery sherds nestled in dozens of flat cigarette tins, each labelled. She could never get enough of them and smiled, remembering his rebuke: ‘You fiend’, he said, ‘You’re not to use me as an excuse for smoking’.4

She looked out across the water. A shepherd’s voice rang out and she could hear the bells of his flock of sheep as they scampered over the stony ground, reminding her of that last day of their three months together, visiting favourite haunts and places where they would one day excavate. While sherd-hunting at Sotira, he scrambled ahead, racing over the rocks, then, calling to her, he suddenly stopped and bent to scoop up a Neolithic stone pounder lying on the ground as if dropped only yesterday.

‘What a wonderful day to farewell Cyprus’, he said. Her hair fell loosely to her shoulders and she looked directly at him, shading her face against the fierce sun with her hand, her skin browned from months in the Cypriot sun.

‘It is our Cyprus’, she said, standing with her back to the sea.5

In the evening he lay in bed, watching her by the window, marvelling at the peace these months had brought him. She turned toward him and smiled. Their future was uncertain then. Memories would have to sustain them. Later, on the other side of the world, the sherds from Sotira helped him to relive this moment.6

She drained her coffee and stubbed out a cigarette as she read the final lines of the letter. ‘I’ve always hated leaving Cyprus’, he said, ‘I realised that you are quite right. It is our island, and we must have a stake in it. Those dusty roads, the Northern mountains, the sea, the bareness of Ayios Ioannis are all part of you and me.’7

‘Kiss me, my Eve.’8

PART 1

The Old World, 1914–47

Chapter 1

England, Egypt and Cyprus, 1914–36

Margery Dray turned into the hallway and sighed. ‘Oh dear.’ Strung out before her were all her shoes, the laces knotted neatly one to the other to form a long accusatory line. Chastised earlier in the day for poor behaviour, her daughter Eve had exacted her revenge.1 Quiet, efficient, determined. Eve never forgot and she never gave up.

Dorothy Evelyn Dray was born in the dying days of Edwardian England, as an Indian summer gave way to the catastrophe of the Great War of 1914. Eve was a hybrid, one part English gentry, one part eastern Mediterranean. From her mother she learned duty, obedience and rectitude; from her father a wry sense of humour, a love of travel and of animals. The deadpan poker face she perfected all on her own.

Eve’s mother, Margery Mills, belonged to a family of modest wealth in late Victorian England, her world a slow and gentle round of country picnics, garden parties and visitors coming to stay for weekends in the country. Days distinguished themselves one from another by little more than the weather or the book lying in one’s lap, but seldom by any change in routine. Rituals of shopping or tennis flowed with the rhythms and certainty of a broad slow-moving stream with few eddies to disturb the smooth grey passage of time.

The course of Margery’s life was determined by men. The Mills family had occupied landed estates in Hampshire since the eighteenth century, but only the men ever owned Bisterne Manorhouse and the thousands of acres attached to it. Wives and daughters might live there but could never be certain of tenure. Margery grew up in this house with two older brothers, two younger sisters, and a mother who would dominate her life for years to come. Her father, a vicar with a passion for carpentry but little interest in the church, left the running of the parish to his wife. Domineering, devout and humourless, her household regimen was rigid and unbending. The family was dutiful and loyal, but undemonstrative. Margery seldom heard laughter or felt the warmth of a spontaneous embrace.2

In 1901 Margery Mills, aged twenty-five, travelled to Cyprus to visit relatives who had lived there for eleven years. Her uncle, Hugh Nichols, was a road engineer. With only one decent road from the port of Larnaca to the inland city of Nicosia, he had no shortage of work. Unlike her Aunt Flo, who disliked riding, Margery was a keen horsewoman and travelled with Uncle Hugh on surveying trips, riding a horse named Selim Pasha to places with equally foreign names and exotic inhabitants: Limassol, Famagusta, Paphos, Kyrenia. They stayed with district commissioners or at local police stations to avoid the fleas and bedbugs of the local village inns.3

Perhaps it was on one of these trips she first met a young Tom Dray, who arrived like a warm breeze through an open window into her cold and musty English life.

Tom Dray was born in 1879^4 with the privileges of an English birthright, though he spent little time in England. For most of his life he lived in the Near East, enjoying advantages not available in Victorian England’s world of rigid hierarchies, where minute gradations of class were the warp and weft of society’s fabric. Like many younger sons of relatively well-to-do but by no means wealthy families, Tom found more opportunities as a colonial son than in England. There, Tom was merely the youngest son of a doctor, but in Egypt or Lebanon or Cyprus he joined an exclusive expatriate world of administrators and government officials. If, as the Mills family believed, his mother was Syrian, that would have been further reason to avoid England.5

A premature baby and the youngest of six, he was spoilt and coddled in childhood which he described years later:

I was born in London, a seven months child [premature] brought up in an incubator and told by the doctors that I was to do no work. I took full advantage of this until I was about ten and considered too old to start school. I was therefore supplied with tutors, a Frenchman, an Italian, an Englishman and a Syrian. By this time I had been sent out to Beirut where my father had gone as a doctor. My last memory of England was riding on Jumbo at the Zoo.6

Tom effortlessly absorbed languages in polyglot Lebanon, where his father practised medicine and where the family lived in a large house in the picturesque hills of Broumanna outside Beirut. Tom learned French of course—from a tutor who stole the best stamps from his grandfather’s album. He studied ancient Greek and Latin, languages that formed the basic education of all English schoolboys of a certain class, and Arabic from a Syrian Jew who, he remembered, fed him figs. At the small English school in Beirut which he finally attended with his sisters, cricket and football were the main attractions, not schoolwork. In early childhood he began his love affair with horses, and he and his sisters all rode well.

Tom’s father knew that as the younger son Tom would have to make his own way in the world. He tried to direct Tom towards a financial career, but office work and banking held no attraction for his tall and energetic youngest son. When the Boer War began, a patriotic Tom was eager to enlist. The army offered prospects of adventure and travel, but his father scoffed. Tom was, he said, ‘too young to join up, too big a target & far too big a fool’. In the end, Tom found work as Inspector of Irrigation on the island of Cyprus. The only prerequisite for the job appears to have been an ability to play polo, at which Tom excelled.

We made a reservoir down by Famagusta, the surface of which made a most excellent polo field although it turned out to be useless as a reservoir.7

From irrigation Tom moved casually into surveying. He met the head of the Land Registry Office while riding one day and was invited to his office to discuss a new system of land registration. Both knew little about how the system worked, but they enjoyed riding. So it was agreed that Tom would join the office where, he was delighted to discover, ‘there was still plenty of polo and shooting’.

Tom lived the good life as a young man on Cyprus and remembered it fondly. He rode, played polo, and moved in a circle of young and privileged colonial civil servants. Cyprus was English but not England, familiar and comfortable but warm and exotic. It was England without the straight jacket, the East without the muddle.

His world was outwardly Middle Eastern but inwardly Hampshire. In the streets wiry moustachioed men wandered the narrow stone alleys and courtyards in baggy trousers, while Turkish Cypriot women were veiled from head to foot. Shepherds picked their way across rocky ledges along the shoreline with small flocks of scruffy long-haired sheep, and bearded Orthodox priests sat in the cafes drinking coffee and nibbling Cypriot sweets. The call to prayer rang out on Fridays, bells tolled on Sundays and a cacophony of voices squabbled at the outdoor markets every other day. Indoors it was strictly the Home Counties. In Tom’s Nicosia house, lace tablecloths covered cane tables and family portraits stared down from wooden frames. Beside a roll-top desk a standard lamp shone weakly beneath its tasselled shade onto an English newspaper lying on the divan. Cyprus became Tom’s home for much of his adult life and finally the source of his considerable wealth. It was also to be central in the life of his daughter Eve.

The island of Cyprus emerges uneasily from the blue waters of the eastern Mediterranean, geographically closer to Turkey and Lebanon than to Greece. For thousands of years it has been within the orbit of great powers—Greece, Rome, Byzantium, the Ottomans—but never at their centre. The island’s position at the edge of the Eastern Mediterranean makes it strategically important, so it has rarely been the ruler of its own fate.

Cyprus is dry and barren limestone country with white beaches looped around the coasts and a wide open plain, the Mesaoria, which cuts the island in two from east to west. In the middle of this windswept and featureless fertile central plain squats the walled city of Nicosia, or Levkosia, a medieval city of moats, walls and gateways. Built by a mathematician, Nicosia is a circular city with twelve bastions, its geometry only apparent in plan view. The city looks inwards. No navigable river, harbour or natural feature determines its placement, other than its position at the centre of the rich agricultural Mesaoria.

Two mountain ranges stretch across the island from east to west. In the north, the narrow Kyrenia Range roars up out of the plain and looms over the northern coastline. In huge unlikely humps the mountain ropes along the top third of the island. The country is stripped bare, bones bleached, flesh cut away. The Kyrenia Range sprouts castles like the Mesaoria sprouts wheat. Leaning against the jagged rocks you are never sure if they are part of the mountain or the remains of a wall. In the south, the Troodos Mountains rise above nearly a quarter of the island. This is a greener, gentler landscape. Monasteries nestle in the mountain folds among forests of native cedar. The minerals of this area have been the source of the island’s wealth for four thousand years and the slopes weep red copper mining slag.

When alloyed with tin, copper makes the metal that gave its name to the Bronze Age. Copper ingots from Alashiya, as the island was called, are drawn on the walls of Egyptian tombs, and ships wrecked off the southern coast of Turkey were laden with copper ingots from Cyprus, along with trade goods from all over the Eastern Mediterranean. Aphrodite, the goddess of love, emerged from the sea near Paphos on the island’s southwest coast. Her consort, Hephaestus, was a metalworker crippled, as were most such workers, by the poisonous fumes of the furnaces and kilns of their trade.

The Phoenicians, Egyptians and Persians all at different times coveted the island. In the first century BCE, Cyprus became a Roman province with the city of Paphos its capital. The wealthy built magnificent buildings on the seashore, with lavish mosaics strewn like carpets on the floors of their villas. Cicero governed here for a time, a peaceful provincial appointment for a reflective senator, although he missed the political turmoil and intrigue of Rome. Later St Paul landed at Paphos to preach his new-fangled Christian religion.

On his way to the Third Crusade, the English king, Richard the Lionheart, conquered the island almost by accident, and sold it a year later to the Knights Templar. They in turn on-sold it to Guy de Lusignan, who had lost his grip on the city of Jerusalem. The Lusignans were Franks, from Poitou in western France, and the family ruled Cyprus for the next three hundred years. It is their medieval imprint that studs the mountain with castles—St Hilarion, Buffavento, Kyrenia, Famagusta. The castles cling like limpets to a foreign landscape.

In 1570 the Turks conquered the island and, like the Lusignans, ruled the island for a further three hundred years. When Tom Dray moved to Cyprus, the island was English and when Turkey entered the First World War on the side of the Germans, the British formally annexed the island.

Five years after first meeting on Cyprus, Tom and Margery’s paths again converged, this time in Egypt, where Margery was visiting her elder brother, Jack. Cyprus had ended in professional disappointment for Tom. Denied promotion because he was too young, he had sat Greek and Turkish examinations concurrently—something no one had ever done before—only to be refused once more. He lost his temper with the governor, applied to leave the country and sailed for Egypt, where he tendered his resignation, having found work with the Egyptian Survey.

Tom and Margery became engaged. She was thirty-one,8 three years older than her fiancé, and they married in August 1907 in the family church at Bisterne. They returned to Egypt, but the following year Margery was back in England awaiting the birth of her first child. A son, Francis, was born on the morning of Wednesday 16 July. Her diary records events: Thursday was a ‘bad day’. The baby was quickly baptised on Friday and the same afternoon he ‘left us’. Margery and Tom buried Francis in the churchyard at Bisterne and she wrote nothing in her diary until eleven days later, when the entry simply reads: ‘Downstairs pm’. She could put no words to her grief.

For the next seven years Margery and Tom Dray lived in Alexandria or Cairo, travelling in the Middle East and to Cyprus, where Tom’s father and two of his sisters had retired. When Margery, aged thirty-eight, became pregnant for the second time she returned to England for the confinement.

Eve’s birth in August 1914 coincided with the outbreak of war in Europe. Restless, Tom returned to Egypt, where he was seconded to Political Intelligence with the rank of Captain, with both Sir Harry Chauvel and General Allenby later writing appreciatively of his services during the war.9 Margery remained in England. Having lost one child, Margery took particular care with her second, recording Eve’s progress in detail in her diary. Perhaps she had cause for concern: at twelve months Eve would not crawl and she only began to walk unaided at eighteen months. She could be wilful and Margery wrote that she ‘has taken to screaming when she does not get what she wants’.10

After a little over a year Margery returned to Egypt with Eve and for the next four years the family lived in the fashionable Cairo suburb of Heliopolis in a large two-storey house, the Villa de Martino. Often alone, toddler Eve found companionship with cats and dogs and other animals. When the family moved to Boulaq Dakrur in the countryside outside Cairo, pigeons, rabbits—Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Peter—and sheep joined the household. There was a cat called Miss Mewkins and a puppy named Pickle. Her father’s horse was Trotsky. This period was one of the few times she lived with her father.

At the end of the war, Tom Dray was promoted to Director of Administrative Services in the Survey of Egypt; the King awarded him the Order of the Nile (3rd Class) in 1924.11 Now in his forties, Tom’s career was at its height, but his marriage had sunk to its lowest point. Margery and Eve, aged five, returned to England. Tom visited but was visibly bored and restless, and Margery’s mother was a hard wedge between them.12 In her diary Margery records her sadness. In 1919, on her twelfth wedding anniversary she doubted that Tom would remember the day, and a year later she confessed: ‘it has come to this—that I daren’t remind him of our wedding anniversary because I feel he regrets it, and hates and despises me!’13 Apart from one year in 1921, Margery and Eve spent every Christmas between 1919 and 1924 in England, without Tom.

For much of her childhood Eve lived with her mother, grandmother and aunt at Lymington, a genteel tourist town on the south coast of England. Hers was a world of cloying feminine gentility ruled by an overbearing Grannie Mills in severe long black skirts. Almost every word was its diminutive—nannies, piggies, bunnies—and servants were simply Cook or Nurse. A dull household with little to leaven the discipline of obligation, whether religious or secular, although everyone was kind.14

Eve was the centre of interest for this clutch of women, who competed for her attention and spoiled her. Solitary and pampered, she never knew the rough and tumble of a life shared with siblings. She never had to compromise. She learned to do what was expected, handing around cakes and tea on social occasions, playing with children her grandmother approved of, learning to ride because her mother liked to hunt. Often alone, she escaped into books and used her weekly pocket money to buy children’s newspapers.

At six years of age Eve paid her first visit to her mother’s family home at Bisterne.15 Many years later she could remember vivid details of this visit and recorded them in case anybody might be interested in the ‘trivial, day-to-day details of life in a more leisurely and more gracious age’. She travelled to Bisterne with her mother and two aunts in her grandmother’s new Austin, driven by the chauffeur Davis who, much to her surprise kept a potato on the seat beside him. Cars had no windscreen wipers in those days and when it rained, he cut off a piece of potato and rubbed it onto the windscreen. ‘This seemed to make the rain run off more easily.’

They drove through farmland and open forest until finally at the end of a long curving driveway, they arrived at the grey two-storeyed house. The manor house lay in the middle of a park on the edge of the New Forest. Wild daffodils grew under cedar trees beside formal flowerbeds and tennis courts. There was a story that only white rabbits, as in Alice in Wonderland, were allowed to crop the green lawns; brown or multicoloured rabbits were shot. Mr Purtain, the gardener, spent most days tending the lawn with a broad mower pulled by Mole, the pony, who wore leather boots over his hooves to protect the grass.

The house itself had been remodelled and restored over the centuries, an odd mix of grand and domestic styles. It was built over various levels and Eve found its ‘geography’ complicated. At the front, two stone stairways passed under triple-arched doorways emblazoned with a coat of arms. Two stone creatures, the Bisterne dragons, sat atop each entrance, guarding the doors but in a domesticated, indolent fashion. Eve thought they looked more like dogs. She and her mother were welcomed by the housekeeper who curtsied and bustled around in an ankle-length dress and apron. Spicer, the butler, opened the door in tails and the footman in plum-coloured livery resplendent with the Mills family crest, showed her mother and two maiden aunts to their rooms. Years later Eve remembered:

Spicer escorted me back into the stone-flagged hall, down the stone steps, past the study and through the door … into the kitchen regions; down a long, stone-flagged, rather dark passage, past doors leading to the kitchen, pantry, scullery, butler’s pantry (where the footman spent hours polishing silver and glasses—wearing woven cotton gloves so as not to leave smeary finger marks—and sharpening the table knives on an emery board) and so on—right at the end was the House keeper’s Room, where I was entertained to tea by Mrs Wakenell (nobody would have presumed to call her by her Christian name: Harriet), a lady of uncertain age, in an ankle-length, close-fitting black dress.. I did not think it unusual that I should be sent off with the housekeeper. Most of my life I had spent in the nursery with my nurse and only briefly been ‘in company’ with grown-ups and visitors.

To the family’s surprise, her parents’ marriage was not over and when Eve was eleven they were reconciled. The family travelled in Belgium, France and Cyprus, visiting aunts and cousins, the extended Dray family. Summers meant dress-up parties and days of swimming or archery. Finally Eve was with young people her own age and revelled in it.

In 1926, aged twelve, Eve made her first trip to Cyprus, travelling by train to Marseille and continuing by sea to the port of Limassol on the south coast and on to Kyrenia, where the Dray family lived. North from Nicosia, the road travels through a narrow pass in the Kyrenia Range, guarded by the castle of St Hilarion. Against a cloudless blue sky the castle tumbles down the mountain spurs and ridges. Carobs with green fleshy leaves emerge from the rocks and in small flat areas the ancient twisted trunks of olives cling. The castle’s arches frame the view to the distance—of the Kyrenia plain and township and the Kyrenia Castle. Looking out to sea, low clouds hang over the south coast of Turkey and at the sea’s edge Kyrenia Castle sits grey and solid against the fluid, aqua-green waters of the harbour below.

Much later, Eve wrote that ‘certainly Cyprus was one of the British colonies, but we did not think of ourselves as “colonialists”, we were simply British people who happened to live in Cyprus’.16

All her life Eve called the island her ‘beloved Cyprus’.

By 1930 Tom Dray had retired from the Egyptian Survey and settled again in Cyprus, where he began amassing property in the north of the island. From England, Margery worried about the expense, but when later she joined him in Cyprus, she settled into a new and freer way of life. It suited her. Tom was building a house on land he had bought outside Kyrenia and he and Margery camped beside the building site. Margery made excursions to visit historic sites and compiled detailed botanical notes on the countryside, sending specimens to Kew Gardens and maintaining a lively correspondence with Eve, by now at school in England. From Kyrenia she wrote that they were ‘so used to being almost out of doors, all the time, in our camp, that we find a house or hotel frightfully “stuffy”—and mean to continue this sort of out of doors life as long as we possibly can’.17

Tom and Margery joined a growing colony of English people on the north coast of Cyprus, living an English life but without its restrictions and restraints. Kyrenia housed the largest English community on the island. Eve’s Dray grandfather and aunts lived there, together with a small group of English occupying a clutch of hotels and stone houses. Many had retired from Beirut, recreating the congenial and familiar world of English society while continuing to enjoy the benefits of a Mediterranean climate and lifestyle. In 1930 there were perhaps a dozen English residents in the town.

A quiet harbourside village hidden behind the mountains, Kyrenia offered picturesque scenery, easy access to Nicosia when needed, but a location at sufficient distance from this administrative centre to ensure both freedom and privacy.18 Before the First World War, only a thousand residents lived in the area and only nineteen of these were English. After the war, the Cypriot businessman, Costas Charalambous (or Catsellis), returned to Kyrenia from America, replete with New World prosperity and entrepreneurialism. He promoted tourism, and in 1930 his Dome Hotel opened for business. Tourists demanded services like taxis and public baths. They wanted places to stay and souvenirs to buy. They employed people to cook and clean and make their lives comfortable. Some visitors stayed. The population grew and Kyrenia prospered.19 Tom Dray’s family were part of this early development. Tom’s sister Ada Dray, together with her friend Miss Winnie Atthill, founded the first hospital in Kyrenia. The Old British Cemetery, originally established to serve the military presence in Northern Cyprus, became a civilian cemetery and on 7 November 1921 Tom’s father, Thomas Howard Dray, was the first civilian burial.20

Some idea of the expatriate life of the English community in Kyrenia can be gleaned from the writings of a retired colonel with the unlikely name Franklin Lushington. In the early 1950s he wrote a novel, Cottage in Kyrenia. It was The Year in Provence of its day and records in amusing detail, and from the wife’s point of view, the life of a privileged expatriate community. The main characters, Henry and his wife, land in Cyprus en route to a new life in Kenya—but they never leave. They camp on the seashore, drink pink gins in the evening and enter into the life of the community.

In Kyrenia one of life’s pleasures was to visit the English club’s bathing pool, a natural inlet on the shore to the east of Kyrenia Castle. It was here that the whole of social Kyrenia was to be seen.

It was pleasant to drive down to the pool in the mornings and meet one’s friends without feeling under any obligation to stay longer than one wished nor to talk to those to whom one had nothing to say … However little inclined to snobbism one might be there was, too, something mildly gratifying in the sight of an ex-Governor General conscientiously sunning himself after his bathe like any ordinary being, and asking Timothy, in a voice at the sound of which thousands of black men had once trembled, for a large lemon squash.21

At the urging of his wife, Henry decides to stay in Kyrenia and buys property from a Mr Roche, a thinly disguised portrait of Tom Dray, from whom Lushington had in fact bought land.

Although he was quite different from what I had expected I liked Mr Roche. He was a big, tall man with a drooping moustache and drooping, slightly bloodshot eyes, not unlike a melancholy St Bernard, but he was very kind and friendly … He and Henry got on very well together, chiefly because they were both keenly interested in cricket, a game about which I know absolutely nothing, except that it is the only thing the English get excited about and is responsible for some of the more incomprehensible English idioms.22

Cyprus was an English Crown Colony. The British authorities had established a Legislative Council but with no intention of giving Cypriots—either Greek or Turkish—much say in affairs. Greek Cypriots agitated for enosis or union with Greece, and the English authorities, with experience gained in other parts of their Empire, played Greeks off against Turks, while feigning impartiality. Only a few decades before the Drays settled in Kyrenia an Englishman living in Karmi was surprised to be taken to task for beating a Cypriot with a stick: ‘Why not? They’re only serfs,’23 he said.

A revolt against English rule erupted in 1931. Six people died, Government House was burnt to the ground, but the revolt was speedily put down. ‘Ringleaders in Cyprus have been arrested,’ Margery wrote in her diary in England, ‘and I expect it will soon be quiet’.24

Although Eve had briefly attended a day school in Egypt, most of her early education came from a Swiss governess, her first real friend. At twelve she entered Redmoor, a boarding school in Bournemouth on the English south coast, close to Bisterne. Eve kept a daily diary and in 1929 and 1930 she recorded, in cramped script filled with adolescent abbreviations, the daily routines of school life. She listed, in 1929, her team’s netball matches (they only lost three times), lacrosse (they only won twice) and games of tennis. She kept a record of exam results for English, French, Latin, Arithmetic, Science, Algebra, Geometry and Music. She was a consistent A student in Latin and French but her other results covered the full range.25

In 1928, aged fourteen, her class composition for the day was: ‘What I intend to do when I retire’. Eve toyed with the idea of buying a yacht with her friend Kay Brown and sailing, perhaps to the south of France. Another prospect was to go to Egypt to ‘dig about in the ruins of the old tombs and temples. They have always had a great attraction for me [and] I have longed to go and make a name for myself there, by discovering a new language, or something equally striking’. She worried about the heat but happily imagined herself grovelling in the sand ‘with a crowd of natives round to do the dirty work’.26 Such was ‘archaeology’ for an upper middle class girl in the 1920s.

For part of the seven years that Eve spent at Redmoor, Margery Dray returned to England to be close to her daughter and to act as a buffer between Eve and Grannie Mills. Although she knew that her grandmother loved her, Eve resented her control. Animals were Eve’s passion and she hoped to train as a vet, but Grannie thought it ‘no job for a lady’. Eve was only allowed the friends Grannie considered acceptable. Once a year Grannie organised a tennis party and Eve prepared a list of the friends she wanted to invite. Sternly checking the list, Grannie struck out those she considered unsuitable. Though outwardly placid, Eve seethed. Not until her late teens did she learn to feign headaches and so avoid unpleasant duties and escape on her own.27

One further reason for Margery’s return to England was that it was decided that Eve should try for Oxford. Whose decision this was is unclear, but it was remarkable. Redmoor was a small provincial school and the Oxbridge exams required more preparation than such a school could give. Eve sat the School Certificate exams twice in 1931, in the hope of increasing her credit and at the end of 1932 sat the Oxford exam. There is no record of her result, but in the middle of 1933, she left Redmoor for good and—her mother felt—with some regret.

Having failed the Oxford exams, Eve entered Royal Holloway College, the women’s college attached to the University of London, in November 1933. Between 1933 and 1937 she studied for a general Bachelor of Arts, majoring in French and Mathematics. Student life meant greater freedom and new friends. She joined the university theatrical group, performing in The Cherry Orchard and The Taming of the Shrew. She joined friends skating or cycling and returned to college late at night. Her ‘family’ consisted of ten girls, a large group of students for the time. They were a sporty crowd who played lacrosse and hockey and enjoyed harmless pranks. They dressed the statue of Queen Victoria in cap and gown and ‘ventilated’, a method of climbing through the transom window above the door to their study.28

Aged twenty, Eve appeared a serious young woman, beautiful but reserved, with an expression that gave little away until you took in those expressive dark eyes. Hair loosely rolled back from her face replaced childish long plaits. Short and with a tiny waist, she looked more delicate than she was. Although now an adult and free of her grandmother’s rule, the habits of a lifetime were established. Eve’s thoughts were always her own.

At university, as at school, Eve’s academic success was modest but her French was excellent and she had a grasp of the spoken language that her lecturer thought ‘exceptionally good … so much so, that for a time she attended Prose and style lectures for Honours students’.29 She regularly visited France or Belgium and spoke French fluently, idiomatically, and with a good accent. Despite these undoubted skills and a keen intelligence, she worked slowly and her exam results suffered. As she had the School Certificate, Eve sat her final exams twice and her results were disappointing, although the Principal assured her it was ‘a good III’. She took mathematics because it ‘amused her’,30 but she struggled with the subject. ‘I wish you could have had a second. I think you know quite enough for a second’, wrote one of her teachers. The school principal’s reference suggests a solid student, but one who is in no way outstanding:

Miss D.E. Dray is a student in her third year of residence. She passed the Intermediate Arts examination in 1934 and has since read for the B.A. General degree with French, Pure and Applied Mathematics … her French is very good, [and] … in Mathematics she works hard, but slowly, producing a small quantity, of satisfactory quality. Her teachers lay stress on her quick intelligence.

Miss Dray is personally attractive and a pleasant and intelligent companion. She has travelled more widely than most students and has a large range of interests outside her work. She is a good lacrosse player and a member of the college team. She is interested in art and archaeology and has some practical knowledge of the latter. I conceive that she will prove valuable in museum work, while her cultivated background, her charm of manner and her savoir faire seem to fit her admirably for the work of a private secretary.31

It was in London and Dorset that Eve discovered a penchant for practical archaeology. In 1937 Mortimer and Tessa Wheeler had founded the Institute of Archaeology in London. Mortimer Wheeler was one of the most celebrated British archaeologists of the early twentieth century, having worked at the National Commission for Historic Monuments, the National Museum of Wales, and as Keeper of the London Museum. For many years the Wheelers had hoped to create an institute for the study of practical archaeology but without funds, their plans remained in limbo. An anonymous donation of £10,000 to the Egyptologist Sir Matthew Flinders Petrie unexpectedly solved the problem. Flinders Petrie agreed to fund Wheelers’ institute if the institute, in turn, would take responsibility for Petrie’s archaeological collections from Palestine.32 Mortimer Wheeler believed the institute would professionalise the discipline of archaeology. It would, he hoped, give wings to the creature only just emerging from its chrysalis.33

Eve attended a series of lectures given by Mortimer Wheeler at the Institute of Archaeology and learned to mend pots and to draw them. Her tendency to slow, careful, methodical work now proved an asset. The institute provided archaeologists with space to work on their collections, and many recognised that this young woman had exceptional technical drawing skills. Wheeler asked her to draw some delicate and beautiful metalwork and she enjoyed the challenge of bringing it to life.34

The institute was one arm of Wheeler’s strategy to professionalise archaeology. The other was to increase public support for the discipline, thereby helping to raise funds for the systematic and scientific excavation work he planned to promote. Excavations at the site of Maiden Castle, an Iron Age hill fort in the county of Dorset, became his vehicle for both. The excavation would become an immense training dig where students and public volunteers would learn the principles of the grid-based stratigraphic methods that Wheeler had developed with Kathleen Kenyon. Work began in 1934 and for four seasons hundreds of volunteers and students carefully burrowed long narrow trenches across the massive oval earth mound, stripping away layers to uncover ditches and fortification walls—all clearly evident in the trench walls. Gradually a neat mosaic of grassy strips between chalky excavation pits patterned the slopes. The general public was encouraged to visit the excavations, where student volunteers guided them around the site. Visitors could purchase mementoes of their visit and over 64,000 postcards and 16,000 interim reports were sold, together with ‘trivial oddments such as beach-pebble slingstones, fragments of Roman tile, Roman oyster-shells, scraps of surface-pottery, all marked in Indian ink with the name of the site’.35

In 1936 one of the site supervisors was Joan du Plat Taylor from the Cyprus Museum. On her day off she visited friends from Cyprus, Margery and Eve Dray. ‘Why don’t you come over and see if you like archaeology?’ Joan suggested to Eve.36

Eve discovered a flair for the work. Her younger cousin Giles visited the excavations during his school holidays. He made his way past workmen pushing barrows of soil and carrying baskets of pottery sherds to the processing area, teetering on the top of narrow baulks dividing the excavation squares. When he finally tracked Eve down he was astonished to discover his cousin, gentle well-mannered Eve, sitting happily in a muddy trench with a pick and shovel and a row of forty grinning skeletons propped up beside her.37

Chapter 2

England and Cyprus, 1936–39

In 1937, at the end of her university studies, Eve returned to Cyprus to visit her mother. She followed her principal’s advice and volunteered at the Cyprus Museum, where she joined her friend Joan du Plat Taylor. Eve spent the weekends in Kyrenia with Margery and lived in Nicosia during the week with Joan and her mother. Joan was eight years older than Eve, thirty-one to Eve’s twenty-three. Although she had no formal academic training, Joan was well read and enthusiastic and had arrived in Cyprus in 1926 as archaeological work came to life after the war. At the Cyprus Museum Joan guided tourists through the exhibitions and manned the souvenir shop, putting out duplicate pots for sale to the general public. Gradually she took on more important roles, working closely with the newly appointed Assistant Curator Porphyrios Dikaios. Together they spent hours cataloguing museum objects, Joan typing catalogue cards to Dikaios’s dictation. Frequently they were called to investigate reports of finds or newly discovered tombs.

Every morning before breakfast the two young women saddled their horses to go riding before driving to the museum, where Eve worked with two other English volunteers, Judith Dobell and Rowena de Marchemund. The girls helped with ‘rescue’ digs or worked on the collection, checking photos, recording and cataloguing stone tools and pottery. Once a week they went to the Club, taking a gramophone and a pile of country dance records. Occasionally there were small dinner parties, and once there was a fancy dress ball. It was a close-knit group and they were a bit suspicious when a new Director, Peter Megaw, arrived to direct the Department of Antiquities.1

Although Eve was new to archaeology, the discipline itself was well established, albeit in a form unlike that practised today. For hundreds of years the standing ruins of the ancient world had beckoned European travellers and scholars clutching battered copies of Homer or Virgil. Everywhere around the shores of the Mediterranean, marble column bases propped open wooden doors of barns, and elegant, if broken, torsos lay in peasant fields. Strange writing on slabs of stone drew philologists to Egypt, Palestine and Persia and copies of these exotic scripts—cuneiform, hieroglyphics—made their way to London or Paris. Collectors scoured the world, buying or stealing whatever they thought valuable or interesting or important: the Elgin Marbles, the Nineveh winged bulls, Sumerian clay tablets, sculptures and pottery of every shape and style. Some of this activity was legal; much of it was not. All of it took little account of local sentiment.

Widespread amateur archaeology and antiquarianism continued well into the early twentieth century, fuelled by popular reports in the Illustrated London News and the enthusiasm with which wealthy upper class young men, schooled in the classics, made the Grand Tour to the Mediterranean or the Near East. Even in the nineteenth century, however, a more scientific approach was expected, and many European powers, together with the Americans, established archaeological ‘schools’ in Rome and Athens to support scholars and set standards. These and other learned societies attempted to guide the energies of these well-travelled and educated gentlemen. The British Government established an Archaeological Joint Committee, chaired by the British Museum and with representatives from most of the major archaeological societies in England, to provide the government with advice on archaeological issues throughout the Empire. In 1920, on the committee’s recommendation, the British Museum published a guide, How to observe in archaeology; Suggestions for travellers in the Near and Middle East. The Director of the British Museum, Frederick Kenyon, explained the handbook’s aim and stressed that travellers should respect the laws of the countries they visited.

Most, if not all, of the countries with which we are concerned, have their Laws of Antiquities. It cannot be too strongly insisted that those laws, even if they might be better than they are, should be obeyed by the traveller … The traveller who makes it his object to loot a country of its antiquities, smuggling objects out of it and disguising the sources from which they are obtained, does a distinct dis-service to archaeological science. Although he may enrich collections, public or private, half or more than half of the scientific value of his acquisitions is destroyed by the fact that their provenance is kept secret or falsely stated. Such action is equivalent to tearing out whole pages from a history and destroying them forever, for each antiquity, whatever it may be, is in its way a part of history, whether of politics, arts, or civilization. For the same reason anything like unauthorized excavation, especially by unskilled hands, is gravely to be deprecated. To dig an ancient site unskilfully or without keeping a proper record is to obliterate part of a manuscript which no one else will ever be able to read.2

The British Museum’s attempts to regulate the collecting of antiquities were in part a response to the unprecedented looting and pillaging that occurred during the nineteenth century. On Cyprus, for example, the American consul, Luigi Palma di Cesnola, amassed an astonishing collection of Cypriot antiquities during the 1860s—over thirty thousand objects—most with dubious provenance, which he proceeded to offer for sale: first to the French, then to the Russians and, finally, after a public exhibition in England aroused interest, to the newly created Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where he supervised the collection’s installation and took a place on the museum’s board. In 1880 he became Director of the Met. When Cesnola published an atlas of the collection, the book aroused interest in the history of Cyprus and led to an increase in legitimate archaeological excavations. The uncomfortable nexus between collecting, looting, publicity and increased excavation are all a part of the Cesnola story.3

Archaeologists profess an interest in the lives of the people and in the histories of the places they excavate, rather than simply a desire for the objects unearthed. In the 1930s, however, with no scientific methods to determine the age of either excavated settlements or objects, there were few ways to understand the histories of many excavated sites. The technique of radiocarbon dating to determine the absolute age of organic material would not be developed until 1949 and was not in widespread use until a decade later. In the absence of reliable methods to give the precise age of excavated material, the only way to understand the past was by using historical records where they existed or, in the case of prehistoric societies without written records, by comparing evidence within a site or across a region in order to estimate the relative age of places, to put events in order. Stratigraphy became the key to this understanding.

When people live in one place for a long time they discard rubbish, abandon buildings, reuse stone or mudbrick or timber, and over hundreds of years complex layers of history accumulate. It is the job of archaeologists to methodically strip away these layers, revealing older periods of history with each successive unpeeling. Objects found in an upper layer—a pot, a metal blade, a marble figurine—must be younger, say the rules of stratigraphy, than similar objects found in lower or older layers. Archaeologists construct relative chronologies this way, not just of a single site but of objects across sites. Complex ‘typologies’ based on the results of stratigraphy show how the shape or decoration of an object changes over time and when an object has no context—someone brings it to a museum, or finds it lying in their fields—it can be fitted into this chronological sequence. Because pottery was in such widespread use in the ancient world but is easily broken and frequently replaced, pottery typologies became the sine qua non of archaeological interpretation.

When the British assumed control of Cyprus in 1878 they were slow to protect the island’s antiquities, although they did build a museum and in 1899 the British archaeologist Sir John Myers prepared a catalogue of its collection. Not until 1905 did a new Antiquities Law^4 replace the earlier Ottoman one. This new law established a committee, chaired by the High Commissioner, to administer the Cyprus Museum. Archaeologists would have to obtain permits to excavate and could keep only artefacts the committee declared not essential for the museum. As a result of this law the collections of the museum expanded, and in 1908 authorities began work on a new museum in the capital, Nicosia.

In Cyprus, as in many other countries in the Near East, excavators operated under a system of ‘partage’ or ‘division’, which encouraged systematic excavation by promising a share of the finds to the sponsors of excavations. Archaeologists argued that without such agreements they would find it impossible to raise money for excavation work and, in any case, poor countries had few resources to mount scientific excavations of their own. Without a division of the finds to encourage scientific archaeology, they argued, looting would continue and information be irretrievably lost. Under the system, foreign archaeologists raised money for excavations by promising museum-quality material to financial backers, and poor countries without the means to mount their own archaeological work obtained material to showcase in national museums. The system did, of course, encourage excavators to concentrate on ‘rich’ sites, and on Cyprus this meant tombs.

Joan often talked about the time when the Swedish Cyprus Expedition had conducted excavations all over the island and she spoke fondly of one of the young members of the group, Alfred Westholm, who the Cypriots affectionately named Alfirios. The story of the expedition was already becoming part of Cypriot myth and Eve had heard it often. Its beginning could easily have been lifted from an Agatha Christie thriller involving, as it did, a chance meeting on a train, the loan of money, royal patronage, and a group of young men eager for adventure in exotic locations. Remarkably, the story is true, and best told by its principal protagonist, Einar Gjerstad.5

[In March 1922] Professor Avel W Persson of Uppsala was travelling to Greece. In a railway station in Serbia he struck up a conversation with a lively and nervous, somewhat oriental-looking man in his fifties. He asked the professor’s destination, and was told that Persson was on his way to Asine in Greece to conduct archaeological excavations.

‘I am absolutely mad about archaeology’, exclaimed this new found acquaintance. ‘What nationality are you, Professor?’

When he learned that Professor Persson was from Sweden, he became a volcano of cordiality, embraced Persson and cried: ‘Well then we are almost compatriots. You see I am the Swedish consul in Cyprus! My name is Luke Zenon Pierides.’

After some further conversation, the consul suddenly asked, ‘Could you let me borrow five pounds, Professor Persson? I ran into some bad luck. The Serbian Customs took all my money and I can’t get any more until I reach Constantinople.’

A further ten pounds was borrowed and the conversation continued. With little confidence that he would ever see his money again, Professor Persson found to his amazement that fifteen pounds was indeed waiting for him in Athens, together with a letter encouraging him to send an archaeological expedition to Cyprus. And so the Swedish Cyprus Expedition was born. Persson’s student Einar Gjerstad would direct it and the Crown Prince, an enthusiastic amateur archaeologist and later King Gustaf VI Adolf, gave the expedition royal patronage.

Between 1927 and 1931 the Swedish Cyprus Expedition excavated, in meticulous detail, important sites across the whole of the island, covering every period from prehistoric to Roman times. The exuberant, youthful energy of its members—archaeologists Einar Gjerstad, Alfirios Westholm, Erik Sjöqvist and the architect John Lindros—was contagious. The expedition brought a wealth of antiquities to the notice of the public and enlarged the collections of the Cyprus Museum. When work was completed, officials loaded 771 packing crates of antiquities at the harbour at Famagusta for shipping to Sweden.

It is against this background that Peter Megaw arrived in 1936 as the new Director of Antiquities. Born in Dublin and an architect by training, the twenty-six-year-old Megaw was already developing into a Byzantine scholar of distinction and an able administrator. A student of the British School at Athens, he had worked with the brilliant young archaeologist Humphrey Payne in Greece, where he had also met his artist wife, Elektra Mangoletsi. One of his first actions as director was to overhaul the protection of antiquities and ancient monuments in Cyprus.

He began by moving to regulate the sale and export of antiquities and placed public notices in hotels frequented by foreign tourists.

Visitors are urgently requested to purchase antiquities only from dealers displaying a license from the Department of Antiquities … To neglect this precaution is directly to encourage illegal excavation, which destroys much archaeological evidence and many objects of interest and value. The public is warned that imitations of antiquities are made and circulate in the island. In case of doubt the Department of Antiquities will gladly give an opinion, but can accept no responsibility.6

When tourists complained that it took too long to travel from the port of Famagusta to Nicosia for the necessary export licences, Megaw began to regularly check the stock of licensed traders to identify and approve artefacts for sale and export. He warned tourists against buying material that was not approved, but believed that it was ‘in the interests of the Department to stimulate the trade in antiquities through the authorised channels’. One of the three people who Megaw licensed as an approved antiquities dealer was Petro Colocassides. Eve would come to know him well.

In the same year that Megaw arrived, William Scorsby Routledge, an Australian, retired to Cyprus. Eve remembered meeting ‘a nice elderly gentleman’7 while sailing to Cyprus with her father. Tom Dray and Routledge became friends, perhaps more.8 Routledge and his wife Kathleen were explorers and adventurers who had studied the Kikuyu in Kenya and led an expedition to Rapa Nui, or Easter Island, in 1913, sailing there in their purpose-built ninety-foot schooner Mana. It was not a happy voyage and Routledge was a difficult man. One of the expedition members, a young Osbert (O.G.S.) Crawford, who would later found the journal Antiquity and pioneer aerial archaeology, found conditions impossible and jumped ship when they reached the Virgin Islands.9

By 1936 Kathleen was dead, Routledge had inherited her considerable wealth, and he was looking for somewhere to retire. Tom left the family home and moved with Routledge into a comfortable three-storeyed house on the outskirts of Kyrenia. While each continued separately to accumulate land and property, they agreed that whoever died first would inherit the other’s estate.10 Routledge died in 1939 and Tom Dray moved to Tjiklos, a forty-acre property situated on a plateau overlooking Kyrenia.

Eve’s mother lived at one end of the town and Tom at the other. It was, Eve thought, an amicable separation.

Joan continued to assume more responsibilities at the museum and was by now an experienced excavator. She had spent four seasons working with Mortimer and Tessa Wheeler in England, had worked alongside Porphyrios Dikaios at the Neolithic site of Khirokitia in the south of Cyprus and had wide and varied experience undertaking rescue digs across the island. Now she would direct excavations on the northern shore of the remote Karpas Peninsula, where the discovery of a patterned marble floor near a small church had held up plans for tourist developments in the area. For three seasons, Joan was the Department of Antiquities representative at the excavations at Ayios Philon, work that was sponsored by the Cyprus Museum and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Both institutions would share the excavated finds.

The Orthodox church of Ayios Philon sits facing a small ancient harbour and the setting sun. Along the shoreline the remains of a Roman jetty enclose a tiny harbour and stone blocks fitted together with sockets for iron clamps lie just above the high tide mark. Rock-cut tombs from all periods line the shoreline to either side. This is the site of Carpasia, said to be founded by the Phoenician, Pygmalion of Sidon. Archaeological investigations would span periods from the Bronze Age to the fifteenth century CE but primarily focus on the Early Christian basilica.

In the spring of 1937 Eve joined Joan for the third season of excavations. Judith Dobell teamed up with the two friends and with another of Eve’s pals from London and Maiden Castle, the Australian Margaret (Kim) Collingridge. For the girls this was a great adventure. They lived in a two-storeyed house that was let out to English holiday-makers in the summer, furnishing the downstairs room with camp beds and tables and chairs. The ceiling was made of matting and an odd assortment of small creatures, centipedes or spiders, often dropped onto them at night. There was an outside ‘convenience’ and in the evenings their cook brought a large tin tub of hot water to their bedrooms so they could bathe.

Judith worked with Joan at Ayios Philon, while Eve and Kim worked at a nearby site, Aphendrika, excavating Hellenistic tombs. They rode to the site each morning on their donkeys, with bundles of fresh lucerne attached to their saddles. The return trip, with cardboard boxes full of pots tied onto the wooden saddles, was decidedly less comfortable.11 Eve and Kim excavated with twelve workmen who had, they laughed, ‘improbable-sounding names such as Sophocles’. The girls giggled at the incongruity of instructions to their workmen. ‘Pericles, your work is very bad!’12

On the last day at Ayios Philon the boxes of pots and the beds and other furniture from the camp were loaded on a truck for Nicosia, while the girls spent their last night in the inn at the village of Rizokarpasso. As honoured guests they were given the best hand-woven sheets whose geometric patterns in green, red and yellow camouflaged the fact that the beds harboured fleas. As Judith crossed the landing to get the tin of Keating’s Powder (in those days used for protection from fleas) from Joan, she found the landing outside their room ‘carpeted’ with half a dozen sleeping men!13

As she had in London, Eve found work drawing archaeological material. Her drafting was skilful and in demand. Soon she began drawing for a young couple excavating a large cemetery called Vounous, near Bellapais, only a few miles from Kyrenia. Jim Stewart was Australian, his wife Eleanor English. The Stewarts were both aged twenty-four and well travelled. This was their second visit to Cyprus. In 1935, en route to Turkey, they had stopped to visit friends. Both fell in love with the island, its history and landscapes and they left determined to return. When not travelling or working abroad, Jim and Eleanor lived not far from Eve’s English family, at Park Cottage in Somerset. Now in Cyprus, Eve and her mother became the couple’s friends.

Eve, Jim and Eleanor were close in age and background. Except that one was blonde and the other brunette, Eve and Eleanor might have been sisters, both short and slim waisted, quietly spoken, well mannered and educated. Jim was the boldest of the three. Short and gangly he had the sort of Celtic complexion that suffers in the Australian climate, or in a Cypriot summer. A square jaw gave him a seriousness that his grin dispelled. Like Eve, he loved animals and adopted cats wherever he went. He knew his mind and did not take kindly to orders.

Chapter 3

England, Cyprus and the Near East, 1930–38

Jim Stewart sat with his luggage in the foyer of the Grand Hotel in Bombay, waiting for the Thomas Cook guide to take him to the railway station. After Jim’s bags had been loaded into the car they sped through crowds of men, women, children, cows and goats towards that grand building. People spilled over into the street and the guide pushed men and children aside, with Jim clutching his bags to his chest as they both leapt into the railway carriage. He gasped with delight when he saw the beautifully outfitted first class cabin on the Gujerat Mail. This was English Imperial India at its best, he thought, as he ran his hands over the leather seats and investigated the reading lights and fan, toilet, shower and adjoining accommodation for servants. But no bedding! His Trinity Hall scarf and overcoat across the seat became his bedding and his attaché case his pillow. Unorthodox certainly, but comfortable. He sat down, opened his writing case, and filed away the train’s menu to be included later in a letter to his father.

At Karachi he added photos, which he cross-referenced, and a list of his luggage, all forty-four pounds of it, including pyjamas, plus fours and dinner suits. As the train rattled through a landscape of peacocks and monkeys Jim noticed that the fences were stone, unlike the familiar timber ones he knew in Australia. A scrabbling at his window shutter alarmed him and he was glad he carried a pistol to scare off intruders. Jim Stewart was ready for anything.

Born in Australia, Jim Stewart had spent much of his childhood in Europe, his adulthood in England, and was well versed in travel between Australia and Europe. His family had money and influence, and as an only child Jim enjoyed the benefits of both.

After completing secondary school in Australia he had enrolled in 1930, aged seventeen, at The Leys School in Cambridge, where he spent two summer terms in preparation for entry to the University of Cambridge. Both his father and uncle were old boys of the school and had business connections with one of the school’s founders. Jim brought with him a reference from the headmaster of his Australian school, who recommended Jim as ‘a boy of excellent character and of more than average ability’,1 although his school report from The Leys provides a more measured view of his abilities. His history master thought that ‘for one so widely read, such work of his as I have seen, has been a little disappointing’, adding that ‘one has seen enough of it to be sure that he will do well at the Varsity and later on’. According to his English teacher, his writing was ‘clumsy’ and he was ‘far too confident and slapdash in his literary judgements … If he read more receptively and were a little humbler in his attitude, his work would gain immensely’.2 Jim’s life at The Leys scarcely rated a mention in the school’s records. He shot at the rifle competition in Bisley in 1931 but his personal score was the lowest of the team.3

Having passed the matriculation examination for entry into the University of Sydney, both Jim and his father assumed he could avoid the Cambridge entrance exam, but the headmaster of The Leys demurred. The whole affair seems ill considered and chaotic. In a letter to Trinity Hall, The Leys headmaster admitted that he had not yet received information from Mr Stewart as to which Tripos his boy would be taking at the university, and the boy himself did not seem to be sure.4 Jim entered Trinity Hall to read history and archaeology, a choice that is likely to have been his, rather than his businessman father’s.

Now in his first year at Cambridge, at the end of January 1932 Jim’s mother died suddenly in a hotel in Edinburgh. He was nineteen. Florence Stewart’s estate was valued at £8652 and £7000 was set aside for her only son.5 The newspaper notice of his mother’s death makes no mention of other family members and it is not clear whether anyone accompanied her remains to Australia, but she was buried at Wentworth Falls, in the Blue Mountains, in April of that year. Jim was certainly in Australia later for the university holidays.

Eager for adventure, Jim decided to take a side trip on his return to England, leaving his ship to travel by bus, train, and plane overland from Bombay to Port Said. Well travelled, confident and energetic, Jim had not only the exuberance and confidence of youth, but the services of Thomas Cook to pre-arrange details and his family’s money to prop him up should things go wrong.6

In Karachi Jim boarded a small bi-plane called the Kannibal for the flight to Persia. There were only two other passengers, an Italian on his way home from Kabul and an army officer on leave. Sitting with large-scale maps on his lap, Jim tracked their progress, scanning the landscape laid out below. Baluchistan looked an awful place, he thought, bare of vegetation. He traced the shadow of the plane across its vast baked sand plain. They landed to collect another passenger and ate lunch soon after take-off:

Beautiful asparagus, cold chicken and ham, peaches and cream, cheese and a bottle of beer, Imperial Airways do you well. It seems so funny to be having this over the desert wastes of Baluchistan.

He spent the night at Jask on the shores of the Persian Gulf. With the other passengers, Jim went swimming in the Gulf, naked ‘as an anti shark remedy’ and they slept on the beach ‘under [the] moon with a hot breeze which was very refreshing and with the noise of the uneasy Persian Gulf beating on our ears … It is amazing. Breakfast in India, lunch in Baluchistan, evening swim in Persia’. Jim wrote home, ‘Oh Dad how you would love this trip. I am just lost in wonder and interest’.7

At the end of the First World War, Britain had assumed control of areas previously part of the defeated Ottoman Empire. In what is now Iraq, British Arabists like Gertrude Bell promoted the region’s history and archaeology. She became the unpaid Director of the Department of Antiquities in Iraq and founded the Baghdad Museum. In the same way that classical texts led scholars to investigate the archaeology of ancient Rome and Athens, biblical writings provided the impetus for much archaeology in the Near East.

In 1922 Sir Leonard Woolley began excavating the ancient biblical city of Ur, sponsored by the British Museum and the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania.8 A prodigious talent, Woolley originally trained as a theologian and hoped that his excavations would shed light on the Old Testament by providing evidence for the life of Abraham and the Biblical Flood. In 1925 a young Max Mallowan joined his excavation team and, together with hundreds of local labourers, they discovered a royal cemetery containing over two thousand graves. All were excavated and recorded in exemplary fashion. Woolley understood the importance of popularising archaeology and regularly reported the results of his excavations in the Illustrated London News. These reports fed popular fascination with the area and its archaeology. In 1928 Margery Dray had joined the milling crowds at the British Museum to view the exhibit of material from Ur and three years later both Margery and Grannie Mills attended a public lecture given by Woolley himself in Bournemouth.9

In 1929 Woolley had uncovered evidence of human sacrifice. Bodies of men and women, gorgeously clothed in golden head-dresses, together with fantastic objects of gold and lapis lazuli, alabaster, silver and marble, were discovered lying at the entrance to the king’s tomb beside their slaughtered horses. This was something Jim longed to see.

Irresistibly close to Ur, Jim insisted on taking a side trip and walked with an Arab guide to the diggings. ‘The surface is covered with shards of pottery and shells’, Jim told his father. ‘We climbed the ziggurat …’ Jim was in his element. He passed Woolley’s bungalow (‘built of bricks from Ur!’) and the guard laid out a rug in the shade and they squatted, Arab-wise, to drink hot sweet tea.

It was wonderful, this dream tea in the court of a house of bricks from Ur in the desert and nearby was a dog kennel addressed ‘Mrs Leonard Woolley, Basra’ and a case of what was once beer.10

The train to Baghdad was full of desert sand and Jim advised future travellers to go by river! Thomas Cook was efficient as always, although Jim disputed the cost of the hotel. It was hot and he slept on the rooftop. He was disappointed with the Baghdad Museum and visits to mosques were forbidden. Nonetheless he visited local markets, where he bought a goat’s hair rug, which proved its worth during cold nights in the desert. ‘Please don’t think I used my letter of credit for it, for I paid for it myself’, he assured his father.

From Baghdad Jim travelled by bus to Damascus and Aleppo, making a detour to visit the ruins at Baalbeck. His overland adventure was complete when he passed through the Alicia Gates in the Taurus Mountains.

It is more beautiful than the Alps, not so fierce, for everything seems to smile from the little peaked shaped bridges to the very rocks themselves, towering above us … This pass has seen more history than any other.11

Jim’s love affair with the Near East had begun. He returned to Trinity Hall in Cambridge at the end of his visit to Australia, fired with determination to become an archaeologist. The Near East and archaeology were inextricably linked, and for Jim archaeology was always and only ever associated with exotic places.

Cambridge studies were hardly onerous. The archaeologist Glyn Daniel, one of Jim’s class of 1932, described the study of archaeology at Cambridge in the early 1930s:12 there was no formal supervision in either archaeology or anthropology and the Disney Professor of Archaeology, E.H. Minns, never expected students to come to his lectures and they obliged. Fortunately, there were other more successful teachers: Miles Burkitt lectured on the Old Stone Age and Toty de Navarro taught the Bronze and Iron Age in Europe, although it stretches credulity to think this was done effectively as he did not believe in using illustrations. By the time Jim graduated, Alan Wace had been elected as Laurence Professor of Classical Archaeology. The Director of the British School at Athens from 1914 until 1923, excavator of Mycenae and Deputy Keeper in the Victorian and Albert Museum, Wace brought a wealth of professional archaeological and museum experience to the department. Jim looked to Wace for support and guidance, and Wace thought highly of him.

One of the Research Fellows at Glyn Daniel’s college was Louis Leakey, who would work at Olduvai Gorge in East Africa, and revolutionise our understanding of human evolution. Daniels remembers a field trip taken by a group of students to investigate flint mines near Brandon in Suffolk:

We were being driven back at breakneck speed by my contemporary, James Stewart … Louis, who was sitting in the back with me, leaned forward after a while and said ‘When the inevitable accident occurs, as it will do if you go on driving like this, could you see I am not killed? I have a great deal of important work to do in Africa’. We arrived back in Cambridge safely.13

Reports on Jim’s university life filtered back via the old boy network to his former school, The Kings School in Sydney. He coxed the Trinity Hall first boat^14 but a year later, at ten stone, had become ‘a spectator on the tow-path, having outgrown a coxing weight’.15 He took his degree in Archaeology and Anthropology in 1934^16 and was said to be leading a halcyon existence. The ‘old boy correspondent’ for The Kings School magazine wrote laconically that for Jim, ‘doing research amounts to rising at 10 a.m. and spending week-ends in Devon and places; and as a reward for these labours he wins a scholarship, just recently announced’. Stewart was, it seems, a golden-haired boy.

Jim’s weekends were spent in Somerset, not Devon. Eleanor Neal’s family owned property in the parish of Kingsdon and Jim was friends with her brother at university.17 Eleanor was a graduate of the Gloucester School of Domestic Science and a few months older than Jim. Sometime in the early 1930s she taught at a school in Birmingham but the details are lost.18 During university holidays Jim had his first opportunity to join an archaeological excavation, and Eleanor went with him.

In 1933 Sir Flinders Petrie, a towering figure in the history of archaeology, was aged eighty and undertaking what was to be his last excavation, at the ancient mound of Tell el ’Ajjul in present-day Gaza in Palestine. Sir Matthew Flinders Petrie was named for his grandfather, Matthew Flinders, the great seafarer, navigator and cartographer who sailed with William Bligh, and who between 1801 and 1803 was the first person to circumnavigate the continent of Australia. Matthew Flinders did not invent the name ‘Australia’ but was certainly the first to encourage its use for this new continent. Matthew Flinders died in 1814 aged forty, and ten years later his widow and daughter were belatedly voted a pension by the Government of New South Wales. Although the pension arrived too late for his widow, now dead, his daughter announced that she would use the money for the education of her son. This son, Flinders’s grandson, was Matthew Flinders Petrie who went on to become one of the earliest and most prolific of Egyptologists.

The ’Ajjul excavations, however, were not a success. Petrie’s methods were out of date, he did not understand the stratigraphy of the site, and he had no interest in what other excavators in the same area were doing. Although he published material promptly, most archaeologists now disagree with his chronology for the site and his findings. To condemn all this, however, is churlish. Even the British archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler, someone only too happy to denounce poor excavation methods as ‘digging for potatoes’, recognised the unfairness of judging by the standards of a different age. In 1936 he had visited the Near East and would have written more but ‘The intricacies of the law of libel are beyond my ken … It will suffice to say this: that from the Sinai border to Megiddo and on to Byblos and northern Syria, I encountered such technical standards as had not been tolerated in Great Britain for a quarter of a century’.19 Nonetheless Wheeler acknowledged Petrie’s formidable powers:

Younger generations have sometimes blamed him for sinning against their own standards, forgetful that the immense stretch of his working life extended long after his period of intellectual receptiveness had passed. We might as well blame Xerxes for not deploying torpedo-boats at Salamis.20

For part of Petrie’s fourth season at ‘Ajjul, from November 1933 to April 1934, Jim and Eleanor worked on his dig. It cannot have been a happy visit. Petrie’s diaries make it clear that, although the couple were on site for forty-four days, for almost a quarter of that time wet weather made work impossible, and in any case both Petrie and his wife Hilda were sick for much of the month. A terse note on 13 January 1934 simply records, emphatically, ‘Stewarts both left’.21

Jim made detailed notes of the work at ’Ajjul and the experience gave him the opportunity to boast of having worked with one of the great men of archaeology. Later he would claim that Lady Petrie had hoped he would return to the site to re-investigate it,22 but there is no way to know whether this is true, and correspondence between Sir Flinders and Lady Petrie makes no mention of Jim. Many years later Jim admitted that Petrie ‘poured scorn’ on him and was a harsh teacher and critic. But in time he was grateful for this training and acknowledged that it was Petrie who impressed on him the need for a broad understanding of the Near East by encouraging him to study not just the prehistoric past, but Crusader, Byzantine and Islamic history. Jim maintained that Petrie was one of those with an ‘intuitive grasp’ of the past. ‘In archaeology, as in any human subject,’ Jim said, ‘there are facts that one can master by instinct, but that are not at the time capable of proof. And this instinct can only be acquired by wide knowledge’.23 ’Ajjul was to be important in Jim’s archaeological development and he always claimed that his later work on Cyprus was aimed at solving chronological problems first encountered there.

Jim and Eleanor were engaged in April 1934, two months before Jim’s final exam results were published in The Times. In Jim’s class of twenty students completing Section A of the Archaeological and Anthropological Tripos, only Glyn Daniel was awarded first class Honours and Jim always claimed that he would have done better had he not spent so much time at the weekends courting Eleanor. Jim’s father possibly met Eleanor around this time because he certainly travelled to England late in 1933.24 Jim and Eleanor married on 1 July 1935 and lived in a house they both loved, Park Cottage, in Somerset.25

In 1935 and 1936 Jim received the Cambridge University’s Wilkins fellowship^26 to support continued archaeological work or, as the Kings ‘old boy’ reported, he went abroad ‘to Palestine or somewhere in the neighbourhood’.27 It was on this trip that he encountered the young, genial Alfred Westholm of the Swedish Cyprus Expedition and made his first recorded visit to Cyprus. This visit set in train all that followed.

Before taking up the fellowship, and a month after their wedding, Jim and Eleanor sailed for Australia. This was Eleanor’s first trip to Australia and no doubt she was keen to meet her husband’s family, but according to Jim the visit was not a success. Jim’s father had remarried and Jim complained about the ‘female avariciousness’ of his step-mother Hope who, he believed, had ‘annexed’ his mother’s china and silver. He and Eleanor were ‘hard at it restoring lost prestige etc.’ Their (or was it only his?) problems made them both more determined to ‘stay as archaeologists’.28 Jim reported to his Cambridge lecturer Alan Wace that they had both decided they could not ‘under any circumstances’ live in Australia, which at least ‘clears the field’.29 On the other hand they used the visit to collect household things for England and also discovered that Australia was an excellent place to buy camping gear, acquiring equipment in preparation for fieldwork. At the same time they investigated Leica camera gear so they could experiment with ‘photomerography’ as a way of distinguishing types of pottery, fabric and design. They began to prepare what they grandly called a ‘Corpus Vasorum’ for their reference. Simply put, this was a ‘scrapbook’ of photographs of objects taken from existing publications to use later as a reference in the field.

In the 1930s it was possible to imagine that the whole of the past could be understood. Few people truly appreciated the depth of antiquity or its complexity; fewer still recognised how much would increasingly be discovered through scientific methods as yet unknown. The 1930s was the age of the ‘corpus’, enormous catalogues of museum material collated and categorised. It seemed only reasonable to Jim and Eleanor that a similar body of work could collate Near Eastern material.

In Australia Jim spent time trying to raise funds for future excavations, admitting to Wace that he had to ‘shelter a lot behind Sir Flinders Petrie and the British School in Egypt … His name here is very nearly magical’.30 It is probably on this visit that he first made contact with Walter Beasley, a Melbourne businessman, devout Christian and owner of Young’s Transport. With luck, Jim might tap into this financial resource, writing his first published paper on three Cypriot pots in Beasley’s collection of Biblical antiquities.31 Besides the Wilkins Fellowship, Jim was prepared to use the couple’s wedding money on excavations if necessary.

Full of plans, they boarded the SS Maloja late in 1935 bound for the Near East. ‘The family still considers I am insane but the obstacles have been cleared away.’32 They would travel to Turkey, where they were to join excavations directed by the archaeologist Winifred Lamb. Eleanor’s experience made her the perfect excavation cook.33 Noel Wheeler, who they had met at ’Ajjul, invited them to join him on Cyprus, where he was digging for the Cyprus Museum. Although they knew nothing of the place, Jim speculated: ‘I suppose Cyprus is a Greek land, because it seems to me, heretically I suppose, that several Asia Minor problems can be understood by Cypriot studies.’ En route they planned to visit Jerusalem, Damascus, Istanbul, Ankara, Troy and Pergamum. Jim left with ‘some regrets for my old home but keen anticipation for our wanderings’.34

By November Jim and Eleanor were in Jerusalem. They met up with Sir Flinders Petrie, who took them to a meeting of the Palestine Oriental Society, where discussions concerned ‘some wretched Biblical site’ but ‘the German nearly made one weep—and Père Abel’s French was inaudible’.35 They were charmed by the German archaeologist Kurt Bittel, met friends of the American Hetty Goldman and planned site visits with the biblical archaeologist William Albright, but these were cancelled because of bad weather. Eleanor was developing into an excellent draughtswoman and photographer and Jim spent time visiting museums investigating Luristan daggers. Both scoured the markets for souvenirs as all young tourists do—they bought embroideries and an old Armenian chest.36

At the end of the month they sailed for Cyprus, where Noel Wheeler met them and became their host and guide. They were enchanted with the island and its people and antiquities. Not only did Jim come to love the island’s landscapes but he believed they taught him more about the effects of erosion and deposition than anything he had encountered in print. Looking at the mad shapes of the Pentadactylos, those five fingers of the Kyrenia Range whose stumps leer up at the sky like a madman’s curse, he felt he had ‘a much better understanding of the influence of the environment which must had led to such weird pot forms. I feel that if I had been a Cypriot Bronze Age potter I would have made some very extraordinary shapes’.37 No one who has wondered at the bulging mounds of the Pentadactylos Mountains could disagree.

For some time Jim and Eleanor stayed with the Director of Antiquities, John Hilton, who also lent them his car to explore the island, and through him met the curator at the Cyprus Museum, Porphyrios Dikaios. Dikaios was interested in the earliest periods on Cyprus; Jim moaned that he had ‘Neolithic on the brain’. But Dikaios was helpful, and together they enjoyed debating theories and issues of disagreement—were the Neolithic connections of Cyprus with Anatolia? Was it a true Neolithic or rather Chalcolithic? Dikaios had excavated tombs in an Early Cypriot cemetery complex at Vounous in Northern Cyprus and recently the French archaeologist Claude Schaeffer had worked there as well. Jim puzzled at the pottery from these tombs, such crazy and bizarre shapes. Jim met all the people then working at the museum, recently reorganised and incorporated into a new Department of Antiquities. The assistant curator, Joan du Plat Taylor, had only just returned from two months leave in England during which time she had excavated a Roman forum site in Leicester with Kathleen Kenyon and it is likely the Stewarts met her at the museum. Perhaps they discussed her plans for a new handbook of the collection.

Hilton’s appointment as the Director of Antiquities was not to last for much longer. Jim complained to Alan Wace that Rupert Gunnis, then Inspector of Antiquities, had ‘fomented complaints’, which had led to Hilton’s dismissal and imminent removal. According to local villagers, Gunnis also dealt in antiquities. This was more or less generally known, Jim said, both on the island and abroad amongst archaeologists—the Wellcome Museum in London had bought some of Gunnis’s collection and further pieces were sold at Sotheby’s in 1933. It was rumoured that Gunnis even instigated the plundering of a tomb by night and got the contents out either by signing his own export permits or by carrying it in his personal baggage, but there was no single incident that could be proved. Jim believed that Sir George Hill, Director of the British Museum, was trying to secure his dismissal for the tomb robbery and thought Porphyrios Dikaios at the Cyprus Museum could supply relevant information. Jim wrote to Wace in some length ‘because it seems to me a very serious matter’.38

Jim’s concern is telling. A collector himself, wherever he travelled Jim hunted down coins and sat in cafes waiting expectantly for villagers to offer objects for sale. He had no qualms about this and most of what was offered he purchased legally. Most authorities granted export licences for antiquities bought from reputable dealers, although growing nationalist voices raised objections and changes would later come. Collectors feared these increasing restrictions, but the issue is complex. Everyone collected; being a serious archaeologist was irrelevant. During this period Jim collected sherds and bought pots for Lewis Clark at the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Jim wrote regularly to Alan Wace describing the material he was sending and there is no suggestion of impropriety. Commercial dealing in antiquities by an Inspector of Antiquities was another matter, however, and Jim was scandalised.

After Cyprus the Stewarts sailed for Greece but found Athens a disappointment and Jim thought the National Museum ‘a horrible mess’. They celebrated Christmas at the British School, enjoyed meeting Peter Megaw, who was about to take up a position in Cyprus, but found few other kindred spirits and in any case ‘Jim had a cold’. Greece suffered, he decided, by comparison with Cyprus.39 In January 1936 Jim and Eleanor finally arrived in Istanbul to prepare for the archaeological research the Wilkins Fellowship was to sponsor.

Archaeology evokes mystery and romance. Eager young students dig into the earth with fine tools and fierce concentration, sifting through layer upon layer of dirt and mudbrick, searching for pottery sherds and listening for the dull clunk of metal. People squat in the dirt, their hair, clothes and heavy boots caked with mud or clay. Others stand at the sieves picking through small stones and grass for slivers of bone, while the director bends down with a tape measure to talk intently with a workman.

The reality rarely meets expectations. Mostly, it is boring and routine and not all of it involves excavation. The Stewarts spent six months in Turkey but only a small proportion of this time involved excavation. For the remainder of the time, Jim and Eleanor visited museums and villages and walked or drove through the countryside with a notebook and camera. They drew and photographed objects in museums, all the while building a visual reference for use when they visited other museums, or when excavating. Their collection of photos and drawings, begun earlier in Australia, was little more than a personal field guide, but to Jim it was the beginning of something more, a ‘corpus’, a body of work. A collector at heart, Jim needed to hold things in his hands, to feel the shape and texture of objects, to own them. It was how he understood things.

Collecting is a way of creating order, of grouping things, of putting them in place. It was then fashionable for children to collect objects, and boys and girls the world over filled albums with stamps or coins from countries they had scarcely heard of—Liechtenstein, Monaco, Bechuanaland. Most children lose interest quickly. Others become collectors. They sort and arrange, fiddle with cellophane packets and catalogue. But the dilemma—always—is how to arrange these stamps or coins. Should it be by date or colour, by country or size? How many different categories are there? Which is best? With fifty stamps it makes sense to sort one way, but what about when you have five hundred or five thousand? Maybe if you could collect all the stamps or coins you would know how best to arrange them, what categories to use. You would find the solution. This idea—of collating everything in order to understand it—was to remain with Jim. He needed the whole before he could understand the component parts. He pursued the idea and in turn it ensnared him.

In the bazaars of Istanbul the Stewarts searched for antiquities and antiques. Jim joked that the dealers must read The Times^40 because they knew exactly what the Wilkins Fellowship was worth and adjusted their prices accordingly. In nearby villages they visited popular cafes where locals brought objects to them. They bought some but were careful not to be fooled by forgeries, although Jim was equally fascinated by the skills of ancient metalworkers and modern forgers. Most of all Jim and Eleanor wanted information about where the objects came from, a time-honoured method of ‘finding’ sites. Although some villagers were forthcoming, others were not. A site with saleable objects was valuable, a bank to be drawn from, and there was little incentive to give it away. Jim had to win their trust.

Jim’s research plans would not prove easy to realise because he hoped to conduct his own excavations in Turkey, to investigate new sites. Yet he seemed blithely unaware of the necessary formalities. On arrival in Istanbul Jim had met the foreign archaeological community and they were not optimistic. He called on Dr Schede and Kurt Bittel at the German Archaeological Institute. Schede was frankly discouraging, and in his very courteous manner hinted that their mission was foolish. It was quite easy to see sites which were known, but otherwise permits were difficult to get and it had taken Bittel three months to get one! It was impossible to explore without a commissioner, for which the Turkish Government would charge £4 sterling a week plus food and travelling expenses. Bittel suggested that, as they needed to pay for a commissioner in any case, why not make for a known site and dig test pits, or sondages, for a month? They decided to try for a newly looted site at, or near Balekeşir.41 From this distance it seems remarkably naïve that a student could arrive unannounced and expect to conduct excavations in a country he knew nothing about. It is equally mystifying that Cambridge would sponsor such an enterprise.

For much of their time in Turkey Jim was forced to negotiate with the Turkish authorities. He was not good at it. In Istanbul and Ankara he had to deal with savvy politicians and bureaucrats. He spoke little Turkish, a foreigner with no understanding of the complexities of the country. He condemned the military, criticised the incompetence of museum officials and wrote to Alan Wace that, although his departmental contact ‘does try very hard to be scientific … they all have silly ideas in their blood, and no amount of Western teaching will overcome their natural racial pride and stubbornness!’42 He persevered, railing against the authorities but determined to excavate, finally obtaining a permit to survey sites in the province of Balekeşir, in the northwest of Turkey, east of Çanakkale, where the site of Troy is located. In March he and Eleanor, together with ‘Johnny’, the Turkish Government representative, explored the region. Together they walked and drove and rode across the countryside looking for clues to what lay buried beneath.

Though the earth is solid, it is not stationary. Time and insects and the movements of plants and animals grind and turn the soil, and objects long buried sink deeper or move to the surface. Everywhere in the Near East, when you bend to the earth, you find pottery. Broken tiles, rounded bases, sometimes the lip of a cup or a fragment of decoration. You are never alone in this landscape; all around are the stories of people who ate and drank and lived and loved at the very place where you stand. Days or decades or centuries or millennia ago a young woman broke her cooking pot and swept it out the doorway, a farmer dropped his knife on the way home and did not notice it was gone, a child lost her toy as she skipped home. These objects lie there, buried by wind and earth and, like the bones of long dead horses or cows or mammoths, are exposed when wind and water strip the earth away. From these fragments of life’s detritus archaeologists imagine stories and try to understand the things that are lost forever—the song the mother sang as she swept the floor, the worry about the failing crops, the childhood game.

Jim was not immune to the romance of either archaeology or of travel. At twenty-three, and in the process of learning archaeology, he fell in love with a place—or was it the other way around? The two loves entwined. The landscapes and local cafes where the villagers brought pots to sell, the joys of riding in the open, of reaching down to find sherds scattered on the ground, the thrill of understanding the way a landscape has formed over time and the knowledge that one is only skimming over the surface. Everyone who loves archaeology comes to love the ground they walk on, to respect it.

Like travellers before and since, Jim tried to describe their exotic life.

Sometimes we would spend a night in a village as the guests of the villagers; at night, after the pilav … had been removed, we would sit on the floor with an ever growing circle of villagers about us, gossiping while the tobacco smoke thickened and the rain beat on the shutters … The talk would be of all things; how to convert a piece of rail into a good knife blade, the prospects of the tobacco crop, the quality of the local wool as compared to the English, what was London like, how far was it to England (How long would it take to go there?), where was Australia, did we find the drinking water here more palatable than in Stambul (where we think in beer, the Turk thinks in water) … With the spring came the flowers, and the storks, whose clamorous bill-clapping made sleep after dawn impossible, and the country became even more attractive: it was satisfying at sunset to see the cattle fording a river on their way back to a village, or to watch water buffalo wallowing in a mud pool; to ride … over the hills and across the valley, to lie beside a spring after lunch high up in the hills and survey the plains spread out like a map below … The friendliness of the people was more marked now that we were known, and when you’re coming home dirty from the day’s wander it is a pleasure to anticipate a hot bath and to know that your old friend at the eating shop will have put aside some choice kebub (little bits of meat strung on a spit and roasted over an open fire) and a dish of yogurt, however late you may be.43

In fulfilment of his fellowship, Jim sent Alan Wace a report on the Prehistoric Sites in the Balekişir Region. The scholarship was Jim’s but the report is in Eleanor’s handwriting.

At last Jim found a site that he wanted to excavate, near Babaköy in northwestern Turkey. It was, he claimed, where all the Yortan pots were coming from and he asked Wace if there was any way he could get extra funds to pay excavation costs. Fearing that the Wilkins money would not cover all his expenses, he planned joint excavations with Kurt Bittel. Wace advised Jim to apply for a Sladen scholarship, which he did, although in his application he failed to mention Bittel’s involvement in the project, or his determination to excavate with or without funding.44

While waiting to finalise plans, the Stewarts visited Troy where the archaeologist Carl Blegan invited them to stay for a fortnight. The Sladen money came through and after much to-ing and fro-ing Stewart and Bittel began excavations at Babaköy, although Bittel initially refused to acquiesce to what he considered unreasonable Turkish demands. Bittel would do the planning and Jim was happy to learn. Eleanor was the photographer. Work would last only a week and was rushed. On the first day they arrived at three in the afternoon and had begun digging an hour later.45

For only a little over three days Jim, Eleanor and Bittel excavated at different parts of the site but most of the tombs had already been damaged by ploughing or looting. One grave was a double burial. Today—in light of the scientific methods now common and the cultural sensitivities now recognised—it is distressing to read of the extraction of one skeleton: ‘the bones were riddled with fibre and nothing short of a cellulose spray outfit would have got them out; wax was useless and in the end we had to be content with a few long bones and the skull’.46

Jim and Eleanor’s photographic catalogue was proving useful. Babaköy did indeed produce Yortan pottery, the distinctive black-slipped and burnished jugs common to Turkish burials and now known to date to the middle of the second millennium BCE. In one grave Jim found a Yortan pot identical in shape and style to a pot he had seen at the Cyprus Museum. The Cyprus pot came from Tomb 39 at Vounous and if the Vounous pot was, as Jim believed, a Yortan import, then this connection could be the key to linking sites in Cyprus and Turkey. This find alone might clarify relative chronologies in the Near East. It might prove the missing link.

After Babaköy Jim and Eleanor spent a further two months excavating at Kusura in Anatolia, with the pioneering female archaeologist Winifred Lamb. In 1936 Winfred Lamb was forty-two and an experienced field archaeologist.47 As a member of the British School at Athens she had excavated at Mycenae, Sparta and in Macedonia and her experience as Honorary Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge extended her interests into later classical periods. Even so, she was a woman and her position at the museum was, and remained, unpaid. She wanted to investigate the connections between the northern Aegean, the Balkans and Anatolia and this led her to excavate the site of Thermi on the island of Lesbos between 1929 and 1933, and to visit Troy where she undertook a broad survey of the prehistoric mounds of the area surrounding the site. Now she was working at Kusura, where a provincial town had thrived on the route between Troy and Smyrna during the fourth millennium BCE.48

Winifred was a friend of Max Mallowan’s wife, Agatha Christie, and of the writer Dorothy L. Sayers and tried her hand at crime-writing in a series of light-hearted short stories, including one called The Inspector Interferes, set on an excavation in Turkey. Twenty-four year old John Buchanan from Cambridge and his wife Lucy are probably based on Jim and Eleanor. John is sick in bed and Lucy, ‘a charming lady, oddly enough not as modern in her outlook as one would expect’ fusses over him. The Turkish Government representative, the inspector Halil Bey, is murdered—stabbed with a recently excavated bronze pin. Mustafa, a Turkish archaeologist proud of his progressive attitudes, adopts the role of Sherlock Holmes. Suspicion falls on John, whose hostility to the inspector is well known and whose arrogant display of petulance is embarrassing to friends and colleagues alike.

He had been in bed for several days and now wore a Chinese dressing gown over his pyjamas. His face was paler than usual, and there were dark circles round his eyes, for he was still recovering from a bad attack of some kind of fever … ‘I know what you are all thinking’, Buchanan exclaimed ‘and I know that I said last night that I would like to kill him. But really I would not be such an ass. It’s just the sort of thing the dirty little beast would do, though, to get himself murdered and all of us put in prison just when the dig is half way through …’49

This was, after an initial surveying year, Lamb’s first excavation season at Kusura and digging lasted ten weeks. Jim worked on the cemetery, the results of which he hoped to publish, and maintained a detailed diary and pottery record. He and Eleanor thought Miss Lamb ‘great fun’50 and Winifred thought highly of Jim, believing he had ‘the most essential qualification for an archaeologist: a great enthusiasm for his profession’.51 Jim later admitted that she also saw his weaknesses. His worst fault, she warned, was his ‘seeking after perfection’, a flaw that, she cautioned, might inhibit him from publishing his ideas.52 Pedantic and demanding with others, in Jim himself this obsession could lead to paralysis.

Another of Jim’s ‘faults’ emerged twenty years after the 1936 season at Kusura. Winifred Lamb faced a dilemma at the Fitzwilliam Museum when the renowned Turkish archaeologist Dr Halet Çambel was due to visit. Diplomatically, Winifred decided to remove from view the pots from Babaköy that Jim, she was fairly sure, had smuggled out of Turkey without a permit.53

In August of 1936, after a year of travel and archaeology in the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East, Jim and Eleanor boarded a ship at Port Said for their return to England. They looked forward to being back in Park Cottage, but theirs was to be only a temporary return. In the column on the ship’s register listing ‘intended future permanent address’, they both wrote ‘foreign countries’.54

Jim was determined to return to Cyprus and hoped to excavate at the Bronze Age cemetery of Vounous, in order ‘to test, as far as possible, the connections between Cyprus and Anatolia in the Early Bronze Age’.55 The cemetery was well known to archaeologists and tomb robbers alike and Jim now wrote seeking backing from colleagues, institutions and the all important Archaeological Joint Committee. In his letter of recommendation, Sir John Myers noted Stewart’s experience excavating with both Winifred Lamb and Kurt Bittel. Myers wrote formally to the Chief Secretary in Cyprus and informally to Peter Megaw, and gave Jim practical excavation advice and offered to lend him equipment.56 The great Australian prehistorian Gordon Childe was less positive. Although he felt there was a need to investigate the island’s prehistory, particularly ‘as Cyprus is still under the heel of British imperialism’, he doubted the value of excavating yet more tombs, given the amount of work the Swedes had done. Childe complained bitterly at the failure of excavators to publish, and doubted Jim would get any financial support.57

Jim applied to Peter Megaw for permission to excavate at Vounous near Bellapais. He also asked for ‘free hand to dig test pits or “sondages” at any sites of interest on the North Coast, to be selected later in consultation with yourself, it being understood that the expedition will not consider that such sondages give them any archaeological claim to the site or sites in the future’.58 This was a remarkable request, given that Jim had not yet obtained permission from any landowners and that the law made no distinction between excavation and ‘test’ excavations such as he proposed;59 Jim wanted ‘carte blanche’ for his activities, free from administrative or bureaucratic restrictions.60 As Megaw pointed out to the Colonial Secretary, Jim Stewart would have quite enough to do getting his excavations of Vounous published, and nothing was to be gained by locating sites if there was no money either to excavate or to protect them from looters.

In the end Jim managed to raise the money. The British School at Athens gave institutional backing but no cash. Actual financial subscribers included the owner of the Birmingham Post, Sir Charles Hyde, the businessman, Sir Charles Marston, the Craven Fund of the University of Cambridge, the Australian businessman, W.J. Beasley, Jim’s father, A.A. Stewart, and the Sladen Fund of the Linnaean Society of London. There was also an anonymous donor who may well have been Jim himself. Years later he claimed to have spent £1500 of his own money on the work, although the figure may well be a deliberate exaggeration.61

Once more, the Stewarts closed up Park Cottage and sailed for Cyprus, where they would set up house in Bellapais. The village of Bellapais hangs from the northern face of the Kyrenia Range, the ruins of its Gothic monastery perched at the edge of a natural terrace overlooking the plain and sea below. The Abbey de la Paix, originally an Augustinian monastery, was founded by Aimery de Lusignan around the year 1200 but later came under the strict rule of a Frankish order of monks, the Norbertines. Royal benefactors contributed to the abbey’s wealth and its bishops grew in importance. The Venetian rulers of Cyprus shortened its name and it came to be known as Bellapais. When the Turks conquered the island, the abbey became an Orthodox Church but the buildings were neglected and fell into disrepair. The church itself continued as a parish church for the village that grew up around the abbey, its inhabitants mostly the descendants of the monks.

The Vounous cemetery was situated on a hill in the northern foothills of the Kyrenia Range, with a wide and picturesque outlook.

On a clear day the Taurus Mountains in Asia Minor stand like a cloud along the northern horizon, and eastward the tongue of the Karpas peninsula can be seen almost as far as Cape Plakoti, while to the South the sheer mass of the Kyrenia mountains curtails the sunlight on a winter afternoon.62

Over the next year and a half Jim and Eleanor would excavate eighty-four Early Cypriot rock-cut tombs there, located in two separate burial grounds. They would remove a vast quantity of artefacts, many now exhibited in museums in England, Australia and America: wonderful and quirky pottery, large and bulbous, often burnished red or black. In their publication of the site, Jim and Eleanor named the landowners on whose property they worked, a respectful acknowledgement of Cypriot ownership. They employed local workmen, many of whom would remain lifelong friends.

The Stewarts set up house in the abbot’s quarters adjoining the abbey. Their workspace was a huge room, originally the Abbey’s Great Hall, facing the village square. Opening off this room were smaller rooms, used as bedrooms and a kitchen. Two teenage boys worked at the benches mending and drawing pottery—one of them, Andreas Stylianou, came from a very modest background but would go on to have a distinguished career as a Byzantine scholar. He married one of the museum volunteers, Judith Dobell, who worked with Joan and Eve in the Karpas. Andreas Diamantis, a teacher at the Nicosia gymnasium, did much of the drawing during the school holidays and came recommended by the Cyprus Museum. His children were forever running in and out of the workroom as they played.63 It was not unusual to find a cat curled up asleep in a half-mended pot waiting to be drawn. When it could spare her, the Cyprus Museum lent Eve Dray to help with the drawing.

Jim and Eleanor had little time for a social life. Eleanor’s sister visited once and helped to type lists of finds for the Cyprus Museum and prepare photo negatives for filing.64 She entertained the locals by taking them for their first car ride, driving somewhat erratically in the Stewarts’ convertible.65 Eleanor took a break from work to join Margery Dray on an expedition to the famous frescoed chapel of Asinou in the Troodos Mountains.66 O.G.S. Crawford, the editor of the journal Antiquity, planned to buy property nearby and visited Jim and Eleanor in their ‘eyrie’. He mistook the square bottle in the fridge for water and found he had slurped down raw gin.67 Virginia Grace, from the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, also visited. Later she wrote in admiration at the ability of Jim and Eleanor to maintain complete catalogues of finds at the same time as they were digging.68 At some stage Jim, never robust, contracted malaria and recuperated in the home of a retired high court judge, Sir Stephen Murphy, and his wife.69

At twenty-three, Eleanor looked delicate, with short blonde hair cut in a bob, but years of travelling in the Near East had burnished her English complexion and she was sturdier than she appeared. She seemed happy playing second fiddle in Jim’s orchestra and worked beside him in the workshop, arranging pottery on the shelves ready for Andreas to draw. Most days they spent together in the workshop, or Jim worked in the field digging with the workmen. Once a fortnight they would take a break from the routine and, with a cat in her arms or draped over Jim’s shoulders, set off to visit Margery Dray and her ‘mousey’ daughter. Eve was the same age as Eleanor, small and quiet, her complexion more naturally brown than Eleanor’s. At night in the still evening, the four of them sat around the kitchen table playing Monopoly. Sheep bells rang in the clear air, or joined the muezzin’s call. Sitting with the board laid out before them, they felt a long way from Pall Mall or Mayfair.70

Chapter 4

War, 1940–45

Hindsight can blind us to the past. Because we know how events transpired it can be hard to imagine a time when that future is unknown. We know the end of the story and can’t believe the characters do not see what is coming. During the 1930s Europe moved, we now know, inexorably towards war. Fears there certainly were of a slide toward a dark abyss, but there was no guarantee that the fall would occur, and hope remained that it could be averted.

Late in 1938, with her Cyprus archaeological experience behind her, Eve joined a group of budding young archaeologists in northern France. They went to investigate Iron Age hill forts in Brittany under the direction of Mortimer Wheeler. At Camp d’Artus, Eve again worked again with Kim Collingridge, along with Kitty Richardson and Jean Cormack.

‘We set out to make a detailed survey of hill-forts built by Gauls of the pre-Roman period’, Kim explained to the Australian press when she returned home. ‘Our headquarters were in a rather primitive village, and we used to go round to the peasants’ cottages asking for information about the forts. The peasants were extremely kind, but knew absolutely nothing, and when the international situation became tense they mistook us for spies.1 Mortimer, a notorious womaniser, soon became besotted with Kim.

Eve spoke French fluently and enjoyed both village life and camping in the countryside close to the excavations. She admired the skills with which the local patron of the hotel could make an omelette using thirty-eight eggs and delighted in wandering around the local markets. With a group of students she posed to be photographed in costume at the village fairgrounds and dressed up for dinner at the local hotels. Every weekend the students danced the foxtrot at a small local casino and Eve remembered one occasion when a man carrying an umbrella kept changing partners, sidling up to a couple on the dance floor, giving his umbrella to one of the dancers and whirling off with the other. It took some time to realise he was satirising the changing politics and diplomatic manoeuvring of the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who still hoped there would be ‘peace in our time’.2

The following year a smaller group returned to Normandy. It was not a successful season. Having completed a survey at Fécamp they moved the focus to Duclair. Wheeler was obsessed with a new wife, Mavis de Vere Cole, although his wandering eye kept a lookout for Kim. Mavis joined the group in France but was no archaeologist and tired of the whole enterprise. Eve remembered only the farcical elements of Mavis’s shifting passion and Wheeler’s vanity.

Mavis sat looking bored for a while and then some young men she knew turned up and she went off with them. Wheeler borrowed Theodora’s car and went chasing after her. He wasn’t certain whether or not to take out his teeth while he sat in the car all night, waiting for first light.3

War loomed. As a veteran gunner from the First World War, Wheeler was not only preoccupied with his wife’s affairs but eager to return to soldiering. On 25 August he suddenly left, abandoning Norma Richardson and Theodora Newbold to wind up the unfinished excavations and pack for Dieppe. Eve wrote to her mother: ‘Kim and I have just spent our day here on the way back from Duclair after a 3 day hill-fort hunt. Most of the things we saw were duds but we found two Iron Age camps (small ones) yesterday’. Later, from Dieppe, she described the town filling with English trying to flee and warned it might take some time before they would be able to get their six expedition cars across the Channel.4 She photographed the general mobilisation at Dieppe that September—clusters of anxious crowds lining the streets, children tugging at their mothers’ hands, men in suits and uniforms. Her postcards to her mother are re-addressed to the friend they had recently made in Cyprus, Mr J.R. Stewart, Kingsdon, Taunton, Somerset. One is dated 2 September 1939.

A day earlier Nazi armies had, without warning, invaded Poland. A day later, on 3 September, England and France declared war on Germany.

A week after returning from France, on 12 September 1939, Eve enlisted for general service in the Auxiliary Territorial Service. She was twenty-five, five foot two and weighed 103 pounds. She gave her vocation as ‘archaeologist’ but added that she had training in draughtsmanship and elementary surveying.5 She joined the 1st London Motor Division as a driver.

Jim and Eleanor Stewart spent the early months of 1939 unaware that their world would soon fall apart. They finalised their work from Turkey and Cyprus. Jim sent notes and photos of Babaköy to Kurt Bittel, he and Eleanor prepared for a lecture and exhibition of Vounous pottery at the Institute of Archaeology in London, and they organised the distribution of finds to their excavation sponsors. They completed their report on the site, Eleanor dealing with the finds and Jim reporting on the tombs. Most of the descriptive work was done by the end of the year but they had written no analysis nor drawn any conclusions.6 Jim in particular was reluctant to give an opinion on the Early Cypriot period as a whole.

Alfirios Westholm visited in September, the month that Germany invaded Poland, and stayed a fortnight. The three friends sat up late into the night, talking archaeology and arguing details of little interest to Eleanor, although she enjoyed the company of this affable Swede. On his departure Jim wrote anxiously: ‘I wonder if Sweden is safe from the Russians?’7

Like many of his class and conservative persuasion, Jim worried as much about Bolshevism as Nazism. One minute he hoped the army would overthrow Hitler,8 the next he put his faith in German Royalists.9 The war was not popular in England, he said, and as the weeks passed Jim expressed increasing optimism that it would end quickly. Hope faded in early 1940 and on the night of the Nazi attack on Finland Jim wrote to Westholm, ‘What brutes! There is much sympathy for Finland here’.10 By March he believed the war might last twenty years.11

Frustrated and directionless, Jim turned to what he did best. Planning. He proposed to lead a major expedition, along the lines of the Swedish Cyprus Expedition, also to Cyprus.12 The idea was for three years of survey work across the island, investigating sites along the North Coast (Mylos, Karmi, Vasilia, the copper mines), and in the districts of Paphos, Limassol and Famagusta. He intended to excavate Classical and Medieval as well as Bronze and Iron Age sites. He longed to excavate a stratified Early Cypriot settlement. He needed a draughtsman and assistant, although why he believed the assistant should be ‘preferably married’ is a mystery. He wanted an anthropologist for the final season and would employ a permanent local workforce, a donkey man for transport and women for pot washing. In toto Jim envisaged six years work, three spent in the field and three cataloguing and analysing finds. Regular leave from work would be necessary and he anticipated long periods each year. ‘An archaeological expedition is in a sense a perpetual emergency, and nerves are apt to become tense.’

The proposal was far-reaching, not only in its scope of planned excavations, but also because of what Jim saw as its political purpose:

Apart from the scientific value of this proposed work, there is the important consideration of propaganda value. There has never been an English Expedition to compare with the Swedish work in 1927–31, or even with the American Expedition now operating at Curium. It would both enrich the Kyrenia villages and demonstrate the fact that the Archaeological importance, and therefore the Imperial importance, of the Island is not overlooked.13

Jim fired off detailed questions to Peter Megaw. What voltage and current were in use in Nicosia and Kyrenia? Could he buy a second-hand Morris 8 tourer? What was the price of a large oil refrigerator? Were axes, shovels and wheelbarrows available locally? How stringent was the petrol rationing? Was a blackout mandatory? Peter Megaw, more attuned to the world he saw coming, replied patiently, but toward the end of the year cautioned, ‘it is difficult to look so far ahead these days, circumstances may completely change in the course of two years’.14

Alan Wace, as ever, was supportive and took Jim’s proposal to the government but doubted the British Council would give anything other than ‘their blessings’.15 The council’s support, as expected, was lacklustre; they were happy for him to mount an expedition under their auspices, ‘though they could not undertake any legal or financial responsibility’.16 Persuaded only by his own enthusiasm, Jim continued to believe it would happen. He prepared lists of essential equipment, everything from dinner jackets and dress collars, five pairs of pyjamas and khaki shirts, to travelling mirrors and toiletries. He calculated the costs of equipment, one-off and recurrent expenses. His estimate of £9586.18.6 for two years work needs to be seen in context. The total expenditure for the excavations at Karphi on Crete, run by Jim’s Cambridge colleague and fellow Wilkins scholar, John Pendlebury, between 1937 and 1939, had only cost £250.8.8.17

Restlessness hung over the nation during this ‘phoney’ war. At Park Cottage, Jim sat at his desk, looking out on a peaceful Somerset landscape of green fields and dappled cows, but in his mind he saw a harsh Cypriot sun and rocky mountains. Pages of typescript grew as he bashed out an argument, typing with six fingers, two of them holding a glowing cigarette. Work on writing up their findings from Vounous and producing a manuscript for publication continued, but Jim was more interested in the future than the past.

As Jim’s plans for his survey grew more and more detailed, he persuaded himself that he had been asked to do it, whereas in fact the idea was entirely his own. Eventually he conceded that he would have to fund the work privately but admitted he had no idea where the money might come from. Modern events made him increasingly conscious of the survey’s political purpose.

The aim is to relieve the disasters caused by the war and to establish some sort of cultural centre where Cypriots and English can meet. I don’t know where the money is to be found, but I feel that if the idea is not carried out the result would be bad. For a start it is an admission that Archaeology is a social science of some value, and that is something new in the general English way of thinking. Then we may do something to bridge the awful gap between the English and the Cypriots.18

Writing to Westholm Jim bewailed the current state of archaeology.

I am afraid that all English archaeology has stopped. Woolley is at the War Office, Garstang relieving Turks, Miss Lamb farming her estate, Wace in Athens. I’m sorry to say that our School in Athens in closing; that seems to me a big mistake when Germany still works at Olympia. But only slowly are we learning that culture is as good propaganda as you can find or invent. No idea is good in England unless William brought it from Normandy in 1066—but then I’m an Australian!

He invited Westholm to visit if they made it to Cyprus to carry out their survey. ‘I don’t suppose we ever shall. It is too good and too great an idea to succeed.’19 Jim’s fears were well founded. In early February his Cyprus proposal was ‘official’ but by March 1940 was ‘off’.

In its early months, this was a strange war. The army did not need or want any but specialist volunteers and some existing officers were sent on leave because there was so little for them to do. Matters changed in the early months of 1940, with Germany attacking France, Holland and Belgium in May.

All imperial troops were volunteers, which Jim applauded. ‘It’s a good idea,’ he wrote, ‘to make this war a crusade’ that will unite the peoples of the Empire ‘by blood’ and create a different, but stronger, Commonwealth. On 16 May he applied for registration in the Army Officers’ Emergency Reserve. He was interviewed in London three days later and when asked to list three regiments to which he hoped to be posted and his reasons, he gave only one—the Cyprus Regiment, because of his ‘professional acquaintance with the Colony’.20 A week later, Dunkirk fell and their friend Eve Dray, now a sergeant with the Auxiliary Transport Service (ATS) helped hand out hot tea and pies to the evacuating troops arriving at the Addison Road train station in London.

Jim was formally notified of his acceptance in mid-July, the decision to join the Cyprus Regiment reflecting his passion to return to Cyprus and his love for the island. It made him a legend amongst Cypriots, who believed, perhaps wrongly, that he could have found a more attractive post with the Australian or English forces and who were delighted and honoured that he chose to serve with them.21

There was so much to do. Although much of the text for their publication of excavations at Vounous was written, the detailed description of finds was not finalised. Jim continued to feel the need for a corpus and was irritated that Schaeffer and Dikaios had failed to publish so much of what he had wanted to include. Westholm offered to help edit the volume and Jim now gave the rights of Vounous to the Swedish Cyprus Expedition. The offer came as the British School, the original sponsor of the excavation, closed because of war and in the will that Jim wrote before leaving England he left £300 to the Swedes for publication costs and bequeathed his personal library to the Cyprus Museum.22

There is no record of Jim and Eleanor’s movements in June, July or August of 1940 but in September, before joining his regiment, they sailed for Sydney. Later Jim would say that the voyage was an unhappy one and it is likely they were both anxious about what the future held. They spent nearly two months in Australia, so were not in England to experience the massive German bombardment of London or the raid on Coventry. Leaving Eleanor to sit out the war in Australia, Jim sailed from Sydney on 28 December. On arrival at the port city of Haifa on 30 January 1941 he was instructed to report to the Cyprus Regiment base, and was posted to the 1006 Pioneer Company at the end of February.

The Cyprus Regiment was an odd beast, a hybrid born of a marriage between uneasy partners, and it is wonderfully ironic that one section of the regiment was a mule pack-transport company. As an English colony, Cyprus was drawn into the war, although the island itself was never attacked. The natural tendency for many Greek and Turkish Cypriots, however, was allegiance not to Britain, but to Greece or Turkey, countries with opposing attitudes to the war. Fascist Italy had invaded Greece in October 1940 but Turkey remained neutral until the last throes of the war. Some volunteers undoubtedly supported Britain’s battle with the Nazis, but pay and health benefits were equally important incentives. The English authorities carefully vetted applicants; those with criminal or political backgrounds were rejected. Communists and nationalists were the least desirable, although after the invasion of Russia large numbers of Communists did enlist. Even so, a lot of applicants were rejected. By the beginning of 1941, over 15,000 men had been interviewed and only 6000 accepted. It does not say much for the standard of English administration that, after sixty years of English rule, 4000 men who applied for enlistment failed on medical grounds. After March 1941, authorities relaxed standards and recruits were accepted even if they had committed one theft or one ‘unnatural offence’, which included wounding, malicious injury, murder or attempted murder, rape, up to six convictions for drunkenness and three for gambling. It was a rag-tag band of men who served in the Cyprus Regiment.

The number of recruits in the regiment mirrored the ethnic balance on the island: four-fifths of all recruits were Greek Cypriot and one-fifth Turkish Cypriot, with Britain ensuring that the ratio was maintained. Although the commanding officer and most other officers were British, commissions were granted to Cypriots over time, although the vetting of Cypriot officers was even more rigorous than for other ranks and the final decision remained the governor’s. Detailed reports on political affiliations, particularly communist or union associations were compiled by the British authorities: ‘due to his influence a lot of trouble took place at the mines’; ‘he is a member of AKEL^23 but I do not think that need be held against him’. Also personal characteristics were noted: ‘[he] is unfortunately married to a woman who was formerly a common prostitute.’24 The comments reflect the paranoia of an English administration uneasily governing a population grown weary, often downright outraged, with colonial rule.

Jim’s opinion of the regiment was more sanguine. After the war he argued that any blame for the regiment’s activities should rest with their officers. Commissions were, he argued, often granted to men from Greece or elsewhere, a ‘mercenary’ class only attracted by higher pay and prestige.

There was thus introduced an element which had no vested interest in Cyprus and the Cypriots, and no prior acquaintance with the island and its people … The majority of British N.C.Os attached to the Regiment were rejects from line battalions [and] … if unsuited for their rank in British units, they were doubly unsuited for what could only be a more difficult task.25

While he acknowledged that the rank and file were also attracted by money and ‘volunteered for the high pay or because their own employment—especially mining—had been obliterated by the war’, Jim did not hold this against them. These men may have had little incentive beyond personal gain, but in the absence of ‘inspiration from their officers’ they should not, he felt, be unfairly criticised.

The Pioneers were stationed in Egypt and Jim joined them at Alexandria. The mood of the men was poor and morale low. After many months in Libya their promised leave in Cyprus had evaporated, and instead they were being sent directly to Greece. Jim was appalled that so many regimental officers remained in Cairo or manoeuvred for ‘safe jobs’ in the Sudan or Somaliland, although much of this bitterness reflects his experience of events that followed.

Italy invaded Greece in October 1940 and ‘few military campaigns have been undertaken so carelessly’.26 Sloppy military actions were not, however, exclusive to the Italians and the Allied campaigns in Greece proved disastrous.

Britain’s support for Greece was born partly of sentiment and partly of strategy. The code breakers of Bletchley Park warned Churchill about German military movements to the north of Greece, as Hitler moved to protect German oil supplies in Romania. Churchill attached a British Military Mission to the Greek Army, but Major-General T.G. Heywood, whose reputation was built on his failure to recognise the defects in the French armies, now refused to see any weakness in the Greek defence. The Byzantine nature of Greek politics did not help. Although the right wing Greek dictator Metaxas famously said ‘No’ or ‘Οχι’ to the Italians in October 1940, only three months later he was dead of throat cancer. The Greek King George was a political actor and Royalists, Venezelists,27 Fascists, and Communists would all play out their animosities over the next few years, while divided resistance organisations, an alphabet soup of acronyms—EDES, EAM, ELAS, EKKA—waged war against the invaders and each other. Ordinary Greek soldiers, on the other hand, fought with determination and courage. In November they defeated the Italian 9th Army in fighting as fierce as that year’s winter in the mountains of northern Greece.

In Egypt, General Wavell was preoccupied with Rommel’s movements in North Africa and thought Greece an unwelcome distraction. But Churchill’s promise to the Greeks must be honoured. Together with thousands of other troops, mostly from the Dominions of New Zealand and Australia, Jim embarked ‘for an unknown destination’ on 5 March 1941. A month later on 6 April, Germany invaded. Greece would be the only country in Europe to fight both Axis powers on its own territory.

For nearly two months Jim served in Greece. In Thessaly he found time to collect pottery sherds at Volos and Pherae, which he deposited at the British School at Athens.28 In Athens he caught up with archaeological colleagues—Young who had dug at Curium on Cyprus, his old lecturer Alan Wace, Monty Woodhouse and others. Wace had returned to Greece in 1939 to resume excavations at Mycenae and to celebrate his sixtieth birthday. With war looming, he had helped to safely store material from the National Museum and ostensibly joined the British legation, although he was probably, even at this stage, working for MI6.29 Monty Woodhouse, younger than Jim and a classical scholar, was also attached to the British legation and would end the war as a full colonel. After the fall of Crete, both Wace and Woodhouse worked for Special Operations Executive (SOE) in Egypt.

At the same time that Jim volunteered, a raft of British archaeologists prepared to leave for Greece. As early as 1938, a special department in the War Office sounded out dons and archaeologists with a view to using their linguistic skills should war eventuate. Officials understood that when war spread to the Mediterranean, language skills would be vital and they hoped that ancient Greek might be a short cut to the modern language. And so it proved. The archaeologist John Pendlebury, who, together with Jim, had received £50 from the Cambridge Classics Board in 1939 for research, had spent the mid-1930s as curator of Knossos on Crete and was almost more Cretan than the locals. Nicholas Hammond, a Cambridge don, and the archaeologist, David Hunt from Magdalen College in Oxford, were both recruited. Hammond, Pendlebury and Hunt flew to Greece as the English expeditionary forces began evacuating Dunkirk. Unable to enter Greece, Hammond and Hunt continued to Egypt, where they joined the Welsh Regiment at Alexandria. All three were to play important roles in the course of the war in Greece.30 Tom Dunbabin, an Australian classicist and two years older than Jim, would end the war as a Lieutenant-Colonel and worked on Crete with SOE. With few linguistic skills and a personality disinclined to follow orders, Jim Stewart was never approached.

As the Germans thrust southwards into Greece, chaos ensued. Allied troops who had assumed they would be marching north were in retreat almost as soon as they landed in Greece. German Panzer units smashed through defences and the Australian and New Zealand divisions pulled back to Thermopylae, the pass held heroically by Athenians during the Persian Wars over two thousand years earlier. The Greek Prime Minister Alexandros Koryzis shot himself on 18 April and two days later Allied forces made the decision to retreat. Evacuation plans were ill prepared and sketchy. When the Greek division surrendered at Epirus, Germans skirted Thermopylae and advanced on Athens. The king and his household, complete with English mistress and pet dachshund, flew to Crete, where they installed themselves in the city of Canea, which they declared the new capital of Greece. On 25 April final evacuations took place. In all, twenty-six vessels were sunk during the evacuation and over two thousand troops died. Jim only ever wrote briefly of his Greek experiences:

Most of the Pioneer companies were captured in Greece. Largely through no fault of the Regiment individual units had a very bad time, and were left in the lurch by the Area HQs … The wreckage of two companies and one more or less intact company got away to Crete, with the rest of a rather dazed ‘Lustre Force’, and were incorporated into ‘Crete Force’, but only after an appalling experience of sea-evacuation. It was a miracle that any degree of organization or discipline was maintained, but in both the standard was not lower than that of other units from Greece, and was rather better than that of some British units.31

Later Jim itemised the personal possessions he had lost in Greece and Crete, including a kitbag, pullover, leather gloves, heavy boots, rubber shoes, wash stand, army blankets and two pairs of silk pyjamas.32

Over twenty-five thousand exhausted and traumatised soldiers arrived on Crete in the course of a week. They dispersed along the coastal strip from Heraklion west to Canea, camping in olive groves and living off the land. Cretans offered bread and food but it was the local wine—krassi—for which most troops hankered. Locals were shocked at the amount of wine the men drank, especially the Australian and New Zealand troops. The New Zealand commander, General Freyburg, arrived on 19 April and Churchill gave him command of Creforce, making him the seventh commander of British forces on Crete since their arrival in November the year before.

Freyburg was briefed by Wavell. Their intelligence came from Bletchley Park’s code breakers but its import was misunderstood.33 Intercepts from the German command indicated that an invasion of Crete was planned for 17 May and would come by air and by sea. Freyburg got it wrong. The Germans planned a paratroop invasion, with wave after wave of parachutes raining from the skies. It was the first and only invasion of its kind and it should have failed. But Freyburg’s failure to understand the intercepted intelligence and his delay in protecting airfields turned possible victory into certain defeat. Jack Hamson, sent to Crete and working closely with John Pendlebury later put it bluntly, his disillusionment and disgust honed by years as a prisoner of war:

The battle of Crete was lost because Lieutenant General Sir Bernard Freyberg (as he now is—he got his knighthood for Crete) V.C., D.S.O. and the rest, was a fool, a blind fool and a vain one. Predominantly a fool, relying on the blindness of fools … the battle of Crete was lost before the battle was joined.34

Troops were thinly strung out along the northwest coast of Crete. The New Zealand Division was sent to guard the coast between Canea and the Maleme airbase to the west and to await the invasion. Jim’s No. 6 company was stationed at Galatas, to the west of Canea. On the first day of the invasion, 20 May, hundreds of parachutes drifted down onto the coastal strip, and waves of German paratroopers landed. Many were bayoneted as they fell, or were simply shot from the sky as they hung from their webbing. Fighting was brutal and at close range. Jim’s company took twenty prisoners and killed forty Germans, but the company had little training, only sixty rifles amongst 280 men, and most of the rifles were locked away. Ninety-eight men died within the first few minutes of battle, but Galatas held and the Germans were unable, on that day, to take the Maleme airbase.

By the time the New Zealand Divisional Cavalry arrived, Jim’s company was down to 120 men. Twenty more died before the company withdrew and only sixty-eight men remained at the final surrender. ‘A notable point in the final scenes in Crete,’ said Jim, ‘was the behaviour of some officers who deserted their companies and secured their own evacuation’.35 This bland recount tells nothing of the horror Jack Hamson later described:

Not of fright or terror or panic, though it may be connected therewith, but of horror more purely. Not the horror of the sight of a disembowelled horse or of a mangled human being—that kind of horror, however shocking is, I suspect, but slight; and we accommodate ourselves thereto without enormous discomfort—but of horror more simple and more absolute.36

Jim stayed with the men of his company. It was a story told and retold and no doubt embellished, but it ensured that Cypriots would love him. Yiannis Cleanthous, who worked for Jim years later, was told the story many times.

A lot of the Cypriots remained up on the mountain with him in Crete … and there were orders from Alamein: ‘anybody that can escape, we need every soldier here.’ They sent this message to the officers. So Stewart got them all together. Do you want to see your families again? You have to stay with me. We are doing a better job here than the thousands in the desert … Some of them of course decided to go to the south coast of Crete … they were taken by boats to a ship about a mile out and of course they were watching from the top of the mountain and as soon as the ship went half a mile out it was torpedoed and they were killed. He says to them ‘that’s why I didn’t want you to go, there is more danger between here and Egypt, than there is up here in these mountains’. So they got to love him because of that.37

Jim Stewart was listed as a battle casualty on 31 May 1941, only four months after he had joined the regiment. Not until 31 January 1942, does Jim’s military record confirm him as a prisoner of war, although it seems his father and wife knew earlier, in September. It had been an especially traumatic time for Eleanor who, sometime in 1941, had also suffered a miscarriage.38 Captured prisoners were transferred to the Greek mainland, where they were held at a transit camp at Salonika. Officers were subjected to abuse, forced to lie on the ground, their men ordered to urinate on them. It would be several months before they would get clean clothes, unimaginable for someone used to silk pyjamas.39

By 19 June, 450 officers and several thousand men, all prisoners from Crete, filled transit camps in northern Greece. All had marched to or been transported there in cattle trucks—thirty or forty men to a truck. Camp conditions were ‘past all belief’, the daily rations were one-ninth of a loaf of bread, three-quarters of a Greek Army biscuit, a ladle of soup and two cups of herb tea. Dysentery crippled everyone. Finally, with relief, they heard they were being moved to Germany. Cattle trucks with no sanitation trundled prisoners for seven days and nights to Lübeck from where they walked to their prison, Oflag XC. On parade, German officers inspected them to determine whether any were Jews, while the German guards shot anyone who looked like they were planning escape. Going to the fence to fetch a football or hanging out washing on the barbed wire could get you shot. The RAF bombed them! Despite the fierce cold, prisoners’ blankets were withdrawn and they were issued with a single cotton one.40 Jim claimed he never recovered from the cold of that winter of 1941.

Jack Hamson was a fellow inmate of Oflag XC. He may have known Jim at Cambridge or met him later on Crete, but their bonds were strengthened during their time as prisoners of war, and Jack become one of Jim’s few post-war confidants.

Some months later Jim was moved to Oflag VIb—Warburg. This was a squalid camp, set in the middle of a flat muddy plateau, with dingy, damp and badly constructed huts. The lavatories and washing rooms were fetid; fleas lived on everyone. Prisoners complained of the coldest winter they had ever experienced, with forty degrees of frost. Two thousand inadequately clothed soldiers were forced to stand in the snow for roll call twice a day.

This perpetual cold increased our hunger and we were always more than ready for the one bowl of watery soup which the Germans provided at midday. This was collected and eaten in one of the two communal dining huts; Warburg was the only camp where our midday meal was eaten outside our rooms.41

As the number of prisoners grew, Germany decided to rationalise its POW camps. Officers were concentrated into two oflags—older prisoners went to Spangenberg (Oflag IX A/H) while those under thirty-five, about two thousand in all, came to Oflag VIIB at Eichstätt. Stalags housed ‘other ranks’, who were put to work in labour gangs. Under section 29 of the Geneva Convention officers were not allowed to work and although their protection was ensured, they missed the opportunity for activities outside the wire that might have relieved the sickening monotony of prison and the agoraphobia that developed.

Jim would spend nearly four years as a prisoner of war but he could not have known this at the time. His future depended on the progress of the war, and his experiences on Crete gave little comfort.

Eichstätt is a cathedral city in Bavaria, situated to the north of the Danube between Nuremburg and Munich. From his camp in a pleasant river valley, Jim looked toward the spires of the city and the dreamy fairytale castle on the hill. Physically, Oflag VIIB was pleasant. Its stone buildings overlooked a river, and after the perpetual mud of Warburg it was a relief to have the Lagerstrasse, a tarmacked parade area, that doubled as a football ground and tennis courts. Half the officers were housed in stone barracks but others lived in recently constructed huts on a lower level near the river that ran just outside the wire. These huts, dubbed ‘The Garden City’, were perpetually cold and damp.

An aircraft factory close by the camp guaranteed that prisoners were not just in enemy hands but liable to be bombed by their own side. Allied air raids were common. On one occasion German guards shot two officers who left their barracks to look at the planes. On another, groups of prisoners were handcuffed in tit-for-tat retaliation for the handcuffing of German prisoners captured during a British raid on the Channel Islands.

Nearly two thousand young officers were housed in the camp. Routines developed. With little to do, many gambled in a room set aside in the hospital. The chemin de fer games got out of hand, men lost vast sums of money and were forced to write home telling their wives to sell the family home to repay debts. The most senior British officer eventually took charge and the War Office issued a directive forbidding gambling, although gentler occupations like cards and backgammon were allowed. In a diary entry that today seems surreal, one prisoner records that he ‘settled down for an afternoon of bridge’. Prisoners organised stage shows and concerts. Female impersonators were popular and the YMCA sent musical instruments.

Some prisoners used their time to study. Camp officials set aside a room and POWs rushed each morning to secure a desk. One read for the Bar, others learned languages, yet others gave lectures, and some sat for exams through London University. Not everyone approved of this dedication. Hugo Ironside, a second lieutenant in a tank regiment, was one of a group of prisoners involved in persistent escape attempts. Collectively they were known as the Eichstätt mob. They dug a tunnel towards the wire and might have escaped had the Germans not been alerted by an Englishman who threw a tin containing a note warning the Germans of the escape attempt over the wire. Too many prisoners, Ironside thought, had ‘got into a rut. They were studying this and studying that and they just didn’t like their peace being disturbed’.42

Monotony, frustration, anxiety, and cold. The younger prisoners suffered most. No one knew how long they would be incarcerated or how their lives would finally emerge. Some had careers unlikely to survive the years in prison. Marriages, too, became casualties. Personal relationships were widely discussed and privacy impossible. ‘After years of continual, unrelieved contact with one’s brother officers, it was not surprising to find that one’s nerves were getting frayed; one was apt to go off the deep end about the smallest things. I found it fatal to share a room with really good friends.’43 The one lesson that prison life taught was the love of simple things.

The drab monotony of that life and the continual pangs of hunger seemed to open my eyes and make me see the small and commonplace things of this world for the first time … I was not alone in this appreciation of everyday things; I saw a marked fondness for animals and birds. We were not allowed to keep dogs but the Germans permitted cats in the camp to keep down the rats and mice. Before many months had passed at Eichstatt there must have been at least two hundred cats in the camp.44

Long-haired cats doubled as useful decoys: ‘when prisoners were moved from one camp to another, wireless valves etc. could be strapped to their tummies & escape the notice of the guards.’ Jim had always loved animals but attributed his special fondness for cats to his time as a POW^45—in the bitter winters, their company warmed him.

Only in writing did some men find true solitude. The War Prisoners Aid section of the YMCA distributed diaries to British prisoners, hoping that men would find some solace in recording their thoughts and sorting their ideas. In his four years in prison Jack Hamson poured over 85,000 words into four prison notebooks. Introspective, philosophical, analytical, he struggled to understand himself and his experiences in Crete. Others used their notebooks to plan for the future, some wrote poems and songs, some kept journals or wrote long lists of renovations they planned to make to their homes, of things they would do when freedom finally arrived.

Jim Stewart wrote long, long lists. From Oflag XC, in September 1941, he had written an almost cheerful, light-hearted letter to his friend Alfirios Westholm, looking to the future and not the past.

This is the end of my war. Pendlebury was killed. I intend to do some reading when books can come from England which takes a long time. Can you do me a favour? Ask the Swedish Red Cross if it can send me some food parcels weekly and get payment from my father (A Stewart, Box 2829N, General Post Office, Sydney, Australia) through the Swedish Consul in Sydney. Do you think that we shall be able to cooperate on the Corpus after the war? There is a danger I may have to leave archaeology, and Vounous—no money!46

As the years passed his mood darkened and at the end of 1943 he told Westholm:

I’m glad you are out of it all, and I hope your children will never know the misery of it. I’ve had a lot to think about during these years. One thing I believe, that Archaeology is so unimportant, so divorced from modern life, that it is worth taking seriously. In comparison life and death seem unimportant; perhaps even ideals.47

Prisoners could send and receive letters, although all passed through the hands of the censor. Friends and colleagues wrote intermittently but Eleanor wrote regularly. For nearly five months she had not known if he were dead or alive. Jim and Eleanor numbered letters to ensure they were read in correct order. On 10 May 1943 Jim wrote his sixteenth letter to his wife. A surviving envelope from Eleanor, who returned to England around this time, was posted from Devon on 12 June 1944. It was her seventy-seventh letter to him.

Colleagues sent books and Jim arranged payment through his father or his bank. Winifred Lamb was delighted to hear he was giving lectures on Cyprus.48 ‘To be a prisoner while others work is a bitter thing’, he complained to Alfirios, ‘yet one learns co-operation’.49 Crawford and Myers both sent parcels and, as someone who had experienced prison in the first war, Crawford advised Jim to use his time to learn German: ‘how well I remember those bloody queues’, he added.50 Jim collected German articles and publications and kept detailed bibliographic lists. He filled prison notebooks, neatly labelled by topic, with his reading—Luristan Bronzes, the Prehistoric pottery of China, Aegean Architecture, four notebooks on the sources of European and Near Eastern history. Bibliographies and notes. Notebook after notebook, seldom dated but occasionally named. When he ran out of notebooks he used flattened out cigarette packets—Sweet Caporal, Capstan Navy Cut, Players—and odd scraps of cardboard or paper. He read widely and voraciously. Lists created order, promised normality, even comprehension. It seems astonishing that one of his few surviving letters to Eleanor should be little more than a list of personal possessions in a trunk.

The site of Vounous continued to occupy his thoughts and in one notebook marked ‘Oflag IX’ he summarised Dikaios’s publication of the 1931−32 excavations at Vounous, listing pottery types and seeking patterns. Regardless of incarceration, Jim was well supplied with reading matter. He wrote to Westholm offering to send him one of his copies of Dikaios’s Vounous volume. He had two.51

Aside from reading, Jim spent his internment developing, expanding, modifying and refining his ideas on the need for more archaeological work on Cyprus. ‘Plans and more plans,’ he told Eleanor, ‘clouds across the moon’.52 The general idea remained the same, but instead of a British expedition he now envisaged his work being done by a military company of the Cyprus Regiment, a company devoted to archaeological work and, naturally, commanded by himself.

Neat blue writing fills three prison notebooks. He outlines the political and scientific aims of his scheme, the way he plans to sell the idea, and specifies overall organisation and personnel. Almost thirty pages of foolscap constitute a further two appendices. He transcribed letters he had written to fellow archaeologists, pasted in their replies, and bound the pages with thin grey string. It was a way to create order, an imaginary future he could control.

Some people think before they speak, choosing words and phrases in progress along a well-considered pathway. For others, speech is a form of thought, a way of working out problems, solving issues, clarifying ideas. Jim wrote in order to think, and his written arguments are directed as much to himself as others. His writing is surprisingly clear and uncluttered, with few changes to the text, and almost no additions or deletions. And yet the writing is a sort of conversation. Arguments pile on top of each other, but rather than hide the underlying intent they expose it. As any diarist knows, the more you write the more your real thoughts reveal themselves. So, too, with Jim’s elaborate proposals.

Jim argued that his proposal was only in part archaeological. For some years he had written of the ‘propaganda’ benefits of archaeology, something he believed that both the Italians and Germans understood. His experiences during the war convinced him that the Cyprus Regiment had been badly let down, mostly by English officers, and he argued that useful occupation for demobilised soldiers would avert further tension on the island. He detailed the ‘political’ aspect of his proposal in a prison notebook, in which he vented his personal and military frustrations and argued the case for an archaeological survey of Cyprus from a geopolitical standpoint. It is a far-sighted document, but it fails to disguise the self-promotion and self-interest of the author.

The plan is typically ‘Stewart’, grand and extravagant, wide-ranging, almost visionary, but ultimately self-serving. His survey, he argued, would be comprehensive. He maintained that everything on the island should be recorded; as with coins and books, so with archaeological sites. He wanted to collect and control it all. The plan saw archaeology as much more than a scientific pursuit and recognised its political, social and economic dimensions. Jim appreciated the need to conserve sites as well as excavate them and spoke of the tourist potential of archaeology and the vital importance of documenting, photographing and publishing. He understood the value of anthropological work as well as field archaeology, but it was all beyond the scope or comprehension of any existing institution and certainly beyond the capacity of a single person.

In his mind, Jim assumed absolute and single authority over what was clearly meant to be his military company. Although the document acknowledged that the Colonial Office might want to appoint a commanding officer who spoke Greek—which Jim did not—he conveniently assumed that they would not. At the beginning he talks of the CO and his role, but gradually slips into the first person. It is not entirely clear what role he saw for the commanding officer, although he stressed that the company should largely be free from regimental control and must be ‘free of routine military activities’, a factor that persuaded him that the CO should be of the rank of lieutenant-colonel and not a major as he had originally envisaged. The corps would be independent of the Department of Antiquities in Cyprus and, although he recognised a role for Megaw and the Director of the Cyprus Museum, he believed that ‘the details of execution—subject to Megaw’s approval—should be left to us’.

All administrative chores, work that Jim spent his life trying to avoid, would be the responsibility of the executive officer whose workload would be heavy. The men would be chosen by the CO and not only from the existing ranks of the Cyprus Regiment, despite his argument that the project was to address their needs. In his self-appointed role as commanding officer he made a special plea to engage Tryphon, his Bellapais foreman, who, he believed, was the only well-trained workman in Cyprus and who, although ‘a confirmed grave looter off duty … not only knows his job but is genuinely interested—and knows his pottery very well. He is an expert at getting ticklish digging done, and at mending pots … honest to his employer and faithful. Drinks a good deal in the winter, but that does not seem to matter’, he added as an afterthought.

For surveying and drawing he suggested other people who were not part of the regiment: ‘I know two girls who have been trained in archaeological surveying and draughtsmanship, and one of them has lived in Cyprus, where her parents own land. Both have been in the A.T.S. but are now discharged.’ Eve Dray was on his mind.

The style of the document moves from the formal to the flippant and finally to the surreal, as he creates his future and peoples it with officers, draughtsmen, architects, administrative officers and workmen. ‘It may, of course, prove necessary to saddle each officer with some nominal responsibility apart from his actual work, but in practice it should not be difficult to raise a smoke-screen to meet the nominal requirements’, he notes. He muses that married officers could have their furniture sent out as company baggage—‘a racket but we should be able to work it’.

Finally, he presents detailed instructions on how to survey, excavate and record sites, noting aspects of the faunal and metallurgical research that will be concluded off site, and discusses the use of air photography, giving practical advice on managing workmen and overall direction.

The bogey which every director fears is ‘atmosphere’. One’s whole aim is to keep things going smoothly, and to prevent grievances festering or people getting slack. One way is to keep to a rigid routine, and to this I would add a modicum of real comfort, good feeding, and plenty of books.

The third and final notebook contains personal reminiscences and musings. He mentions the need for skilled foremen and names some.

Simeon was a great athlete, but had an accident while racing Sjöqvist round Vouni, and has since not been too fit; he is honest and a lovable character, though he has been in jug on a charge of rape (which was faked) … [Tryphon] was sacked for theft of some gold earrings, but I am fairly sure he took the blame for his mother, an awful old woman, who is now dead (thank God).

He suggests the workmen should be employed in the proportion of seventy-five per cent Greek to twenty-five per cent Turkish and says that his custom ‘has been to go with Tryphon to the village coffee shops at night, and ask for men’. His advice is that:

old men are steadiest and I like to give them work … Beware of the talkative, those who speak English and men with narrow peaky faces. Have at least one man who is an obvious wit. Employ as many landowners as apply. Young men work best if their best friends are also employed.

He wants very few, if any, British NCOs and talks nostalgically of ‘Levantine loyalty’ and the democracy of Cypriots. ‘Full ability to deal correctly with the men can only come from experience … Remember that the Cypriot has a lively mind, and nothing will shift the inertia of the East unless there is reason in it.’53

In summary, he expects he will need five officers—all to be provided with cars—and over three hundred other ranks. From prison Jim wrote to colleagues, sent complicated memos for Eleanor to take to the War Office, to members of parliament, to anyone who would listen. All an elaborate fantasy. In the cold winter of Germany, Jim had created a warm archaeological Cypriot escape.

On 14 April 1945, Oflag VIIB was bombed by American forces. Fourteen POWs were killed and over forty wounded. Two days later the Americans liberated the camp. The sudden transformation unsettled many of the prisoners. It was too sudden and most were not mentally prepared. ‘Now that this thing had really happened,’ one prisoner wrote, ‘I hadn’t the vaguest idea what to do next; I felt very strange and completely lost. I went back to my room where I muttered something or other about having to pack because I was going home. I found to my horror that I was quite incapable of packing. I did not know how or where to start and gave it up in desperation’.54

Jim landed in England two weeks after his camp had been liberated and two weeks before Victory in Europe Day. He was admitted to hospital but released after only twenty-four hours and sent on leave. He returned to Eleanor at Park Cottage. He was thirty-one and weighed six stone.

Chapter 5

England and Cyprus, 1945−47

Eve enjoyed her time driving with the Auxiliary Transport Service, but she ended the war at the Admiralty, where she charted naval convoys, using miles of hat elastic and dozens of dressmaking pins.1 She was a good driver and had enjoyed the camaraderie of her other ‘Fannies’ in the ATS. But her uncle, Sir John Mills, now resident at Bisterne, was appalled to think of her working with large trucks and so, like her grandmother before, had interfered, although with the best of intentions. As usual, Eve acquiesced, but it rankled.

The widespread destruction of large parts of the city did provide some opportunities. On the southern bank of the Thames, at Southwark, Kathleen Kenyon from the Institute of Archaeology directed excavations of the remains of a Roman fort uncovered during demolition work. Volunteers worked from spring to autumn, during school holidays or in the evenings. Eve Dray joined Kenyon, supervising a motley group of volunteers from Holland and America in excavating a Roman rubbish pit. Two of the Americans had, until recently, flown missions over Germany and secretly planted a small clay pot from Woolworths in the trench as a joke.2 Despite the harsh rationing, Eve invited them all to supper and managed to find enough to feed them. But there was little paid work for archaeologists.

The winter of 1945 was bitter, the most severe for fifty years. People queued to buy coal since only the wealthy could pay black market prices; others in heavy overcoats picked through the wreckage of their streets and towns and boys played soccer amid the rubble—the only playground they had ever known. More than the weather was bitter. After the initial celebrations of V Day, when lights flooded the city for the first time in five years and people danced in the streets and drank to the peace, a sullen gloom descended. People longed to break with the past and, after five years of Conservative government, the Tories were overwhelmingly rejected, with Labour’s Clement Attlee taking office after a landslide election victory. Winston Churchill may have led the country through the war but no one wanted him to lead in peacetime.3 Most wanted to forget the past, but not everyone could. Soldiers returned to homes and families who scarcely recognised them. For years these men had lived regulated and regimented lives, alternately full of danger and boredom. Domesticity was not easily resumed, nor was domestic life the same. This war had been an industrial one, factories re-tooled, energy redirected and manpower replaced. Machines were geared to war and the gears were greased by women. They staffed factories, drove trucks, wore uniforms. For many the experience was liberating and some found a return to the past difficult. Marriages struggled to adjust. Children learned to obey two parents, one of whom they barely knew. As soldiers returned, divorce rates rose.

POWs returned to a world they no longer recognised. Those like Jim who had been captured in 1941 knew little of the progress of the war and were shocked by the physical evidence of its aftermath. Rocket blasts had shattered the windows of St Paul’s. Vegetables grew in the moat around the Tower of London. Waste bins collected scraps for pigs and food was rationed. But the wreckage of London and food shortages offered only a superficial understanding of what the country had endured. Returning prisoners were excited but fearful and fretful, unable to concentrate. Doctors warned they might be impotent and many worried they would shame themselves in public by swearing or forgetting to button their flies. Grown men shrank at the thought of meeting people, of entering a room full of strangers. Drink offered only temporary escape. A bottle of wine cost a staggering amount. Officers returned to their quiet dignified clubs to find a seething sea of grotesque, babbling Americans and flashy blondes.

Adjustment was no easier for their families. ‘I was very happy to have him home,’ said one wife, ‘and then you realised that you’ve not got the same man back … He still had a lot of the prisoner of war in him. Even now you can’t touch his things. In the prison camp they only had a certain limited space and what was theirs was their own and nobody touched it. It’s continued all his life and I have to be very, very careful. He wasn’t like that at all before he left.’ ‘Then the drinking started’, said another. ‘The war changed him. And what I still remember was him butting his cigarette out on the floor like he was still in the prison camp. He was just a completely different person to what he was.’4

Jim had spent years reading archaeology and planning for a future that he thought would mirror the past but the mirror had shattered. Imprisoned for four years, he had no sense of the changes wrought by years of war. England was impoverished and in debt. ‘Archaeology is pretty much at a standstill … I am not too optimistic’, lamented O.G.S. Crawford, who warned Jim there were few job opportunities. After years of confinement, Jim could not sit still. He had spent his internment gestating great plans for a survey of Cyprus, conceived in the months before the war. Not for the first time Jim’s fantasy overstretched reality.

Within a month of returning to England he bombarded friends and colleagues with ideas and letters and requests for support. He sent them long essays outlining the details and justification for the expense of his elaborate Cyprus proposal. Winifred Lamb congratulated him on the detail.5 A.W. Lawrence, Professor of Classical Archaeology at Cambridge and brother of T.E. (Lawrence of Arabia), thought the military language ‘superb’,6 but Donald Harden from the British Museum warned against being ‘overbold’ and doubted there would be sufficient numbers of trained archaeologists to conduct excavations. He spoke to Woolley about the proposal but warned Jim that ‘he is a bit choosy in his patronage of such activities!’7 Sir John Myers thought the proposal a ‘counsel of perfection’ but noted that Jim had made no estimate of cost.8 Myers sent the memo to the Archaeological Joint Committee and suggested that Jim also forward it to the Colonial Office and the War Office. Myers cautioned against creating a program that overlapped the functions of the Department of Antiquities in Cyprus, a recipe for potential conflict. From this distance it is hard to imagine that a poor and war-weary England would look on the proposal favourably, and the letters of support may well have been written out of concern for Jim’s state of mind, but Jim was not the only one convinced. Peter Megaw thought his idea a ‘promising’ one and had no doubt that a site survey of the island and site conservation works were needed. He did, however, have reservations, as he explained when writing from England to the Governor in Nicosia:

It was not possible for Stewart in Germany, where he prepared his memorandum, to picture accurately the present situation in Cyprus, and I suggest that if his scheme is approved in principle by all concerned it would be useful if Stewart went out to Cyprus to size it up before details of establishment, equipment and functions are finally fixed. If he did that I could work with him, when I return to London, on final terms of reference etc. … Stewart’s memorandum was considered last week by the Archaeological Joint Committee, a body on which the C.O. and the Treasury are represented and I understand that from the archaeological side they are giving it full support. I hope that the War Office will be equally sympathetic.9

The War Office was not. English officials had little faith in the Cyprus Regiment. Over seven hundred Cypriot Communists had eventually joined the regiment and the War Office doubted they could be trusted.10 ‘In view of the way in which ammunition, explosives and equipment has melted away when anywhere near Cyprus Forces, have we any guarantee that what is found will not disappear in the same way?’11

The War Office dismissed Jim’s proposal but not before observing that the project would be excellent ‘if it were not so remarkably naïve’, noting that a rough estimate of the annual cost would come to around £75,000. Jim still clung to the idea even as it sank. As late as October 1945 he wrote to Eve Dray, by then back in Cyprus, suggesting there might be work for her as part of the programme.12

Jim’s mind sped along roads built on flimsy foundations, unable to stand still or take stock. Confined for so long, with only his thoughts and reading for company, Jim had no idea how the landscape had changed. Jack Hamson knew how he felt. Both men were mentally and physically exhausted, indecisive, but Jack was old enough to know it wise to postpone important decisions. The ‘bogey that sits on one’s shoulder and whispers in one’s ear’ afflicted them both and they felt older and sour. Jim was restless. More philosophical, Jack told Jim: ‘we paid our penny and took our choice by going into the army.’13 They felt bitter towards those who had not. Both wanted to rake over the burning embers of Crete and mourned Pendlebury’s death. ‘To have perished in failure four years ago is to be truly dead.’14 They discussed work possibilities in Athens. Would Jim be tempted by the offer of a consulship? Alan Wace urged Jim to consider the job of Assistant Director at the British School at Athens, but Jim seemed reluctant. Would he think it over again if it were offered to him?15 Despite the setbacks, Jim’s colleagues supported and encouraged him. The Craven Fund gave him a grant of £150 to complete work on Vounous but a second grant was unlikely and he needed a job.

Jim’s career prospects were poor and his situation became critical when Eleanor became pregnant. She was unwell for much of the pregnancy and had to be careful, given an earlier miscarriage. Twelve months after his release from prison, on 28 April 1946, their son Peter Hugh was born. Friends and colleagues sent congratulations. Winifred Lamb wrote to ‘welcome’ him, adding a pencil sketch of a cat: ‘Jim the cat will be a bit surprised when Peter Hugh comes home’.16 From Cyprus Peter and Elektra Megaw sent best wishes, hoping that Eleanor’s worries were now over. ‘She has had a time’, they said.17

At last Jim finally accepted his plans for Cyprus were dead. Where could he turn for support? One answer might be the Swedes.

Jim and Westholm were friends and it was to Alfirios that Jim had written in 1940 in despair at the madness of the world and revealing his plans to volunteer. It was time to renew connections and, although Peter Hugh was only two months old, he left England for a visit to Sweden.

Friends welcomed Jim warmly. He visited Alfirios and met Einar Gjerstad for the first time. They discussed the idea of collaboration and possibilities looked promising. Arne Furumark, the Swedish archaeologist and specialist of Bronze Age art, discussed Jim’s ideas on chronology and advised:

If I were you, I would draw up my own classification and stick to it. After all, Gjerstad and the Cyprus Committee are dependent on you, and you may very well insist on doing things in your own way, so long as it does not clash too much with the general lines of the publication. But don’t repeat my words!18

When he returned to England, Gjerstad wrote to tell Jim that ‘the Swedish Crown Prince is very keen on your collaborations with us, and I shall talk to him about the economic question, when I see him in Jan’.19 ‘England is dreary after Sweden’, Jim complained.20

A further possibility was Australia. Before the war, Jim had met another antipodean at the British School at Athens, Dale Trendall.21 Trendall was four years older than Jim and they had overlapped at Cambridge. Originally from New Zealand, Trendall’s was a formidable intellect and he was well on the way to a brilliant career both as scholar and university administrator. In 1939 Trendall took up the chair of Greek at Sydney University when the incumbent, Englishman Enoch Powell, left to enlist. During the war years Trendall worked with another Greek scholar and a mathematician in the cryptographic unit at Victoria Barracks in Melbourne.22

Trendall now wanted Jim at Sydney University. He was supported in this by Walter Beasley, who had met Jim in Australia in 1935 and was one of the sponsors of the Vounous excavations. Beasley was fifty-seven, a devout Christian, skilful businessman and Managing Director of Young’s Transport Agency. While travelling in the Near East in the 1930s, he had visited excavations at Jericho and become convinced that archaeology would one day prove the truth of Biblical events. In 1946 he established an independent Australian Institute of Archaeology in Melbourne to further this aim.

Since his release from Germany, Jim had written regularly to both Trendall and Beasley and in the middle of 1945 an offer arrived from Sydney. In his reply Jim mentions £2000 budgets and excavation plans.23 Trendall told Beasley that Jim hoped to return to Sydney as Director of the Nicholson Museum and occasional lecturer at Sydney University, but also wanted the opportunity to mount excavations. At the end of the year Trendall made a firm offer, a job at Sydney University as Assistant Director of the Nicholson Museum. The Nicholson was the oldest antiquities museum in Australia, established in 1860 through a bequest by the inaugural Chancellor of Sydney University Sir Charles Nicholson. It was a teaching museum, although no Department of Archaeology existed until 1949.The offered position would be partly funded by Beasley, who would pay for Jim’s travel expenses and cover part of his salary. In exchange, Jim was to provide Beasley’s newly established institute with professional advice during university vacation time.24 Jim dithered, and Beasley worried that his ‘nervousness seems to be increasing with regard to Australian conditions’.25 Whether this nervousness was real or feigned in order to obtain better employment conditions is unclear. Undoubtedly Jim was strongly attached to England and knew that archaeology conducted from Australia would be difficult. At the same time he was not above negotiating on the basis of exaggerated claims of alternative job offers.

Later Jim would say that by choosing to go to Sydney he had given up two better prospects but this is disingenuous. It is true that Anthony Arkell, Commissioner for Archaeology in the Sudan, had sounded him out for a position there, but by June 1946 there was still no guarantee that money for the position even existed, and in any case there were many things against it, in particular the weather and isolation. Khartoum was eight days travel from Cairo^26 and Arkell cautioned that life in the Sudan was difficult, especially for a wife and young child, although Eleanor seemed keen on the job.27 Arkell warned Jim about ‘snags’. Was Jim prepared to spend fifteen years in the Sudan, separated from his wife and son for long periods?28

Alan Wace again encouraged Jim to consider the position of Assistant Director at the British School in Athens. He was reluctant. Perhaps Greece held too may unhappy memories. People helped him where they could. On the suggestion of Professor A.W. Lawrence, Chambers Encyclopaedia asked Jim to update their sections on Asia Minor, Cyprus, Troy and Thermi—at the rate of £4 for 1000 words.29 The Medievalist John La Monté asked if he would contribute to a planned history of the Crusades. Later still, Alan Wace recommended Jim to Hetty Goldman, who was excavating at Tarsus, but her offer of employment, his second prospect, arrived too late and he missed the opportunity, although later he claimed to have given it up for Sydney.30

Jim felt conflicted by the idea of leaving England. When he and Eleanor had visited Australia in 1935, they had left with no intention of return. For much of their marriage they had lived a vagabond existence, although always drawn back to Park Cottage in Somerset, a house and location they both loved. For Jim, the longest time he had spent in any one place was as a student at Cambridge or a POW in Germany. In March 1946 he applied to the army for repatriation, but could not decide whether this would be to Cyprus, Khartoum or Australia, and in any case he wanted to defer any possible repatriation so he could complete research in England.31 He was unable to make up his mind.

There may also have been confusion in Jim’s personal life. Winifred Lamb’s replies to his POW letters suggest he sought guidance from her, although what he confided is unclear. Eve’s mother had long been friendly with the Stewarts and Eve used their address as a forwarding address. Her receipt for lecture fees from the University of London in January and February 1946 was sent there. On one visit Jim took Eve flint hunting, and on another she arrived with a present for Peter.32

Although torn about his future, Jim still found time for numismatics. Coins were his great love and fellow numismatists remained his closest friends. The paper he read to the Numismatic Society in London compares the Lusignan period on Cyprus with the modern world and reflects his sense of gloom.

The achievement of the Lusignan Kings was that they placed themselves aside from religious strife, leaving the odium for its actions to rest on the Latin church … To a Cypriot like Saint Neophytos there was no difference in criminality between Richard [Lionheart] and Saladin—750 years later we can, perhaps, agree with him …33

Though unemployed, Jim was not without financial resources. While he complained to Westholm that he might have to give up archaeology for lack of money, even on demobilisation he continued to buy coins. From the moment he heard rumours from Cyprus of a hoard of coins found at a village near Paphos, a huge collection of Medieval coins from the Lusignan period, he knew he must have the whole lot.34

At the end of 1946 Eve Dray had returned to Cyprus and became Jim’s ‘agent’ there. He sent her to the antiquities dealer Petro Colocassides to track down coins.

Make yourself pleasant. He knows about you. Tell him about my coins and all the books and tell him you have been helping with the Vounous book … I must have every coin from the Paphos hoard before I can write an account of it … [Colocassides] has a lot himself, and I want to get them … P.S. The ‘Mission Colocasides [sic]’ really is important. Paphos is a Mediaevalist’s dream.35

Obviously Eve had the right touch because a month later Jim congratulated her: ‘You’ve clicked! Colocassides says “She is very good and very polite and affable and I like to trust and work with her”. Take immediate promotion in the ambassadorial ranks.’36

Later, Jim stressed that ‘action over Paphos—the coins from Stavrokeno find—is now urgent. Some have leaked onto the continent, and we must round up the remainder pronto. I leave you to work out plans and action with Petro Colocassides, who is a crook’.37 Typically Jim felt unable to write an account of the Paphos hoard until he possessed it all. The same reluctance would characterise his approach to the Early Bronze Age.

Petro gave Eve fifty-one coins for Jim and in reply Jim sent Eve more detailed instructions.38 Eleanor added a post script. ‘I guess your head must be reeling with details of coins as well as pots! However I hope you are enjoying the new game of coin tracking. Peter has just started to wear the blue jersey you gave him. He is getting on fine now, very different from the odd little shrimp you saw.’

Jim and Eleanor opted for Australia. Once this was agreed, Jim immediately revived his plans for survey work on Cyprus. What he had failed to achieve through the Colonial Office, the War Office and the Cyprus Department of Antiquities, he now planned to do under the auspices of the University of Sydney. He doggedly persisted, simply transferring responsibility and financing from one organisation to another and rebranding the project the ‘Australian Cyprus Expedition’.

Jim arranged to send his Vounous research papers to Sweden, posting ten large packages containing forty quarto box files of pottery catalogue cards and tomb registers, fifty Leica rolls of film, whole and half-plate glass and cut film, over 2000 six-by-nine-inch negatives and 150 large negatives. He retained a further twenty box files to help him finalise the text for publication and promised to send drawings later of the approximately 2000 objects they had excavated.39 Sending material to Sweden was an unusual decision, given that the excavation had been conducted under the auspices of the British School at Athens, but Gjerstad had offered to publish the site and had no qualms about accepting ‘your most generous gift to the Swedish Cyprus Expedition … a very valuable and important contribution to the archive of the Cyprus Collections in Stockholm’.40 At about this time Gjerstad invited Jim to formally join forces with the Swedish Cyprus Expedition project by taking responsibility for the publication of the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age period. This volume would complement Jim’s work at Vounous. Jim was flattered and eager to assist.

His friends Jack Hamson and the numismatist Peter Grierson regretted his decision to leave England, but understood it.

It is a decision to the advantage of your son—taking the rational as distinct from the English view of likely events upon the continent of Europe. It may even conduce to your own physical well being … my intelligence tells me that it is wise to remove one’s self from the frontiers of Europe, but I have an irrational belief that it may yet be that this country will ride out the storm again. I note that your compatriots are all agreed to write this country off, and to transport a reasonable proportion of its inhabitants to their wide open spaces … it is certain that your decision to go to Australia is a matter of regret, and loss, to your friends in this country; and may well be loss to yourself also, in many of those imponderables that somehow continue to have such great weight … Well my dear James I wish you and Eleanor, as ever, the very best good fortune, in Australia or elsewhere, drunk or dry.41

The year 1947 was pivotal. Whatever happened, whatever decisions were made with whatever consequences, Cyprus would lie at the centre.

Before sailing for Australia Jim made a final visit to the island. The army arranged his passage. The stopover was ostensibly to inspect the Kumarcilar Khan, the building he believed he had persuaded the Cyprus Government to provide as headquarters for his Australian Cyprus Expedition. He planned to meet Eleanor and Peter a fortnight later in Port Said but theirs would be a long wait.

Now thirty-four, Jim was lean and athletic, having regained the weight stripped from him during four years of incarceration. With a flick of red hair, a square jaw and piercing blue eyes, he still resembled a naughty boy, his cherubic smile the most reliable indicator of impending mischief. He had charisma and charm but also, occasionally, a melancholic cold detachment.

Eve had learned to mask her feelings but not to ignore them. She and Jim had been friends for over a decade. They shared a love of Cyprus and whatever reluctance there was to act on impulse in England, now in Cyprus they both abandoned any reserve. Two weeks grew into three months. They explored places where Jim’s planned Australian Cyprus Expedition might work and immersed themselves in the island and its beauties. They visited Joan at Rizokarpaso, Eve’s old haunt in the Karpas. Near Peter and Elektra Megaw’s cottage they scrambled over the weathered limestone of the Kyrenia Range, looking out to the distant sea, posing for each other. The hesitant expression of Eve’s childhood photos becomes the open, unselfconscious face of a lover. Three months passed quickly. They were committed—to Cyprus, to archaeology, to each other. It was not easy to distinguish these three loves or know which took precedence.

On the morning of his departure for Port Said and ultimately Australia they left Sotira to drive south to the harbour at Limassol. Officious men in uniforms yelled instructions and stamped papers and a proper goodbye was impossible amid the noise and clamour of passengers clutching shapeless bags, and children crying at weary mothers. As she farewelled Jim at the dock Eve must have wondered at the consequences of their affair. But there was nothing for it. There would be no going back. The die was cast.

PART 2

A New World, 1947–62

Chapter 6

Australia, 1947–50

Jim joined Eleanor and Peter at Port Said. Eleanor was not in any doubt about the cause of Jim’s delay. ‘You’ve had a nice quiet affair in Cyprus’, she laughed as Jim helped get their baggage on board and they both sat down beside Peter’s pram.1

The SS Asturias was twenty-two years old and, like Europe itself, battle-weary. Launched in 1925, she had made the voyage from Southampton to South America many times before being converted into an armed merchant cruiser at the start of the war. Torpedoed in the South Atlantic in 1943 and abandoned as a total loss, the British Government bought her in 1946 and gave her a complete refit. She could accommodate nearly fifteen hundred passengers in three classes and over the next five years helped to transform post-war Australia, bringing more than twenty thousand European migrants to a new hemisphere.2

Jim wrote to Eve every few hours, regretting their rushed and unsatisfactory parting, and savouring the three months that preceded it. ‘Have you answered my formal offer of marriage yet?’ he asked.3 ‘Do you want to be my constant companion in all our work as in love?’4 His letters charted the ship’s passage. ‘Off the horn of Africa’, ‘Off the Chagos Islands’, ‘Southern Hemisphere’.

The voyage was tense, full of recriminations and regrets. Jim and Eleanor fought, cried and argued, and finally laughed about it all. Jim recounted the events to Eve:

Things are pretty friendly now, since the real shock has worn off …We wander round the deck at night hand in hand, discussing our futures. Eleanor’s apologised for what she called you, and Peter Hugh will be allowed to stay with us … Now that I’m away from you, I begin to see the pattern of why I love you—your willingness to help me with work; your interest in me personally; your affection; your adoration—may I call it that? your zest for life, your way of managing me without bullying; your patience (you’ll need lots); your excellent, if latent, brain; your dignity and courage; your beauty of feature and figure; your frankness; your enjoyment of sex. I could go on forever.5

Sometimes Peter Hugh distracted them. Jim thought him ‘absolutely adorable. Masses of bright curly hair and an insolent face’,6 although he was ill prepared for the responsibilities of fatherhood.

I’ve had babies in a big way … Last night I had to sleep miserably in a deck chair because one young mother couldn’t face taking her extremely repulsive infant to bed in the cabin. It was thought advisable for her to have a man with her in case of rape or something, so I was deputed to the job … I spent the night looking at your photo, thinking of our future, and drinking P.H’s emergency brandy ration … Anyway you’d better cogitate hard about children, for they do mean giving oneself up entirely and a consequent lack of comradeship.7

In Cyprus, Eve waited patiently and continued working at the Cyprus Museum or volunteering at the Blind School, while madly working to finish Jim’s drawings. Jim was right. For the moment they had only memories and plans.8 She confided in Elektra Megaw, who Jim thought would support her, but was reluctant to mention anything yet to her family.

Jim hoped to arrange a divorce quickly by claiming adultery with an ‘unnamed woman’ and asked Eve to look again for their receipt from a hotel in Nea Salamis which he had mislaid. ‘Can I find it? Can I hell. I remember you giving it to me, but God above knows where it is.’ He even discussed the problem with Eleanor and they sat side by side on their deck chairs laughing at ‘the sheer incompetence of the peccant husband’.9 Though Eleanor hoped this affair was casual, and Jim did not tell her of his plans to bring Eve to Australia, there was to be no going back.

When the ship docked in Melbourne, Jim spent a day visiting his sponsor, Walter Beasley. He was unsure how he would explain away his upcoming divorce and remarriage, given Beasley’s Christian conscience.10 For the moment Beasley seemed happy with his plans and thought Jim’s negotiations with the Cyprus Government for support of his proposed expedition ‘too crafty for words. He reckons I’ve been in the Levant too long to be caught’, he told Eve. They were an odd pair, the old man teetotal, non-smoking and religious, the younger, chain-smoker, already over-fond of drink and without any obvious religious belief.

I left the place a wreck, and threw myself on the padre as soon as I got on board—he produced a bottle of altar wine, which I downed non-stop … The Australian Archaeological Institute is purely Biblical, and a bit of a shambles. Fortunately I am not expected to sort it out … I am not a diplomat.11

The next evening their ship steamed steadily north towards Sydney. Jim stood on deck at sunset leaning toward the blue coastline. It was not just the padre’s wine that left him heady with excitement; it was years since he had been home. He was beginning a new life and he wrote to Eve that he hoped this country would be their ‘land of promise and city of delight’.

Perhaps I am a little excited about getting near home. What a lot of new things you’ll have to learn—new stars, new flowers, new birds, new animals, new scenery, new people. It’s a pity that Westralia is such a barren place, flat and bare. But New South Wales is very different: semi-tropical coast, delicious mountains, big rivers, and plenty of trees, even if there’s no real undergrowth. Those big brown eyes are going to be quite amused.

Sydney will rather amuse you too, it’s such a queer mixture of the ultra-modern and the Victorian. But I think you’ll love our harbour lights. Eve darling, what an adventure we started that night at the Imperial. I wonder where lies journey’s end, or if there is one for us.

We are over the first hurdle, but for heaven’s sake don’t think we are home yet. The more I think about the problem the greater seems the jungle through which I have to cut a track.12

Jim searched for the two shoulders of land that protect Sydney Harbour from view. Cook, the greatest of navigators, had missed it as he sailed north. Flinders, whose grandson Jim had worked for, knew it well, one of the great natural harbours of the world.

Australia in 1947 was not the place Jim had left seven years before. A Labor government had taken the country through the war years and edged it closer to America after the fall of Singapore. While Great Britain remained for many Australians the place they called ‘home’, these ties were loosening. Even so, local papers were full of the planned visit of the Mountbattens and the doings at Ascot, together with advertisements for food hampers to buy for friends and relatives still suffering rationing in Britain. But Australians now realised Britain was a long way away. In 1942 Japanese midget submarines had launched attacks from Sydney Harbour. Both Darwin and Broome were bombed. Jim had suffered four years in a prisoner of war camp in Germany, but compared with the experiences of thousands of Australians in Japanese camps in Thailand and Malaya—Changi, the Burma Railway—many might think his a comparatively easy war.

Jim landed in a city of nearly one-and-a-half million in a country of seven-and-a-half million and with a population set to explode in a few years. Returning soldiers and booming immigration strained services. Papers ran articles railing against housing shortages alongside advertisements for the latest household goods. The tensions between expectations and reality simmered. Jim spoke as a member of the upper class when he told Eve that ‘all the employers curse Australian labour and the new 40 hour week’, but as a patriotic Australian when he added, that ‘to anyone from home it looks as if 40 hours of Aussie labour is worth a damn sight more than 48 of English’.13 There was an optimism borne of peace and the promise of prosperity.

On the other hand, Jim returned to a culturally and socially conservative country. In the same year that Jim returned, many other Australians—writers, artists—were escaping overseas in the hope of finding a more congenial life in societies less stultifying than Australia’s. The White Australia Policy remained unchallenged, Aborigines were not citizens of their own country, pubs closed at 6 pm, chicory essence passed as coffee, equal pay for women was years away. Jim complained that even friends at the Numismatic Society called him ‘Sir’.14 Divorce was rare and shocking and nothing about their situation would be easy. Jim warned Eve: ‘If you think we can twine orange blossom and lace round this marriage, you’d better think again. There’s nothing romantic or pleasant in it—I’ve deserted my wife and baby.’15

But Jim settled easily into Australia. Sydney was bright and gay, he explained to Eve. ‘You’ll begin to see the inter-relation of the environment and the Australian character, why we are quick and hasty and direct, reckless and rather feckless, and why nobody is better than his fellow. You can’t be depressed for too long here, though you might shoot yourself on the spur of the moment’.16

Almost as soon as he landed, Jim set about finagling to get Eve passage to Australia. After years of war, people were on the move all over the world and passenger ships scarce. International shipping was sporadic at best and obtaining passage from Cyprus to Australia would prove difficult. Beasley had paid Jim’s own transfer costs and now Jim persuaded him to pay £250 toward the cost of bringing out his urgently needed ‘technical assistant’. That the staunchly Christian Beasley was manipulated in this way and contributed unwittingly to bringing Jim’s lover to Australia, was unlikely—when discovered—to do Jim any favours. Jim wrote to the Foreign Minister, H.V. Evatt, asking him to cable the Australian Commissioner in Cairo to secure passage for his ‘assistant’. Trendall sensibly made him tone down the letter, but even so it was an extraordinary request.17 Jim’s father, only recently aware of the relationship between Jim and Eve, was ‘astounded’: ‘He thinks I’ll probably be hanged if Evatt ever finds out how he’s been used!’18

Jim gave Eve detailed advice about beginning her life in Australia: ‘Shoes situation here quite good. Stockings are worn in town and by ladies (i.e. graduates) at the Univ. But in the summer you needn’t wear them. Hats as you like.’ Eve should bring sheets and linen, both difficult to find in Australia, and he told her to bring items from Bellapais: ‘5 bath towels, 6 face towels, 4 red blankets, 6 napkins, 1 coloured tablecloth and 4 napkins, 3 large striped Lefkoniko sheets and 8 small Cyprus towels together with 3 small coloured tray cloths.’ Jim suggested they leave buying pyjamas until the price dropped ‘or we go back to Cyprus, when we can have an orgy of spending on that sort of luxury. Buy them for yourself if you need them.’19

Eve was unable to board a ship until December and in the intervening six months they wrote to each other almost every day. For Jim, writing was a way of sorting himself out, of testing ideas, of thinking. He was introspective and bleak, demanding and despairing, argumentative, arrogant, loving and sometimes lost. Eve replied less emotionally and looked forward, not back. She was practical and sensible where he was morose, a dreamer full of dark fantasies.

Within a fortnight of his return to Australia Jim and his father boarded the train for Wentworth Falls in the Blue Mountains to visit his mother’s grave. The countryside calmed him and reminded him of the Kyrenia Range, but the visit aroused demons: ‘I can’t bear grave visits, and in an icy wind driving mountain mist across the forests all my ghosts trooped out of the vault, all the memories and images of happy times, of high hopes now shattered and broken, of all that I’ve fought for against my family.’20 He collapsed on return to Sydney.

Jim juggled concerns and responsibilities, obligations and ambitions. The final break with Eleanor was painful. He was often unwell and felt physically sick at the thought of losing his son.21 He had no space at the university for his library and he could not find anywhere suitable to live. Trouble was brewing with Beasley, and the Australian Cyprus Expedition looked further and further away. He had abandoned not just Eleanor, but Park Cottage, which he loved. He was homesick for Cyprus and for England.

He dwelt on the past, his failures and loss. ‘I’m feeling awful to-night, as the sun goes and darkness closes in. I just can’t bear my own company in these empty days and nights, sitting in the ruins of my old life.’22 But he loved this country of his birth. ‘Wait till you’ve smelt burning gum-leaves, for that is the finest aroma I’ve ever met.’23

In the six months of longing to be reunited, Jim and Eve lived on edge, strained by the separation and concerned for their future. They had few doubts about their decision but its cost was steep. In Cyprus Eve waited for a boat to Australia and struggled to make sense of Jim’s demands. His love letters alternated with others full of complicated complaints and endless lists and orders for pots and coins.

Bugger you. Your letters have just come. When I say buy 1–12 I mean 1–12 not 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 12, 18, 23 anyway. You’ve not sent me sketches, and how the hell do I know that this new list of pots is worth £50. We decided to buy on your drawings and you bloody well stick to it. You’ve made me really angry by your lousy unsystematic way of dealing with things …You would cause this bother just when I’m hopelessly busy.24

He always apologised but distance and postal delays exacerbated anxieties. When Jim wrote to say he was ill once again, Eve worried as she tried to imagine him alone and friendless in the alien world he described and which she was soon to enter.

At nine in the morning and a week before Christmas, Jim Stewart strode along Manning Road toward the red brick buildings of Sydney University. Preoccupied with his precarious domestic situation, he bounded up the steps below the three-storey clock tower, scarcely noticing the elaborate turrets that erupted from the tower’s roof. Sydney University was nearing its century and its Tudor Gothic architecture sat solidly out of place amongst the bustle of post-war mercantile Sydney. The buildings formed a square around a grassed quadrangle, itself dissected by cement paths. Jim turned left as he crossed the quadrangle and passed a group of students chatting in the shady stone colonnade. Outside, it was hot as a Cypriot summer.

He passed beneath the vaulted ceiling and turned right into the Nicholson Museum. The museum housed the largest collection of antiquities in Australia and had begun as a personal bequest from Sir Charles Nicholson—doctor, businessman, politician, collector and one of the founders of Sydney University. Jim and his sponsor Professor Dale Trendall planned to make the museum both a first-rate teaching museum and a vehicle for promoting the study of archaeology. It would be the centre of their empire. But would it serve?

Jim bent to inspect the dusty pots crammed into the wooden display cases and stepped around an Egyptian sarcophagus lying squarely in the middle of the room. In a back room he found more pottery—sherds and complete pots—and a peeling assortment of labels in varying stages of decomposition. One moth-eaten tag lay abandoned on a workbench: ‘10 pots from Amarna sent in 1920’.25 Despondent, he sat in the cluttered museum office and wrote to Eve: ‘The Egyptian problem is quite overwhelming’, he said. ‘I hate the muck and don’t know much about it.’26 The bronzes from Iraq were ‘quite beyond repair, having been vilely treated first by Woolley during the Ur dig and not cared for at all since then’.27 How could he hope to transform the museum given its lack of staff and resources?

Jim had returned to Sydney to take up a position in the History Department at Sydney University and found an institution bursting at the seams. To assist with their transition to civilian life, the federal government had granted returned servicemen free entry to universities and at Sydney the student population exploded to nearly 10,000 as men rushed to seize the opportunity. This was the largest university in Australia, larger even than Cambridge or any major university in the United Kingdom. More graduates might mean more teachers and doctors for the booming post-war economy, but at least one professor moaned that administering his department had become increasingly like running a chain store.28

Like Trendall and many Australians in the 1940s, Jim believed that Australia had no cultural background of its own and must look to Europe to provide it. Almost as soon as he arrived, Jim joined Dale in a ‘begging campaign’ to expand the Nicholson’s collections.29 Jim wrote to all and sundry, pleading for donations of pottery sherds or other artefacts to fill gaps in the collection and expand the museum’s teaching capacity. Often they swapped objects. A.P. Elkin, Professor of Anthropology at the university, maintained a ‘bank’ of Aboriginal flint tools, which were used as currency with overseas museums and archaeologists. Trendall explained the system to a journalist from the Sydney Telegraph: ‘I’ll swop you seven nulla-nullas, three bark paintings, two corroboree records, an Arunta skull, and a didgeridoo for the shop-soiled mummy case, in good-condition.’30 This casual barter system easily came unstuck, as Jim explained in a memo to Trendall: ‘Owing to the stupidity of Australia House a set of gramophone records of aboriginal music destined for Madrid has gone to the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. I wonder if you could write to your friend in the Australian Embassy in Paris and ask him to negotiate an exchange of North African Stone Age material in return for these records.’31

More imaginative and unusual ways of funding the museum amused Jim. Dale, he explained to Eve, planned to profit from the black market connections he had made during the war, courtesy of his cryptographic work:

Unfortunately the Labour [sic] government has abolished giving knighthoods. Dale knows one person who would give us £100,000 with joy if he could get an honour to give a cloak of respectability to his wartime activities. Labour is about to nationalise the banks … and there are quite a few people who don’t want the Commonwealth gov’t to get a peep at the state of their bank balances. Dale hopes to cash in on that desire to reduce holdings in return for some recognition as University benefactors.32

Jim had a further reason for urgently promoting the idea of an international museum.

Another war is coming, when nobody knows. In it Britain, Western Europe and the Mediterranean will be wrecked, utterly and completely. Even America and Canada will be severely damaged. We want to raise our standard of culture here to meet what will be (perhaps we are looking 50 years ahead, perhaps only 2), and we want a centre of research on which future generations can build—it could well be the only centre of archaeological research anywhere in the world. I want to lay down policies which will transcend personalities, and which will make the museum international. I want everyone to be able to come and work, and not be fettered by ‘rights’ to material, and I want things so laid out that no personal twists can find play. In due course, if we get the museum, we shall ask other Museums to deposit material on loan, as a war insurance.33

The Nicholson Museum, Jim and Trendall hoped, was to be much more than a simple collection of antiquities from the great European civilisations, with the Cypriot collection as its centrepiece. Just as he saw the museum acting as a cultural repository in the event of war and destruction in Europe, or planned an archaeological survey of Cyprus to meet political ends, he understood the educational role the museum might play within the university and the broader community of Sydney. He wanted the department and the museum to develop a symbiotic relationship, each contributing to the other in ways that would make the museum ‘a living organism rather than an antiquarian collection’.34 It would certainly not be an art museum. The Friends of the Nicholson Museum, a student Archaeological Society, and the appointment of a school liaison officer formed a part of this strategy. The museum would become a place that lived, that welcomed school students and the general public and provided space for undergraduates to work.

Jim argued repeatedly with university administrators that archaeology, unlike other arts subjects, should be treated as a science; like a science, it needed laboratories in which to work. Storage space at the Nicholson was hopelessly inadequate and students had limited space for research (though, perhaps because of these very deficiencies they loved the informality of the museum and the romance of eating their lunch sitting on an Egyptian sarcophagus).35 Security was slack—in the study period before end of year exams, the door to the museum was simply left ‘on the latch’ to allow students to work inside.

In Cyprus, Eve haggled with authorities over export permits for the antiquities purchased for the Nicholson. Both Jim and Dale were aware of changing moods in the Near East and understood they must move fast to get what they wanted. Post-war nationalist voices cried out against pre-war colonialism and called for bans on the export of national antiquities. Arne Furumark, who Jim had met in Sweden, wrote of the difficulties he faced on Cyprus, difficulties he was convinced were fuelled by resentment at the amount of material removed from the country by the Swedish Cyprus Expedition, even though at the time it was done legally. When an old friend from Turkey, Hamit Koşay, sent four large boxes of sherds to the Nicholson, Jim worried they might presage an imminent change in the Turkish Archaeological Law.36

He stressed that Eve make sure pots sent from Cyprus were marked ‘of NO commercial value’ so as to avoid close inspection,37 although at the same time he claimed to have contacts in the Roman Catholic Church that could ‘square customs’.38 Eve was uneasy with Jim’s instructions and said so.39 One of her purchases met with difficulties when Porphyrios Dikaios refused the necessary export permit. She apologised for her lack of diplomacy but told Jim that ‘he just kept saying he was doing his duty not letting anything he hadn’t duplicates of out of Cyprus’.40 When Peter Megaw returned from leave to find a high-handed letter from Sydney’s Vice-Chancellor complaining that Dikaios had treated the university unfairly, Megaw wrote in fury to Jim, warning it would be a ‘nasty letter’:

I should have you know that the scale of your purchases from the local market is embarrassing as we are bound in controlling the licensed dealers to have in view their connection between their trade and clandestine excavations … the point has been reached where your purchases must be regarded as a potential inducement to them.41

The university withdrew its complaint.

Eve gently reminded Jim that his friends in Cyprus were helping and he should not take their help for granted. Petro Colocassides was still waiting for a reply to his letters; would he write to thank their friend Judith Stylianou for her work? ‘A nice, loving letter would be more helpful at this juncture’, she wrote. ‘I’m just dead, and not in a fit state to haggle and argue.’42

Dale Trendall had negotiated with Walter Beasley in Melbourne over the terms of Jim’s employment and almost as soon as Jim arrived, the arrangement struck trouble. Beasley had agreed to fund archaeological work in Cyprus in exchange for a share of the finds, but the Australian Cyprus Expedition was destined never to live up to its grand name.

Walter Beasley’s Australian Institute of Archaeology was established to promote biblical archaeology and its overt aim was to use archaeology to authenticate biblical events. Archaeology was Beasley’s means, but the end was not what Jim had foreseen. When he visited Beasley in Melbourne, Jim declared himself shocked at the cavalier way Beasley had dealt with the Vounous material he had received in exchange for partially funding Jim’s excavations. In particular Jim complained that Beasley had split up material from the same tomb group, severing the connection between objects from the same context. Later Jim complained about the religious clauses in the institute’s constitution, although previously he had no compunction about accepting Beasley’s money.

Sydney University worried that the Department of Antiquities in Cyprus would make demands the institute could not fulfil and Jim quite rightly insisted that all excavated material must be treated scientifically—tomb groups kept together and objects properly curated. Jim’s appointment was intended to provide Beasley’s institute with precisely the professional expertise it lacked, but he seemed unwilling to give it. Dozens of letters about the institute’s constitution flew between Sydney and Melbourne and serious discussions took place about creating a new institute with fewer religious clauses and conditions. In the meantime Jim alerted Winifred Lamb in Cambridge and Richard Barrett from the British Museum, warning them against Beasley’s institute and its religious affiliations. Both were members of the British Institute at Ankara Committee and, grateful for his advice, promptly severed connections with the Australian Institute of Archaeology, thus directly affecting funding for work in Jordan. Beasley guessed at Jim’s interference and became convinced that he was milking the institute while failing to fulfil his half of the agreement, that is, to provide technical support to the institute. Beasley knew and liked Eleanor and his religious sensitivities were undoubtedly shaken by Jim’s own cavalier attitude to his family responsibilities and to other people’s money.

Finance was a serious problem. From the start, the Professor of History, A.H. McDonald, worried about the scope of Jim’s grand proposals. Why, he queried, did Jim need to excavate Medieval sites? What time would he have to devote to the university’s museum? Beasley had promised £2000 toward the proposed expedition but Jim estimated that three years work would cost £11,558,43 equivalent at the time to twenty-three times the annual salary of a university lecturer. Where could this money possibly come from? Jim’s elaborate lists and costings for the Australian Cyprus Expedition were all padded and in the end his tendency to exaggeration served him badly. He told the university that the Department of Antiquities in Cyprus had not only given permission to excavate but had made promises of in-kind support amounting to £6000 sterling. What he failed to mention was that these promises were all notional and that none of the work had begun nor would until the project eventuated.44

In Cyprus, Megaw continued to back the proposed Australian Cyprus Expedition, but his doubts about its viability intensified and he was irritated by the way Jim pressed his case. As he had done when trying to get passage for Eve, Jim ignored official channels, convinced that personal political contacts would get quicker results. He cut corners. He wrote directly to the Colonial authorities rather than to the Archaeological Joint Committee. When the Colonial Office sought advice from the committee, the Director of the British Museum wryly observed that Jim Stewart was in effect asking the Cyprus Government to mount an excavation, only to then give Stewart both the management of and credit for it.45

Together with the Vice-Chancellor and Professor McDonald, Jim and Dale worked the big end of town, hosting dinners and soliciting financial support from the business world. People expressed interest, but little actual money trickled in.

In the meantime Walter Beasley’s letters grew more exasperated. As the project seemed increasingly doomed to fail, he lost patience with both Stewart and Trendall. He had paid part of Jim’s salary, provided money for Eve’s passage, money to transport Jim’s personal library to Australia, money for a truck in Cyprus and would later give money to help to outfit Jim’s Bathurst property at Mount Pleasant. Beasley was a businessman and this venture was not showing any potential return. While he retained his enthusiasm for archaeology and his reverence for archaeologists, he lost faith in Jim Stewart and Sydney University altogether.

As the months passed, Jim’s plans continued to unravel. When he first returned to Sydney in late 1947, he had moved with Eleanor and Peter into the family home on Manning Street near the university. Eleanor now accepted that their marriage was over, although it took some time before Jim was prepared to broach the subject with his father and stepmother, only doing so after he had ‘filled Hope to the haws with brandy’.46

Jim refused his father’s initial advice to simply keep Eve as his mistress. One minute Jim expected he and Eve would live together openly; the next he worried about gossip. Might he lose his job? Divorce in the 1940s was uncommon, scandalous and messy. A man could sue for divorce if his wife committed adultery but until 1923 a wife could only sue on grounds of adultery if she had one additional complaint. Many people fell back on the concept of a failure to restore ‘conjugal rights’. This allowed two people who had agreed on divorce to do so in a reasonably civilised way, although any suggestion of collusion could overturn the decision. For Jim and Eleanor this would be less scandalous than adultery but would delay the divorce.

Most days Jim worked at the university. He needed a place of his own but despaired of finding suitable accommodation either for himself or his massive library. In the end, Jim’s stepmother Hope proved both sensible and practical. In October 1947, Jim moved out of Manning Street and Hope helped him move his things to Elizabeth Bay Road until he found a flat. The final break with Eleanor was ‘sheer hell, for Peter Hugh reasons, but it’s done and over.’47

Finally Jim found a house in Edgecliff. A double-storey stone cottage with church windows and a stone porch, the house belonged to the Roman Catholic Church. A Virginia creeper clambered over the walls; magnolias and jacarandas provided shade. Where light filtered through the canopy, someone had planted bananas. The cliff for which the suburb was named rose sharply behind, and an ugly block of flats towered over the house. Jim’s cats found hunting grounds there and the senior female cat, Scatty, raised a litter of kittens. He longed for Eve to join him soon. Jim needed her calming influence.

As the time for departure loomed, Eve grew wistful, knowing that with this decision she would lose both her independence and her beloved island. At the last minute her boat was delayed for a fortnight. Another frustration.

I feel completely numb and vacant. After the frantic rush and worry of trying to get everything finished, trying to do all you wanted, packing up till the last minute, all keyed up, and just a little sad at leaving Cyprus (which is looking so lovely now there’s been some rain and the first flowers have come out—pretty little narcissus, and carpets of tiny mauve things, like Roman hyacinths), brief good-byes to my relations and then the drive to Limassol—all for nothing! Oh! Darling, don’t ever again leave me behind, to suffer like this.48

And a few days later:

I think I understand myself now. For months I’ve concentrated entirely on trying to do what you wanted, right up to the day I went down to Limassol … I think it must be that, almost subconsciously, I realised that this was the last time I’d ever be myself, and so, although I’ve thought a lot about you, I’ve not actively done anything for you. In a few weeks now I’ll join you; I’ll offer myself to you, body and soul, I shall become a part of you; I myself will cease to exist. Jim, my darling, I know there’s so much more I could have been doing for you, and yet I’ve just not attempted to do anything; can you understand what I’m trying to explain, and forgive me … I wonder, will this really be my last word from Cyprus … Darling, I just don’t know what I’m thinking or feeling now—I’m all on edge—worried, excited, sad, everything messed up! I just can’t attempt to sort it out, so I’ll just say:—sleep peacefully, my own.49

A fortnight later they again drove south. Eve looked back only briefly. At the wharf she said her goodbyes to her father and his driver Hassan. She boarded the Egyptian-registered SS Misr with four hundred other passengers, mostly Cypriots migrating to Australia. Like them, she was nervous, but excited about her future and the life and country that lay ahead.

Jim was annoyed when the boat stopped at Fremantle and upset that he was unable to meet her in Melbourne.

I wonder how you like your first glimpse of Australia. Most English hate it—and us. But I want you to like it and settle down happily, for if you still want to marry me this is going to be your home. You’ll find the people jarring on you a bit, but remember that everyone is very friendly. They say more or less what they think, and for that reason they are really more genuine that the English … So don’t go criticising your new country just on surface details. I grouse about it a lot, or criticise, but at heart I love the place and the people.50

The following day he continued:

I suppose it is really an attack of nerves, It started off with nightmares—in one you sliced off your left fingers with a bread-knife while cutting me a slab of bread; in the other, I found myself in command of troops stationed in a railway junction; the usual thing, a wave of bombers came in low flying dead at us and started to unload … and it was quite obvious that we had had it … I’m sorry, I haven’t got myself sorted out. Somehow I’ve got to get a grip of myself, for this sort of thing is devastating and does nobody any good. Sorry, darling, I’ve given you a lousy welcome to your new home. Try to forgive me, my Eve. When we separated that day in Limassol I knew that darkness lay ahead, but how bleak and how hard it would be I didn’t know …51

Eve flew from Melbourne to Sydney, where Jim waited. They had been separated for nearly six months and longed for this reunion; they were still committed to each other, but fearful of the effects of their decision. Despite warnings they should not live together openly, Eve moved into the house at Edgecliff. In the evenings they sat peacefully on the cane chairs in the front garden, sipping an evening drink and looking across the scrappy lawn toward the harbour. Eve loved this garden. It was their haven.

Few friends in Cyprus knew the precise details of Eve’s personal life. Judith Stylianou wrote happily, passing on her best wishes to Jim and Eleanor. Tom Dray worried. He missed his daughter and hoped Eve would tire of this new country. Her English family asked when she planned to come home. Joan du Plat Taylor knew more. Eve and Jim had visited her at Ayios Philon and she felt compromised. She wrote from Cyprus asking what the situation was, as rumours were circulating that Jim and Eleanor had separated, and no one knew for sure.52 As late as Christmas 1949, even Joan assumed that Eve’s sojourn was temporary and asked when she would be coming home to Cyprus.53 Although a ‘nomad at heart’54 she had settled down—but none of her friends thought it would be for long.

Jim thought Eve might find a position in the French Department at Sydney University but Trendall found her work as a technical assistant at the Nicholson Museum, a much needed position, given the overwhelming backlog of material to contend with. Her job was to mend and draw pots and to keep the museum open for students. Sitting at her drawing bench, she would do her work, smiling to students who entered but rarely initiating conversation. She was happy to hover in the background where she was most comfortable, amused that people scarcely noticed her. The work proved exhausting. So many objects at the museum had not been accessioned and most in the storage area needed mending. In his annual report Trendall wrote that she had ‘done excellent work in cleaning and repairing vases and other antiquities, but she has an almost overwhelming task before her, owing to the substantial arrears in this work’. There was little space for working on objects, and storage issues were critical.

Eve didn’t take to Sydney, had little interest in cities or the sights and distractions they offered and her living arrangements made for an uneasy social life. After England and Cyprus, Eve may have found Sydney—especially the Sydney of the well-to-do—a parochial backwater—while no one knew how or where to fit her in. Reticent and shy, she remained self-contained and distant. With no other friends, Jim and her museum work became her life.

Sometimes she shopped for relatives and friends in Europe. She never forgot birthdays or Christmas obligations, selecting goods she knew were in short supply. Aunt Ethel was grateful for the marzipan and turkey; her father said he would share his parcel with the aunts.55 ‘It was quite amazing to learn what real flour is like, it’s so long ago’, wrote Hans Helback from Copenhagen, who was fascinated by the way in which the slices of bacon she sent were separated by strips of cellophane.56 Kurt Bittel thanked her for coffee.57 But it was only a momentary escape from work.

In addition to his work at the Nicholson Museum, Jim’s job was to lecture in the history department. Almost from the beginning, he and Dale Trendall lobbied for the establishment of a separate Department of Archaeology, finally created in 1948. Dale, as Professor, lectured in classical archaeology and Jim specialised in the Near East. Student numbers were never large. In 1949 twenty-six students studied classical archaeology and forty-two, Near Eastern. To young and eager students Jim was a gifted teacher and an exceptional lecturer. Many adored him and would remember his enthusiasm and passion for his subject decades later. Without notes he perched on a desk at the front of the room, blue eyes alight with the intricate puzzle of pottery typologies and memories of Cyprus. He chain-smoked his way through each lecture, the ground outside the window littered with a scatter of butts, each punctuating the main point in an argument.58

From the start he set impossibly high standards. Winifred Lamb warned against being too ambitious. ‘Be very careful not to confuse students by an accumulation of facts’, she cautioned.59 Arne Furumark was amazed at the standards he expected and surprised that students were able to meet them; if the exams Jim had sent him were anything to go by, he was impressed.60 Never fond of armchair archaeologists, Jim insisted that students become familiar with archaeological material and demanded the university produce lantern slides, at some cost. Teaching about things without seeing them was, he thought, both impossible and futile. He insisted that students study geography. Although most would never visit the archaeological sites he mentioned, Jim expected them to understand the role of geography in the history and prehistory of the Near East.

Jim was a gentleman who inspired staff and students not just with his knowledge, but through the force of his personality. The museum was central to this teaching and Jim planned to make it world-class. Students loved the ‘informality and mess of the museum’, although its Gothic windows and high ceilings, the gloom and dust, gave students exotic entry to a world utterly alien to their own.61 The students formed an archaeological society and wrote newsletters. Winifred Lamb congratulated him on their work and ambitious enthusiasm. ‘I know no counterpart’, she wrote, astonished by his energy, but warned him not to overwork.62

A good lecturer allows students to grow, to develop their own interests and research paths, and up to a point the loose arrangements Jim fostered at the university encouraged this. Students overreached to please him, responding to his infectious enthusiasm. He took them to the centre of things, to a world of scholarship they could scarcely imagine. But Jim was impatient. He didn’t suffer fools gladly. Rich and privileged, he could be petulant and imprudent, regularly antagonising those in authority, and stamping with relish on any toes in his way. He could be ‘tricky’, took instant dislikes to people, and students and staff learned to be on guard around him.63 He treated his best students as wayward children, bullying them into following his dictates, reluctant to lose control, a puppeteer pulling the strings. Many students danced to his tune only to realise too late they had lost the freedom to move. It was only a matter of time before his approach would end in tears.

Basil Hennessy was an outstanding student. He was solidly built, with a disarming smile and a face distinguished by a liverish splash across the left eye, a birthmark that marked him and gave him the air of a pirate. Basil’s father had returned from the First World War broken, gassed at Mont St Quentin. He died when Basil was only seven. At seventeen, Basil joined the navy and, as a returned serviceman, enrolled in an arts degree at Sydney University in the same year that Jim arrived. He was twenty-two to Jim’s thirty-four and Jim soon replaced his father as the most important adult male in his life.64

In class Basil sat close to the front and leaned forward, drawn into Jim’s stories of exotic places and memorable characters—real and imagined. With personal links to many of the great European archaeologists, Jim was at the height of his powers. Basil was hooked. Over the next ten years he allowed himself to be bullied, cajoled and chastened, goaded and petted. Basil moved in with Jim and Eve at Edgecliff and Jim and Basil became friends and drinking partners, though never on an equal footing. Jim was older, more experienced, wealthy. He dropped names, wore silk shirts with elegant cufflinks, talked of travel and war, and could have anything he wanted. Even people. He told Basil when to visit his mother and berated him when he thought his letters too ‘flowery’.

Within a few years of Jim’s arrival, the Nicholson began to sponsor excavations in Cyprus, Jericho and Nimrud. Objects that would never otherwise have reached Australia arrived at the museum and excavated material had the advantage of clear provenance, not always the case with purchases. Sydney University paid £1000 for a group of ivories from Max Mallowan’s excavations at Nimrud and £50 for a much less showy horde of Roman coin from Taunton, in Somerset, near where Jim and Eleanor had lived. Both acquisitions—one famous in its lifetime, the other not—are considerably more valuable today, but at the time it was difficult to justify the expense, given the small numbers of archaeology students enrolled at Sydney University. This feverish collecting added to the existing backlog of artefacts. While Jim and Dale Trendall amassed much new material for the Nicholson Museum, there were no resources for dealing with it and not until the early 1960s did anyone seriously try to make sense of it all.

Both Trendall and Jim Stewart were committed to the idea of a grand museum for Australia and began to think that Sydney University, without sufficient funds, was not the answer. Jim believed, as usual, in personal connections, so they went directly to the top.

In a proposal sent to the Prime Minister they argued that ‘Australia is not yet old enough to have developed its own cultural traditions and the history of the country has made it the heir of European and Near Eastern culture to an even greater extent than the United States of America’. The Department of Archaeology and the Nicholson Museum should, they argued, remain within Sydney University, but the model they proposed was more independent, along the lines of the government-funded research institution, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). While the university provided only £1250 towards the Department of Archaeology’s maintenance budget, Jim’s proposal contained detailed figures for a new museum costing over £29,000 and included three lecture rooms, a sitting room, drawing office, library and darkroom. He estimated they would need a staff of twenty-two, including a carpenter, librarian, technical assistants and lecturers. Two postgraduate scholarships would offer travel allowances. Jim envisaged an organisation that, true to form, gave him maximum independence and minimum administrative responsibility, and his direct appeal to someone in power rather than a formal request through official channels was one he had used before.65

Old fashioned and connected through wealth and property, Jim favoured agreements made with a handshake or by word of mouth, choosing influence with individuals over written agreements between institutions. Old World methods. The New World of committees and memoranda and applications to a research council was beyond his understanding and beneath his contempt.

The Acting Prime Minister, Sir Arthur Fadden, returned the proposal to Sydney University’s Vice-Chancellor, noting firmly that the approach was out of order and should have gone through normal channels. The Vice-Chancellor, Sir Stephen Roberts, placed the proposal and memo on file adding ‘Trendall told Stewart he gave it to me just before he left. I certainly have not seen it, and knew nothing about it’.66

While he struggled with a new teaching load, efforts to build up the Nicholson Museum’s collection and his own domestic crisis, Jim continued research. ‘Intellectually I was at my best in Bavaria [as a POW]’,67 he told Eve, and the pent-up energies of his prison years were unleashed in Sydney. The most pressing need was for a new edition of the handbook for the Nicholson Museum.

In 1947 the first edition was only three years old but out of print and out of date. A second edition, published in 1948, was completely revised and reflected both Stewart’s and Trendall’s interests and the changing focus of the museum’s collections. Jim rewrote the Near and Middle East sections, while the Egyptian section was abridged (neither was particularly interested in it). Part 2 was devoted to Cyprus, Crete and Mycenae. Jim of course wrote the enlarged Cyprus section and Trendall prepared the sections on Crete and Mycenae with Jim’s help. Trendall completely rewrote Part 3, devoted to Greek pottery. The section on Greek and Roman ‘daily life’ remained unchanged and the section on ‘inscriptions’ was slightly revised. All sections included recommended readings and folding maps were included for reference to sites. The handbook remained in use in at least one American university well into the 1960s,68 and Arne Furumark told Jim that he was going to convert his ‘truly excellent handbook’ into a textbook for his students.69 Four leather-bound copies were made: for Stewart, Trendall, the Vice-Chancellor and, perhaps to his bewilderment, the King of Sweden. A further eight presentation copies were bound in green cloth.70

A year later Jim had nearly completed his study of the Lusignan coinage of Cyprus, although the work lapsed for want of a publisher and because it did not fit his teaching or departmental direction. Jim asserted his belief in the need to expand the teaching of archaeology into later historical periods and always hoped to excavate a Medieval site on Cyprus, but it was a vain hope. Coins were a sideline to his academic position and a pursuit largely unknown to his university colleagues. He often turned to the Medieval period as a pleasant break from other obligations. ‘Coins are a relaxation,’ he told his friend Albert Baldwin, ‘but I don’t look at them unless someone like yourself or Philip Whitting asks questions’.71 Although he accepted an invitation to write a chapter for a book on the history of the Crusades and continued to promise to do so, nothing eventuated and the episode remains an example of his appetite for taking on too much and failing to deliver.

In 1950 his and Eleanor’s volume on Vounous was published in Sweden.72 It had been a long time in the making, interrupted by war, imprisonment, separation and the move to Australia. Jim claimed at various times that he had lost notes during the war, although elsewhere he said that the bulk of the manuscript had been completed by 1939. He posted a copy of the handwritten manuscript to Stockholm late in 1946, together with most of his research material. Initially Jim dedicated the volume to ‘all those, named and un-named, Cypriot and English, Australian and Swedish, who have helped us’ but later changed this to more diplomatically acknowledge their major sponsor, Sir Charles Hyde, owner of the Birmingham Post.73 The publication attracted mixed reviews. Many thought it an exemplary work,74 but others criticised the failure to include general observations in addition to the data relating to each tomb. Still more complained that the pottery categories used in the text relied on a future, unfinished, and incomplete corpus, which Jim had hoped to publish, but as it consisted of thousands of ring-bound pages, it was beyond the financial resources even of the Swedes.75

The Cyprus Museum’s Porphyrios Dikaios had excavated at Vounous and knew the site well. While acknowledging the ‘careful and conscientious work’, the ‘meticulous presentation of the results’ and the ‘excellent presentation’ of the volume, Dikaios regretted the failure to include any analysis: ‘Every field-report should be accompanied by a chapter, however short, giving the summary of the excavator’s position on the various problems elucidated or presented by his excavation.’ More significantly he disagreed with Jim’s explanation of the features of particular tombs, noting his use of ‘meagre evidence’ and of dubious stratigraphic interpretation.76

Eve’s work in the Karpas was also published that year. Unlike Jim and Eleanor’s Vounous, Eve and Joan du Plat Taylor were particular about noting which institutions received which tomb groups of objects. Jim’s failure to do the same was criticised by one reviewer^77 and would come to haunt Eve’s later work.

Scholars today are expected to publish in fully refereed journals and it is a rare academic who ventures into more popular forms. This was not how it worked in the 1950s. Jim offered to publish other people’s work, wrote brief reports for university publications and contributed to general works like the Cambridge Ancient History. He happily shared material; late in 1951 he offered to hand over all his notes for the Cypriot section of the proposed History of the Crusades to someone else ‘if it could be of any conceivable use’.78 There were, in any case, fewer journals than today—although Jim certainly could have published more than he did. His obsession with completeness crippled his ability to test-fly ideas.

The idea of a corpus of Cypriot pottery first came to Jim back in 1935 when he and Eleanor visited Australia to prepare for their Turkish trip. Initially Jim saw a corpus as little more than a visual ‘aide memoire’ for use while travelling. In time he felt the need to include every known Cypriot pot into a system that would make sense of the Early Bronze Age on Cyprus. If Dale Trendall was working on a Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum, an international project to document Greek vases, then the idea was not of itself unusual.

Winifred Lamb had warned Jim about his perfectionism and pondered the question of academic caution. ‘At what stage in one’s mental development,’ she asked, ‘does one get that sense of caution, that almost legal craving for proof upon proof?’ Important though it was, she pointed out that in scholars like [Sir John] Myers and [Professor Henri] Frankfort they were perhaps ‘all the more brilliant and suggestive because they let themselves go; they must be read with many grains of salt, but if that precaution is taken they do good to one’. Although she did not presume to place Jim in either category, she planted the idea that brilliance requires a leap of faith, an escape from caution. Perhaps it was a warning Jim was unable to heed.79

Some people are lumpers; some are splitters. Lumpers see the big picture, splitters see the detail. Lumpers look for similarities, where splitters look for difference. Both seek truth, but where a lumper sees a forest, a splitter sees each individual tree. Different personalities are attracted to each approach and either view can distort reality if taken to extremes. Those who look for the one big picture fail to see the complexity and variety of details under their nose; those who only sniff the flower close at hand know nothing of the forest in which it is thrives.

Archaeologists look for meaning through patterns, but patterns can become an end in themselves. A joke persists of an archaeologist explaining the concept of typology to his students. He shows how it was possible to sort buttons into a range of types. Some buttons have one hole, he explains, some two and some four. They might be round, ovoid, square or be polygonal in shape. Buttons are made of plastic or metal or bone and these attributes can all be cross-referenced. ‘A one-hole plastic polygon button forms one type’, he said and asked the students to name other possible types. A bemused student raised a hand. ‘But they’re only for keeping trousers up, aren’t they?’

Jim was a splitter who happily got lost in the detail.

Chapter 7

Mount Pleasant, 1951–54

Since adolescence Jim had known that he would inherit property in Bathurst, to the west of Sydney − not just the estate of Mount Pleasant, but a quarry and a house in ‘horrid Scottish Baronial of the late 70s’. The Mount was, he told Eve, an ugly folly and when he inherited he thought they should blow it up.1 In 1950 Jim and Eve drove up to Bathurst to visit his aunt and consider their future. Eve revelled in the countryside, delighted to leave Sydney behind, and as they drove through the townships of the Blue Mountains Jim told her stories of his childhood.

As sandstone gorges drew Eve’s gaze, Jim explained that the Stewarts were one of the oldest families in colonial New South Wales and part of the establishment. In 1825, fewer than forty years after the arrival of the First Fleet, a Scot, William Stewart, was briefly Lieutenant-Governor of the new colony; the following year Governor Darling granted him vast swathes of farming and grazing land around Bathurst. Popular myth had it that Stewart rejected the offer of land in the settlement of Sydney, instead asking for all the land visible from Mount Pleasant, the highest point near Bathurst. According to local legend Stewart was buried standing upright on Mount Pleasant, surveying the acres he was granted.2

William Stewart’s son James had extravagant tastes and a sad family history. After the deaths of his three young children at Strath, the homestead his father had built at Bathurst, he constructed a massive Scottish baronial mansion, The Mount, of granite reputedly quarried from the land where the building now stands. Family myth had it that the house was modelled on Sir Walter Scott’s shooting box in Scotland.3

Jim’s father, Albyn Athol (A.A.), was an engineer and businessman;4 as a second Stewart son he was not in the direct line of succession. A.A. was accident-prone. He spent three years at The Leys School in Cambridge, where he distinguished himself by a series of sporting accidents.5 He trained as a naval engineer and joined the Navy, but was thrown across the engine room during gun trials and damaged his hand. Invalided out, he joined the Merchant Navy and led an adventurous life that involved shooting hummingbirds with a blowpipe on the Amazon and narrowly escaping imprisonment by the Turks for shooting ducks on the Black Sea.6 On returning to Australia he developed a successful business career, with interests that ranged from sand and gravel to shipping and hospitality. He owned properties in the best parts of Sydney.

Florence Morris, Jim’s mother, was South African and said to be a descendant of the landscape painter Landseer.7 An only child herself, she married Albyn in a society wedding at The Mount in 1899. It was fourteen years before she gave birth to Jim on 3 July 1913.

A year before Eve’s birth, and on the other side of the world, Jim Stewart had entered the New South Wales equivalent of Hampshire gentry. Although his childhood began in Australia, his world would have been familiar to Eve. As children, both lived with affectionate but restrained parents for whom money was often a substitute for personal contact. Both were only children, self-contained and selfish, spoiled and solitary. But there were subtle and significant differences. Although Jim and Eve both came from wealthy and well-travelled families, a son was always more secure than a daughter, whose future relied on the circumstances of her father or husband. Where Eve learned to blend into the background, Jim wanted to be centre stage. He had the confidence and self-assurance to step onto it.

As an adult Jim liked to tell everyone that his mother had little interest in him and when asking friends if they had seen him around, added ‘if you do find him, whatever he’s doing, tell him not to!’8 Perhaps with good reason. As a child Jimmy was a short skinny boy with unruly ginger hair and a tendency to fidget. He was quick to laughter but equally quick to irritation. He loved to play tricks.

Eve had already heard some of the stories and smiled as she listened once more. When Jim was five the Stewarts lived in a house at Elizabeth Bay on Sydney Harbour, close to where A.A. moored his boat. One day Jim was sent into the garden to play while his mother entertained guests at a tea party. He pointed the garden hose through the drawing room window, turned it on, and kept the women penned in a corner for five minutes. According to Jim, his mother spanked him and his father gave him five shillings! Some years later he blacked out a section of the Sydney suburb of Parramatta by throwing an S-shaped length of fencing wire over one of the electric light wires.9 He spent a great deal of time with the next-door neighbours, always leaving his hat behind as an excuse to return. He was at his most charming and cherubic when about to commit one of his more dastardly deeds. But he was always forgiven. You couldn’t be angry with Jimmy for long—and didn’t he know it!10

In spite of his protestations, Jim was closer to his mother than he admitted. From the age of six he lived with her in the village of Wentworth Falls, a place he remembered with great fondness. Straddling the road from Sydney to Bathurst, Wentworth Falls is one of a string of small communities in the Blue Mountains, a temperate retreat for the well-to-do from the urban crush of a sweltering Sydney summer. Jim’s mother owned a house there, Lymdale. Jim’s father took only limited interest in his wife. She was independently wealthy and they seldom lived together. In the 1920s many of the locals assumed that the Stewarts were ‘covertly separated’.11 Beside his business interests, A.A. developed a passion for collecting. Model-building was popular in the 1920s and 1930s: in Sydney alone there were four hundred members of model-building societies. As an engineer, A.A. had a particular interest in models of stationary engines, of the type used to power various industrial processes.

At Lymdale A.A. gave full rein to the fascination with engineering models that developed into something of an obsession and as a wealthy businessman he could indulge this obsession. He joined the miniature model group and progressively acquired a collection that rivalled any in the world.12 Although ostensibly bought as toys for his son, he only ever gave them to Jim for a short time before taking them back. He bought land adjoining Lymdale and built a complicated railway system for model trains, some of which had carriages large enough to carry six passengers. He added a western extension to the house for displaying static models and in the ‘garden’ constructed a specially designed tank for testing model boats. His father had a genius for improvising and ‘making do’, Jim told Eve as they drove past Wentworth Falls, adding that ‘only a practical engineer like my father could have made such a horrid series of additions to a house’.13 Eve smiled and thought of her own father’s obsession with building.

During the 1930s A.A. was a member of the Technological Advisory Board of the museum attached to the Sydney Technical College. For years, regular discussions of the board stressed the need for a specialised museum of technology of a type then fashionable throughout the British Empire. A.A. was an active board member and suggested approaching the government to take over the Queen Victoria Market building in the centre of Sydney. He personally lobbied the Premier of New South Wales.14

At the same time that he was a member of the board of the museum, he began selling his personal collection of models to the museum, seemingly blind to any conflict of interest. Although he donated five models, the remainder were sold and today form an important part of the collection of the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney. Jim absorbed his father’s passion for collecting. As a child he loved to lie on the grass, reading about coins and the stories they whispered of the distant past. But it was one thing to read the stories. Far better to own the coins themselves. Jim took Roman coins to bed instead of teddy bears, holding their history in the palm of his hand. This acquisitiveness was never to leave him.

In the 1920s the sea voyage from Australia to England took several months. Ships travelling at a leisurely pace took extended shore visits at Bombay, Aden and Port Said. Porters struggled with large cabin trunks and passengers dressed for dinner. Much of Jim’s early childhood was spent moving between Europe and Australia with his mother or father. Years later, in letters to friends, he fondly recalls places they visited and hotels where they stayed. They wintered on the continent and took summer holidays in Ireland, Scotland or Scandinavia. His formal education was disjointed—no record exists of school attendance until the age of ten. He attended two schools in England and one in Australia between the ages of ten and fourteen,15 but schooling was only the formal part of a broader education he obtained as he travelled across the world in style. By his late teens Jim was familiar with much of Europe. It is doubtful he had much idea of how ordinary people lived.

From 1927 to 1930 Jim attended The Kings School at Parramatta in Sydney, the oldest independent school in Australia and a school that remains one of the country’s most expensive private schools for boys. It has a long tradition of sports and military cadets and the school magazine devotes considerable space to both. As is the way with school magazines, they also include student poems and essays, along with regular contributions from old boys. These paint a picture of the sort of life Jim was living, the life of the well-travelled wealthy upper classes. Articles provide regular glimpses of this life: ‘When last in Cairo’, ‘While travelling by ship in Norway’, ‘I make my debut at Balliol’ and ‘Life in Paris’. To many of the boys and most of the masters, England, rather than Australia, was ‘home’.

Each year he was at The Kings School, Jim wrote for the school magazine: two travel articles and one book review. The pieces are well written and largely free of purple prose, although the odd ‘smote’ and ‘affrighted’ slips in, as they do when you are young and mimicking your masters.16 ‘A Trip through the Southern Highlands’ describes travelling by road, presumably with his mother, to Edinburgh. At Loch Lomond ‘the day was still and broken only by the voices of the woods [but] … soon the van of the picnic brigade hove in sight, and with their arrival the prospect was not so pleasing’.

The next year Jim described his first visit, aged thirteen, to Rome the ‘eternal city’. Anticipation of the visit was somewhat dampened on first impressions: ‘It is hot and dusty in the summer, and crowded with an apparently aimless wandering mob, in which every twentieth man seem to be an official … The civilian population is motley and noisy.’ Finding the tourist pace of the Cook’s guide too fast, he and his mother returned to the Vatican (‘interesting to the student of art’), the Forum (‘a hopeless tangle to the uninitiated’, which ‘appealed to me more’) and the Catacombs, which he found the most fascinating. At thirteen it is not surprising that he was transfixed by the gruesome skeletons and phials of ‘red coloured liquid’. Their visit also took in Frascati (‘a sleepy little village, chiefly known for its wines and beautiful scenery’, which ‘plays the same role as the Blue Mountains towns in New South Wales as a week-end resort’) and Ostia (‘the ‘Manly’ of Rome’). They ended their visit, as all good tourists must, by throwing money into the Trevi Fountain to ensure their return and to follow tradition, ‘a tradition that the fountain cleaners are only too ready to perpetuate’.17

School life was not all work. In his first year, Jim had success on the running field (third in the 100 yards, but first in the 440) and was a successful third witch in the performance of Macbeth performed to raise money for the Parramatta Hospital Fund. Together with the two senior witches, they were, according to the review in the school magazine, ‘in action, in voice, and in every respect … witches realistic enough to give every one nightmare [sic].’18

Jim and Eve drove past Wentworth Falls and Katoomba and west to the central Bathurst plain. The trees, bent low against the wind, resembled the drooping pines in the Troodos Mountains and in the centre of the town of Bathurst Eve observed more parallels. A memorial to the Boer War had been dedicated by Lord Kitchener, whose map of Cyprus remains one of the great legacies of the English occupation of that island. Eve told Jim how much her father enjoyed poring over his copy as he decided which property to buy next; together they wondered if they would ever own their own place on Cyprus.

Bathurst is an old settlement, the first major city along the Great Western Highway, which leads westward from Sydney into the New South Wales outback. When the first English settlers sailed into Sydney Cove in 1788 they clung to the coast, a convict settlement run by a maritime force that relied on the sea for supplies. Although they explored areas along the coast to the north and to the south, travelling inland was impossible because of the impenetrable semi-circle of sandstone that surrounded Sydney, the Blue Mountains. With few horses and no bush knowledge, the tiny convict settlement on Sydney Harbour hovered at the edges of a land they knew little of and had not even begun to understand. When three European explorers found a path through the Blue Mountains in 1814, they came to a high country of rolling plains and deep alluvial soils. When Governor Macquarie visited the settlement a year later the town of Bathurst was proclaimed.

Today Bathurst sits in a pastoral landscape of rolling paddocks and sheep grazing in geometric willow-edged fields. It is a low landscape, open to a vast sky, a landscape of muted colours and rounded, gentle shapes—clouds billowing and rolling above meadows of closely cropped grass. Winters are bitter. Little breaks the wind as sheep huddle against fences close to the ground. Lambs die easily in these winters and the trees lean away from the winds that return each year.

Jim and Eve stopped at Strath to visit Aunt Roslyn, and after lunch walked across the rough road and open fields to inspect The Mount. Jim’s uncle Athol had abandoned the house in 1927, leaving it vacant after selling the furniture. From time to time people squatted in different parts of the building, but for many years it was completely deserted. During the Second World War Athol made the house and thirty acres of land available to the Women’s Land Army and these young women were the only people who had lived in the house in recent years.19 The two storeys were of dark granite blocks. Even darker slate roofing sagged and gaped. One upstairs room opened onto a verandah with a stone balustrade and a tall turret sprouting from the roof above the main entrance. Hand in hand they walked past the granite gateposts, each topped with a sandstone folly. Weeds smothered the downstairs verandahs. Eve thought it looked like a neglected Bisterne.

Jim and Eve stepped onto the front verandah and glanced back over the sheep paddocks sloping towards the willow-fringed Macquarie River. Clusters of cream-coloured roses competed with rampant honeysuckle. Zinnias and Michaelmas daisies grew below the balustrade alongside straggly tomatoes, presumably self-sown. They walked through the front door into the entrance hall and the atmosphere lightened. Jim pointed out the William Morris wallpaper to Eve and she was surprised it had survived so many years of neglect. Through the entrance hall they discovered what looked like a drawing room, separated from a similar room mirrored on the other side of the archway. In their imagination they lined the room, from floor to ceiling, with bookshelves and special cabinets for coins.

A cedar stairway led from the central area to a storey above and on to an attic, but the rickety stairs looked precarious. Rooms clustered around the inner stairwell—Jim explained that there were fifty in all. One with a series of tall windows topped with smaller windows of decorative leadlight, opened onto a stone balcony overlooking sheep paddocks. In another was a marble fireplace. A rusting iron bedstead was a reminder of the Land Army’s occupation. Downstairs they explored the ballroom at the back of the house. It was enormous, with immensely high ceilings. Could this solve their problems? They mentally furnished it with trestle tables and workbenches and peopled it with students mending pottery and drawing. A side verandah overlooked what must once have been a formal garden but the stone fountain stood desolate, abandoned amongst the weeds. In the kitchen and basement they found a defunct dumb waiter and cool storerooms. A water pump outside the kitchen sat over a well and behind it what looked like a bakehouse.

How would they possibly furnish the place? What would it cost to connect electricity? How would they manage with only one bathroom? Surely those marvellous marble fireplaces would be inefficient. How would they fund it? Jim made a mental list of necessary improvements, while Eve planned her garden. Could they have poultry? Of course they would want cats, but what about a dog? If they had children there would be acres of countryside to roam. ‘How cold does it get in Bathurst?’ Eve asked.

One look between them sealed its fate. They decided they must have The Mount.

By early 1951 letters to Eve Dray were addressed to The Mount and some time later Jim wrote to their friend Judith Stylianou:

We are nearly straight at long last and are now settled in the country about 130 miles from Sydney. I go down to lecture every second week and spend the rest of my time up here. We have all our technical work and our store-rooms in the country and only use Sydney as a shop window for the finest objects or those that we need for teaching purposes. At long last I have got all my books together in one spot and we are really quite comfortable, with excellent working conditions … As I obviously have not written to you for so long, I expect that I forgot to tell you that Eve and I got married at the beginning of the year.20

Jim’s father and Aunt Roslyn attended the wedding ceremony, along with the two witnesses: Ron Byatt, a friend from the Numismatic Society, and Margery Dray, who flew to Australia for her daughter’s wedding and stayed on for six months at The Mount. For the sake of form, Eve’s address was given as Jim’s cousin’s place. It was a quiet affair. Eleanor, too, would remarry that year.

Eve’s father thanked her for sending a photo of The Mount but seemed confused. ‘What is it? Your house? Museum? Hotel? Then what has become of the Nicholson Museum? And when are you coming out to Cyprus?’21 Two years later he worried: ‘Why live in a 30 room house with 5 fires and chickens and ducks and four feet of water all round?’22 It all seemed a waste of a good education.

Jim commuted to and from Sydney. Sometimes he drove, often he took the train. Eve remained attached to the university but worked at The Mount and seldom accompanied Jim to Sydney. When apart, the postal service could scarcely keep up with their correspondence. ‘Darling, as you’re still here (whiffling peacefully), you really know all the news there is … Just time to sort out your pills before I wake you.’ Eve hid the letter in Jim’s razor case where he would find it when he arrived in Sydney.23 And Jim in Sydney wrote: ‘Darling, Just a note to say how very much I miss you and wish I hadn’t got to come down like this.’24

Gradually more and more work found its way to Bathurst, so much so that it became difficult to disentangle personal and professional effects. Library books and university files went to Bathurst. Much of the archaeological material arriving at the Nicholson was also sent to Bathurst to be housed in the ballroom at The Mount for processing and study. At last Jim had his ‘laboratory’ where students could work on archaeological material.

Life at The Mount was unconventional. To visiting students it was ‘pure heaven’, like something out of a novel by Evelyn Waugh or P.G. Wodehouse.25 A ‘gothic’ mansion of never-ending rooms and stairways, two sitting rooms with more books than the university’s Fisher Library, and an ‘old retainer’, Callan, setting the fireplaces in the evening. In the ballroom students could handle Bronze Age daggers and pottery sherds, or skulls from Jericho.

The house remained partly derelict well into the 1960s and visitors remember rain dripping into buckets in the ballroom. Bitterly cold in winter, Eve worked in the ballroom in gloves, rugged up in a coat and blankets. The open fires did little to heat the cavernous rooms. As she had in Cyprus, Eve asked local tradesmen to make drawing tools that she designed herself—a special frame to help her to draw large pots, knives for making plaster copies of coins.26 She taught students the basics of drawing but few could manage the concentration and single-minded focus. Years later Basil said that Eve was one of the three best archaeological draughtsmen he had ever known. She was meticulous but slow. She would not even begin a drawing unless she had a clear four hours to spare.27 This was rare, given her other duties.

Eve claimed responsibility for much of the unconventionality of the house.28 It was she who put the Red Polished Bronze Age pot in the bathroom for toothbrushes and she who insisted the baby orphaned lamb be kept warm in the room beside the kitchen. She ran the household with little domestic help, although for some time a Cypriot immigrant girl, Maroulla, cooked for them. Maroulla’s speciality was rabbit stew, Basil was a fair shot, and rabbits were prolific. Although unusual for a conservative 1950s Australian palate, anything was an improvement on Jim’s curries and haggis, which he insisted on preparing every New Year’s Eve. ‘A blackened monstrosity that nobody could eat. It was Medieval’, Basil recalled.29

Visitors arrived regularly for lunch or the weekend or for more extended periods. Jim charmed visitors and monopolised the conversation. Sometimes students visited with their parents, at other times in small groups. In later years postgraduate students might live there for weeks on end. Everyone was expected to become part of the household and to follow its daily rituals. Eggs for breakfast, soup for lunch, bountiful sherry, brandy and conversation before the evening meal, usually turkey. A story circulated that some of the turkeys on the menu had died of old age, but Eve strenuously denied this. Turkeys were ubiquitous. Eve raised them for the Christmas trade and made sure that university staff and friends were well supplied. Staff remember Jim and Eve descending on the university laden with turkeys and vegetables and homemade plum jam full of seeds.

Jim Stewart was wealthy, clever and spoilt, a short man with a tendency to grow fat as he aged, his ginger hair showing signs of premature balding and straggly wisps falling over the freckles on his brow. In any gathering people gravitated to him and convivial drinking lasted long into the night. Few could match his wit or his capacity for drink. He was happiest in conversation and loathed the diplomacy and bureaucratic manoeuvres that administration required, which was odd, given his obsession with lists and plans and detailed, often exaggerated, budgets. He was generous to friends, polite to those he respected, in particular older colleagues or family friends.

Eve came alive in the country. The Callans, father and son, were employed to manage outdoors and all the farming and grazing land was tenanted, but Eve was in charge of the turkeys. Her diaries detail her farming world—lambs bottle-fed, eggs collected, turkeys slaughtered, problems with poultry diseases. Basil’s wife Ruth, from a serious farming family in Queensland, thought it resembled a Victorian lady’s idea of a poultry farm.30

And then there were the cats. Jim loved cats. At Bellapais strays slipped into the storeroom and curled up in the Bronze Age pots dug from the tombs at Vounous. At Eichstätt long-haired cats warmed his bed and shared his food. Wherever he was, Jim fed homeless kittens. In Sydney Mrs S. Catty ruled the Edgecliff house. A thin grey cat with white Roman nose and cheeks, she curled across Jim’s shoulders in a photo that was one of Eve’s favourites. Both her kittens, Sir Marcus Bibulus and Corrie, were jet black.

A skulk of cats greeted visitors to The Mount and it is their presence that most people remember vividly. Like the fine gradations of servants in an English manor house, the cats formed a strict hierarchy. There were outside cats and inside cats, outside/inside cats and inside/outside ones. Students learned to prepare for the evening cry of ‘Cats’, when all work ceased and mountains of boiled rabbit were cut up and distributed amongst them. After dinner a similar cry went up and tea towels were exchanged so that those used to dry the cats’ bowls were not used on the human crockery.31

Mrs S. Catty’s son Marcus Bibulus, DD, Bishop of Ophir, was for many years the most senior indoor cat at The Mount and behaved accordingly. His photo is the only one from this period that is enlarged. An enormous black tom with a flick of white at his breast, he held himself with the air of noble lineage. He had sired many of the outdoor cats and a few of the indoor ones and took precedence over sundry waifs and strays at mealtimes.

A student remembered the Bishop of Bathurst arriving for lunch. ‘I don’t think you’ve met the Bishop of Ophir, have you’, Jim remarked casually as he ushered His Grace into the dining room. Puzzled at the idea that a small village outside Bathurst might boast such an appointment, the bishop shook his head: ‘I wasn’t aware such a person existed.’ Jim gestured to a large black cat overflowing the dining room chair at the end of the table. He made the introductions. ‘Meet Sir Marcus Bibulus, DD’, Jim said as he settled into the chair at the other end of the long table. Both purred as the Bishop feigned sophisticated amusement.32

Another visitor remembered enjoying coffee with Jim and Eve in the sitting room one afternoon. Marcus Bibulus entered and walked purposefully towards Jim, cocked his head in the direction of the door, and demanded Jim stand. As directed, Jim followed Sir Marcus, who led him to the gun cabinet in the hallway. With gun in hand Jim followed the cat through the front door, whereupon Sir Marcus stared in the direction of a brown snake coiled on the grass within striking distance of the turkeys’ wire pen. Having dispatched the snake, Jim returned to the house, locked the gun away and the two settled back in front of the fire in companionable silence. No one was surprised by the cat’s behaviour.33

Along with the bishop’s mother, Mrs S. Catty (aka Scatty), Lusagh the dog and the hordes of outside cats, Marcus Bibulus is immortalised in the preface to ‘The Early Cypriote Bronze Age’, Jim’s volume in The Swedish Cyprus Expedition, published in 1962: ‘Indeed I owe a great deal to my animals for distracting me.’34

At the beginning of 1950 Jim sent copies of exam papers to his friend Winifred Lamb at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. She was especially impressed by the paper that Basil Hennessy had written and suggested he would be a suitable applicant for a scholarship with the British School at Ankara.35 At the same time, Jim persuaded Sydney University to contribute, together with the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, to excavations on Cyprus directed by Joan du Plat Taylor at the mining settlement of Myrtou-Pighades and by Terence Mitford at Kouklia. Basil was accepted as the inaugural scholar at the British School of Archaeology at Ankara and left Australia at the end of the year, although he first visited Cyprus. Despite the scholarship being Basil’s and this his first excursion into field archaeology, the directions and control were all Jim’s. Basil left Australia with a typed list of instructions that included everything from hiring a bicycle to sherd collecting and working in the Cyprus Museum. Point four of fifteen said: ‘I want you to make the acquaintance of Petro Colocassides at the earliest opportunity. He is at the top of Onasagoras Street, about ten (10) minutes from the Museum. Do not discuss any of your dealings with him in the presence of any of the members of the Museum staff. I attach a list of things which I wish you to deal with chez Petro.’36

From Nicosia, Basil sent greetings from everyone at the Cyprus Museum. He was welcomed into the small world of Cypriot archaeology and met the Megaws, Jim’s workmen from Bellapais—Costa and Tryphon, the latter whom he liked very much. Porphyrios Dikaios gave him a four-hour lecture tour of the excavations at Enkomi and together they collected sherds at Kalopsidha. While digging near Emba, Basil was horrified to discover that local women were employed, although he admitted that they were much more useful with a shovel than he was. He was thrilled to be entering a tomb for the first time. ‘I can see now why you are so fond of Cyprus’, he wrote to Jim as the island worked its magic.

Basil collected the gold coins that Petro had for Jim but he was unsure how to get them out of the country. When Dale Trendall later joined him, they decided it would be wise to leave the coins with Eve’s father at Tjiklos. Petro warned him that the authorities throughout the Near East were increasingly concerned about the export of gold. Basil apologised to Jim but said he had to be cautious: ‘if on some chance I was picked up during any of the eight frontier crossings, the loss of my scholarship … would be the least of the repercussions.’37

From Cyprus Basil and Trendall travelled to Beirut, Jerusalem and on to Ankara, where Seton Lloyd also warned them against taking coins out of the country.38 The mood was changing. Seton Lloyd was not even sure that Basil would be able to send pottery sherds back to Australia. It was all ‘a great pity’. Basil worked for Seton Lloyd on a survey of Anatolian pottery and had offers of excavation work at five digs. He admitted to a wonderful sense of ‘unreality in just skipping around the countryside’.39 He decided to work first with Lloyd and then with Joan du Plat Taylor at Myrtou and Terence Mitford at Kouklia. Jim deplored what he considered Mitford’s poor excavation standards and Basil assured Jim he would be careful not to ‘assimilate anything that smells of carelessness’. To Eve, on the other hand, he wrote that he thought both Mitford and his co-director, Harry Iliffe, were ‘being very careful’.40

At Myrtou Basil would be responsible for his own part of the excavation—Stephania. Sydney University provided funding in return for a proportion of the finds.41 Money also came from the Australian Institute of Archaeology but Beasley would later complain vigorously at the poor amount and quality of material he received.

At the end of 1951 Basil arranged for the shipment of material from Stephania. He sent fifteen cases to Australia and a further four to New Zealand. More sherds would follow. He and an English student, Hector Catling, were both sherd hunting and Basil collected over three hundred at the sites of Larnaca and Tekke.42 Excavators were impressed by Basil’s work, with Seton Lloyd keen to have him back the following year, as was Mitford. At the end of 1951 Kathleen Kenyon also offered him a place at Jericho and Max Mallowan invited him to work at Nimrud. It was hard to think about returning to Sydney with such invitations in the offing.

Marooned in Bathurst, Jim fretted and grew ill. He demanded Basil curtail his travels, return to Australia and complete his work on the Stephania material, which by then had arrived at The Mount. Basil came to dread Jim’s letters and pleaded for more time.43 Eve brokered a compromise and Basil finally returned to Australia in the middle of 1952, whereupon Jim promptly ordered him to visit his mother.44 At The Mount, Basil had learned to place a hand over his brandy but it would be years before he unwound the chains that bound him to Jim.

Delighted to have Basil back, Jim wrote to his friend Christopher Blunt in London.

We are inundated at the moment by pottery from Cyprus and Jericho and seem to have acquired, in a stroke, twice the total intake of the last five years. Fortunately Basil Hennessy has come back to us, after eighteen months abroad … He promptly celebrated his return by falling out of a tree and cracking his ribs and a fortnight later by electrocuting himself on the end of an electric lead; fortunately he seems to be able to take a terrific amount of punishment without loosing [sic] his normal cheerfulness. Work on the house jogs along and the new storerooms for the Jericho finds are nearly completed. With any luck we should have all the interior decorating finished by the end of the year.

There has been a very severe crisis in the University’s financial affairs and this has set our plans back by many months, as well as giving us a great deal of un-necessary extra work and a considerable amount of worry. However, the situation shows some slight signs of improvement and I hope that our scale of operations will not be seriously hampered. The general conception is that we shall be in Cyprus in 1954, and unless something serious intervenes, that should be a fairly safe arrangement. I do not know if Eve and I will be able to get to England in the course of that year, but we shall certainly do our best.

Lambing has started and is not going too well at the moment. Eve has two lambs, whose mother had to be killed, living in the house, so our evenings are filled with the bleatings of sheep. We have got our first batch of chickens and one of the turkeys has just been set in a nest of her own choice. The cats, needless to say, continue to flourish.45

When Jim and Eve first decided to move to Mount Pleasant in 1950, the university had agreed to fund limited renovation work so the house could be used as a temporary storage area for archaeological material arriving from Cyprus and the overflow from the Nicholson Museum. An urgent requirement was for a facility to deal with the Jericho material from Kathleen Kenyon’s excavations, which included human remains. This temporary solution became, for Jim and Eve, ever more elaborate and expensive. Rather than limit themselves to the initial university agreement of £5000, Jim and Eve took over managing the work and decided to take it to its ‘logical conclusion’. Jim and his father mortgaged their land and borrowed money to complete the work. Their idea was to lease the house to the university for 99 years with an implicit understanding that this would be converted to an outright grant. Jim hoped that his library and coin collection would go to Sydney University in due course but regretted that the land and house could not be an outright gift. His financial position was complicated and uncertain. Jim had a son. The land could not be granted, although he was prepared to give the house. The status of the library and coin collection remained in the air.

Jim’s plan was to create an archaeological centre to promote hands-on research. In one fell swoop The Mount would solve the problems of museum storage and working space and provide accommodation for students, staff and visiting scholars. Above all, it might solve the problem of a lack of technical support and training. Students would get their boots dirty. They would not simply sit in classrooms. The one glaring omission was that students would have no opportunity for fieldwork. Jim had little but scorn for the idea of Australian archaeology and field experience would have to wait until he could organise training digs in Cyprus.

By the middle of 1952, and with Trendall’s initial support, Jim and Eve commenced a campaign to make The Mount a part of Sydney University. The Institute of Archaeology in London, created by Mortimer and Tessa Wheeler, began this way and perhaps Jim and Eve saw both the couple and their institute as models.

At the end of 1952 Jim presented the university with a proposal, together with pages of costings, site plans of The Mount and complex financial argument. The university would contribute £10,000 in exchange for a gift of the house at Mount Pleasant (valued at £35,000) and income from commercial rights to a quarry on the property (estimated at around £1200 per year) as well as Jim’s library and coin collection, to be sold at cost price. ‘The benefactors make one stipulation in regard to this matter’, Jim wrote, ‘—that their names are not publicly mentioned … They wish to see their own academic interests perpetuated, and regret that family considerations prevent the outright gift of the library and coins.’

Initially sceptical, Trendall agreed to support the proposal’s ‘bold vision’. He admired Jim’s courage and concluded that ‘the facilities in Australia are as favourable as any at a British University’. He asked the university senate to accept the offer in principle and appoint a committee to investigate. He went on to make it clear that he, too, would leave his library to the university and it could be housed at The Mount.

Two committee members visited Mount Pleasant and made their report early in 1953. It was businesslike and final. They reported that additional monies had been spent on The Mount without approval from the university, and argued that the university had no liability for these. They noted that Eve remained on the university staff, but expressed doubts that the work done constituted a full-time job. The cost of maintaining The Mount was considerable. It would be unwise, they said, to house some of the university in what was essentially the private home of a member of staff. Similarly it would be unwise to offer an Honours course reliant on a staff member’s personal library.46 The university was expected to pay off the mortgage, pay all outgoings, provide necessary staff, leave the Stewarts with the right to live there and continue in academic employment, and hand over complete control of the archaeological work to Jim and Eve. In other words, they argued, the proposal to ‘gift’ The Mount overstated the advantages and understated the disadvantages. It looked like a gift but was actually an offer to sell. They recommended that the offer be rejected, and that the University instead seek premises in Sydney to provide the necessary workspace and storage. They noted that Mr Beasley from the Australian Institute of Archaeology had already provided the university with £500 for the provision of ‘archaeological apparatus’ at The Mount. ‘Some difficulties have arisen because Mr Stewart wishes to spend these monies on carpets and bedroom furniture.’47

Discussions dragged on for months. Students, fearing there would be no Honours year as promised, petitioned the Vice-Chancellor. Jim’s solicitor wrote to the university but the university’s decision was final.

Put in simple terms it was an offer to sell to the University Mount Pleasant house and the quarries … for the sum of £10,000. The University did not wish to have Mount Pleasant on these terms … The University, I think, did not want to buy Stewart’s house or any other house at Bathurst for £10,000 or at all … The University wishes the work of the Nicholson Museum and the Department of Archaeology to be carried on in Sydney and not in Bathurst … the Senate’s decision is simply that if the University of Sydney provides courses of study in Archaeology it wishes to do so in Sydney not elsewhere.48

What Jim wanted, the university believed, was to have all benefit and no responsibility. It was the Cyprus Survey and the Australian Cyprus Expedition all over again. Bathurst locals thought it a cunning ploy to get someone else to take over the management of what most of them considered a white elephant.49

By the end of 1953 Jim and Eve realised, with bitterness and regret, that there was little more they could do. Jim’s lawyer explained to the university committee that he had endeavoured to counsel Jim and assured the university that he ‘was never in doubt’ as to the sincerity of Jim Stewart’s offer.

In 1954 Jim lamented what he saw, melodramatically, as the destruction of the department. Seven years earlier he had returned to Australia hoping to lead an expedition to Cyprus. When this failed, he transferred his energies into the Mount Pleasant project, but this too had failed. Early in 1955 archaeological material began to be relocated to the Golden Grove, an empty pub in the inner-city suburb of Darlinghurst, which Sydney University planned to use as a storehouse for the Nicholson. Eve would not agree to move to Sydney and Jim would not want her working ‘in a slum’.50

Jim planned to take a sabbatical year and wrote gloomily and self-indulgently to Peter Megaw:

It is all very sad, for it marks the ruination of eight years very hard work and the virtual termination of a department which has never had a fair chance to stand on its feet. I have this year off and Basil Hennessy is taking my lectures as a temporary appointment … Eve will presumably resign very shortly.

Chapter 8

Travels, 1955–56

The SS Oronsay lay at anchor at Suez, waiting in line to enter the canal. Sharing a beer in the ship’s glass-windowed lounge, Jim and Eve sat quietly, both lost in thought. Eve recalled family camping trips through the Egyptian desert as a child, her mother swathed in a long fur coat, her father at the wheel of their open-top car. How quaint it all seemed now, another world. When she had left Egypt as a child, she never expected it would be so long before she returned. Jim had met his company near here in 1941 and, in 1947, had passed through with Eleanor, both in sad and sullen silence.

At dawn Eve rose to watch the sun lighten the pink cliffs at the edge of the Eastern Desert, which seemed to rise directly out of the blue waters of the Red Sea. Later she sat with Jim as the great ocean liner entered the canal behind a group of tankers and freighters. A young boy leaned over the railing and shrieked with delight at his first site of a camel. Eve thought it possible to forget you were on a ship, the canal so narrow it gave the impression of sliding in graceful silence over the land. On one side of the liner was nothing but sand and on the other, a fringe of cultivation.1

Eight long and messy years after arriving in Australia, Eve mentally replayed the mad rush to finish work and her excitement at preparing for the trip back to the world she had left behind. Optimistic and upbeat, she hoped that if all went well they would bring back enough ‘loot’ to impress doubters and win over Sydney University. They might, she thought, get their institute after all.2 Although on leave from his job at Sydney University, Jim had obtained official support for these planned excavations from Melbourne University, although Melbourne gave little by way of financial backing and Jim seems to have covered most of the expenses himself. Plans that had once been attached to an Australian Cyprus Expedition now came under the aegis of the Melbourne Cyprus Expedition.

As she folded their clothes and packed suitcases in the cool Bathurst evening, Eve marvelled at how long it had been since she’d travelled. Although relieved to turn their backs on Sydney and their failed plans, leaving The Mount was not easy. They fussed over the house, worried at the decline in wool prices and A.A.’s health, and fired off detailed instructions to Basil.

Remember to smooge the house cats (Pooh, Bub, Fiz, Tabitha, and Chilly), try to coax Chilly back in to the drawing room, remember to shut the china cupboard doors as the cats are always anxious to explore, here is a list of hens to be eaten off, remind Callan to keep the lambs indoors during winter.3

In Sydney they boarded the Oronsay and were shown to their cabin. Built only four years earlier, the ship had become a regular visitor to Sydney Harbour as it plied the route between Australia and England; from September to December, in the off season, ‘boomerang’ trips were relatively cheap. When the liner berthed at Melbourne, Eve visited distant family and Jim renewed relations with Walter Beasley. After years of tension, he was surprised to find Beasley so affable, although still—he thought—‘utterly incompetent in Archaeology’. Jim felt sure he could easily get a job in Melbourne if he wanted.4 In Adelaide they paid a visit to fellow coin collector, Sid Hagley.

From Adelaide they sailed into the rough seas of the Great Australian Bight. White-faced passengers kept to their bunks or dragged themselves on deck to gaze dolefully toward the horizon as the ship rolled and bucked. Eve was a good sailor but suffered from a bout of food poisoning.

Although the Oronsay was new and luxurious, a boomerang ticket was not the sort of travel either Jim or Eve was used to. By 1955 Australians enjoying the country’s post-war prosperity were sailing for England in ever greater numbers at the same time as Europeans were hoping to emigrate. Travellers would normally take passage on a one-class tourist ship but were able to buy cheap tickets on the Oronsay in the off-season. ‘You ought to see the yokels’, Jim commented to Basil.5

Only in their early forties, both Stewarts were uneasy in this more open and democratic post-war world, and Jim for one pronounced himself disappointed with the failure of passengers to dress for dinner, which was especially galling because he surprised himself by fitting into his dinner jacket. ‘Afraid the old Malaga spoilt me for ships’, he told Basil. ‘Now one lays out one’s own clothes and cleans one’s own shoes. I suppose one must adapt oneself to the flitter and bustle of sewer rats’, but it made him feel ‘less sociable and more inclined to retreat within my own boundaries’.6 Jim was prepared to concede that the ship was efficient and well run, although it reminded him of a ‘highly painted platinum blonde, hair probably not the same colour all over’.7

Eve described shipboard life to her mother. Their starboard cabin had no porthole but was handy to bathrooms and the steward’s pantry. For meals they sat at the Chief Engineer’s table with an elderly couple from the Midlands and four New Zealanders.8 By the time they left Fremantle the boat had its full complement of passengers: 750 in their class and 750 travelling ‘tourist’.

As the liner steamed north across the Indian Ocean, pods of dolphins surfed the bow wave and passengers moaned about the heat. Jim complained about the quality of the food:

The white fish is undoubtedly whale for nothing else could masquerade under five different names. It poisoned me last night, so now I’m living on fruit juice as being reasonably safe. But the ship is not crowded and one has plenty of free space. More people are dressing for dinner now, thank God. Service is quite good apart from the cabin. I’ve been feeling too tired to do much work.9

A delegation of academics returning from a Vice-Chancellors’ meeting in Sydney was on board and Jim took the opportunity to lobby them. He was unsurprised when their ideas, as he relayed them to Basil, agreed with his own. In general, he said, they declared Sydney University badly in decline, mentioning in particular the Nicholson Museum. They resented the fact that neither Jim nor Basil had been asked to show them around the museum and the person deputed to guide them was ‘considered amiable but third rate. I have spoken strongly on the subject’, Jim added, in case Basil was in any doubt.10

They went ashore at Singapore. Eve wore a long-sleeved blue suit with buttoned jacket and pearls, brooch and narrow-brimmed hat. She grabbed her brown leather handbag and urged Jim, dressed in an expensive but rumpled grey suit and a wide silk tie, to hurry as they made their way down the gangway. As they posed for the photographer at the bottom of the descent, Jim squinted into the tropical sun.

At Colombo, which they knew better than Singapore, they again went ashore, but the prices shocked them as they combed the markets. ‘Coins were quite ruinous, silk was limited, moonstones quite ridiculous.’11 They didn’t bother to go on any organised tours, but succumbed to purchasing stamps for their collections, and despite the prices, Jim picked up a silk shirt and Eve a silk petticoat.12

Familiar with sea travel and not interested in social activities, neither engaged in shipboard life. They followed their normal routines. Eve worked editing the first volume planned for publication by the Melbourne Cyprus Expedition. This was not a work of archaeology but a work reflecting Jim’s medieval interests, a 1938 translation by Richard Dawkins of a medieval manuscript ‘The Chronicle of George Boustronios’, a Hellenised Frenchman living in Cyprus in the fifteenth century. While Eve worked, Jim rested. They went briefly to the ‘Red Sea Races’ held on deck, where wooden horses ran along tracks raised on trestles, but after watching two contests, decided to place their bets more reliably on the cold beer in the lounge bar. A man from the Australian Broadcasting Commission was an excellent pianist and the younger passengers sang along to songs that, to Eve’s surprise, were the old familiar ones such as ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary’. A fancy dress ball attracted Eve’s interest. She thought the men more imaginative dressers: ‘one very tall, thin man was a palm tree & a fat one was a stuffed olive.’ But, she wrote her well-travelled mother, ‘I don’t have to tell you about shipboard life’. Mostly they kept to themselves.

This short visit to Egypt was made easier by Eve’s father, who gave them £300 towards expenses and arranged a flat for their use. The flat, in the suburb of Zamalek, was owned by an English couple who had recently bought the Dome Hotel in Kyrenia and were holidaying in Europe. A neighbour arranged for a car and driver and Jim soon befriended an upstairs neighbour’s Siamese cat. He was amused to see that it gained access to the roof via its own personal ladder.

For Eve the trip to Egypt meant she could finally deal with the piles of boxes left by her family at Boulaq Dakrur. How strange to return now, middle-aged and married. Ahmet, their driver, drove her through the suburbs of Cairo, along a hideous new dual carriageway, past rows of shops and ugly blocks of flats. Her childhood house was no longer in the countryside; suburbs crept right to the doorstep. Although the house was shabby, the plaster peeling, the garden was the same and the gardener met her at the front door. He showed her the family trunks stored in the garage and with a sigh, she realised the job would take more than one day. The once-precious family memorabilia looked sad and shabby after all these years. She sorted through books, threw away most of the mysteries, tossed out her mother’s battered straw hat, but kept both her teddy bears. Then she found herself in a photo album stored in the great trunk. There she was, standing dutifully, weighted with a heavy silk kimono and holding an open fan ‘à la Japonaise’. In another she posed in the garden. She remembered the heavy white coat and ankle-length boots and the veiled hat she was made to wear as protection from the flies. Yet another showed the very teddy bear she was holding in her hands. She stroked his now flat and lifeless fur. She and Jim nearly argued over what to ditch—useless ‘bric-à-brac’ from the 1920s, he said. She was relieved that her mother couldn’t see the desolation.13

Jim’s friend, the London coin dealer Albert Baldwin, had written to introduce him to dealers in Cairo and Alexandria and Jim tracked down coinage. Not just his favourite Lusignan coins, but other Crusader coins, and Roman, Venetian, and Islamic ones as well.14 They visited museums and libraries and lunched at Gropis, just to boast they had been there. Jim thought the Cairo Museum and library a disappointment, but was charmed by the Coptic Museum. ‘What we liked best was a 6th century painting of a delegation of rats, waving a white flag and carrying flasks of wine and goblets, making overtures to a cat’.15 Often Eve strolled by herself through the city she had once loved. She set out alone to relish the fresh dates and figs in the street markets, leaving Jim to solve his arcane pottery puzzles. In the evenings they enjoyed their balcony amid the pot plants on the balustrade, morning glory climbing up its pillars. A charming place to write letters, or for a pre-dinner drink.

Jim wrote to his father extolling the virtues of Egyptian scholarship, the friendliness and courtesy of everyone they met, and his surprise at the popularity of the nationalist leader General Nasser. The city delighted him: ‘more modern than Sydney, and much better shops’, and he admitted they were both putting on weight.16 To Basil, however, Jim lamented how out of touch and isolated he had become in Australia: ‘one can’t possibly carry on archaeology at Sydney in vacuo, without very close contacts in the East … To work only from books is really quite hopeless.’ They met the Egyptologist Labib Habachi and Jim considered him charming, perhaps because they agreed on the internationality of culture. Both thought that museums should have the chance to acquire objects unfettered by questions of national ‘ownership’. They had long discussions on historical questions—the Hyksos in Egypt, Albright’s dating—and on donkeys.17 Jim was flattered that Egyptian scholars greeted him as a Medievalist. Professor Mustafa Ziada from the Department of History knew of Jim’s work on the Crusades and the Lusignan rulers of Cyprus and agreed with Jim that archaeology should reach out to the Medieval period, but knew nothing of Jim’s work on Early Bronze Age Cyprus. ‘Is this the onset of charlatanism?’ Jim asked Basil. ‘Perhaps it’s a good thing I have no vanity to feed, or at any rate not much.’18 They dined with Professor Ziada at Heliopolis and Jim mused about living in Egypt.

In only a little over a week they amassed quantities of books, all of which had to be checked through customs. Eve and Jim made endless trips to the post office with boxes of books that were wrapped and tied, but later unwrapped for customs. Fortunately a one-eyed customs officer recognised one of the volumes in the pile: ‘Ah … Tennyson’, he sighed, and stopped checking at box number three. There were twenty-eight!

Their last day in Egypt was at ‘Port Bloody Said’. Jim had a further nineteen boxes of books to post and lost his temper with the customs officers, who he was convinced expected bribes. ‘Venereal whores in whom Nasser should take an interest’, Jim quipped to Basil, in a reply to a letter containing the latest gossip from Sydney on the fate of archaeology at the university.19 The news from Sydney contributed to his anxieties and he collapsed on the Esperia, vomiting, bleeding and generally feeling like he’d been kicked by a horse. Jim had to be helped ashore in Beirut.

Most of the archaeologists they planned to visit in Lebanon were away, but they drove to the site of Byblos—a glorious jumble of tombs from the Late Bronze Age beside a Roman theatre, with a tangle of house foundations of all periods in between. What a stratigraphic nightmare, Eve thought. Their guide was patient when he realised that this odd couple were more interested in the burials below the Neolithic house floors than the impressive Roman theatre above.20

At last they landed in Cyprus. It had been eight years since they had left. Both they and the island had changed. Eve’s father Tom sent a car to collect them at Limassol and drive them north. Many more lights dotted the flat lands around Nicosia and the dark hills along the road to Kyrenia. Just after midnight they arrived at Tjiklos to find Tom Dray asleep on a sofa in the lounge room.

Tjiklos, Eve told her mother in England, had become quite a colony, with houses springing up on the plateau and a growing population of English residents. She reported on those her mother knew: Wing Commander Hubbard was back in his house and slowly going senile; Miss Darcy had moved down to town and an American now lived in her house; Mrs Duckworth was increasingly blind; Mrs Wallis has gone quite ‘queer’ and played bridge all day; Mrs Worcester, too, had been ‘difficult’ before she died; Polyxenos sent her best wishes. Tom had converted three army huts built during the war into houses and Jim and Eve stayed in one of these. Eve wished she knew more Greek so she could chat to Christallou who lived with her husband and three children next door. Tom Dray, although now seventy-five, couldn’t stop building. This time it was a house above a water tank, although heart problems kept him in bed once a week.

On that first morning they went to Nicosia to hire a car. The city now engulfed the nearby village and spread into the countryside. Ledra Street, within the Medieval walls, had been transformed by rebuilding. Tryphon met them and they visited Petro Colocassides, who, naturally, had coins for Jim to inspect. They visited the museum, where Porphyrios Dikaios greeted them and cheerfully showed off the new storage and work areas. After a long day they returned to Tjiklos to find that a small Morris car had been delivered and Tom Dray’s cat had already adopted them.21

In the centre of the old city, the Kumarcilar Khan remained derelict. A seventeenth-century ‘card players’ inn, the building had heavy stone columns and walls that supported a timber roof, now sagging and splintered. For some years Jim had stored his field equipment in the Khan and now, to his fury, he found that much of his equipment was lost and what remained was in a frightful mess. Eve thought this hardly surprising. Obviously Joan had used some of it for Myrtou-Pighades, and what could you expect after nearly ten years? When news of their return spread, old friends arrived and Jim and Eve were touched to be greeted so fondly. Jim had a happy encounter with Michaelaki, a friend from the Cyprus Regiment. Tryphon was put to work cleaning and preparing what equipment they could find, Dikaios lent them tools and hessian sacks for storing finds, and Jim and Tryphon haggled happily over wages. Jim wrote:

My dear Basil this is still the old Cyprus with all its friendliness and courtesy. Strangers are behaving in the old way and none of my village friends have been afraid to seek us out. I only hope nobody will spoil my feelings, for the spell of the island is beginning to come back.22

Detouring on the way home to Tjiklos, they visited Bellapais. It’s tempting to imagine they saw an Englishman sitting under the shading tree at the local café. They would have recognised the world he described although may not have approved of the sentiments. Lawrence Durrell worked as a teacher in Nicosia and knew Peter Megaw. A Greek speaker, he had romantic views of the Mediterranean and his attitudes towards the English expatriate community were acerbic.

The British colony lived what appeared to be a life of blameless monotony, rolling about in small cars, drinking at the yacht club, sailing a bit, going to church, and suffering agonies of apprehension at the thought of not being invited to Government House on the Queen’s Birthday. One saw the murk creeping up over Brixton as one listened to their conversations.23

Jim’s friend Costa was in charge of Bellapais Abbey and persuaded Jim to find money for conservation works that Peter Megaw had approved, but which the Department of Antiquities was unable to fund. Rashly Jim agreed to find the money.

Before leaving Australia, both Eve and Jim had read newspaper reports of ‘terrorist’ agitation against British rule in Cyprus but neither was especially concerned. Letters from old friends remained friendly and Jim for one had no intention of putting himself at risk. ‘I don’t like getting hurt and positively loathe being frightened’, he told Basil. ‘If the tension is too bad, we’ll move on.’24

British Army lorries filled the roads, the only visible army presence as far as either could tell. At Bellapais they were warned that no one knew exactly who was involved in terrorist action and it was as well not to antagonise anyone in the village.25 Jim reported that the locals were prone to throwing stones at the army convoys, but he thought even the English residents would have done the same. If anything, he thought, people seemed united in their antagonism to this military presence.

Jim saw little enmity between Turks and Greeks in the village where they planned to work, although troops had recently been called to quell trouble and they heard rumours that the police feared entering the village. ‘Despite a few threats to kill our people we have had no trouble and I have insisted on employing Greeks and Turks … we are doing our bit to restore sanity’,26 Jim assured Basil. Some political disturbances escaped their notice altogether: on one day in Nicosia, the wireless reported a bombing that neither Jim nor Eve noticed. Certainly bombs were thrown, but Jim thought them primitive and ‘not many people get more than a fright. The Cypriots are more scared than we are. Our Turkish workmen won’t let Eve walk down to the road alone—one of them escorts her. Which is very sweet, but not necessary’.27 When the Post Office in Nicosia was blown up, it interrupted mail deliveries for a while, but nothing in the political situation caused Jim or Eve much concern. ‘It is so easy to commit sabotage and murder here that only Cypriot inefficiency makes life relatively safe. The British are just too incompetent for words in dealing with a very simple situation.’28 Jim blithely assured his father that the recently declared state of emergency would not worry them. And to Basil he commented:

I’m getting bloody cantankerous with the nerves of the Greeks and British. The Greeks are even afraid to go to the cinema. The whole situation is ridiculous, and made worse by the lying newspaper people … The Times correspondent is a Hun, usually drunk, so you can guess his reliability. God castrate the whole bloody lot! We drive around after dark without worry, and the state of emergency has made no difference.

He was shocked to discover that Peter Megaw had five guards at his house and preferred the attitude of their neighbour, the Admiral, who refused guards and wouldn’t even keep his barbed wire in position, ‘but then he’s a Canadian’, Jim added.29

To his father he admitted to shame at the panic the British were in, although he thought the Navy seemed calm and unworried and even went as far as to write a letter to The Times condemning the failure of the British to protect pro-British Cypriots.30 As he told his father, he doubted they would publish the letter, since he ‘advocated the immediate execution of those terrorists who are already under sentence of death. The troops should be allowed to shoot on the spot anyone caught with arms’.31

As soon as possible they drove their small hired Morris to the area they planned to excavate—a site Jim had chosen eighteen years before, a large cemetery like Vounous and, like Vounous, heavily pilfered. Vasilia was situated only fifteen minutes walk from Judith and Andreas Stylianous’s house, and their friends offered the house as a base. Eve and Judith had worked together on the Karpas excavations before the war and Andreas had worked with Jim and Eleanor at Bellapais. Andreas agreed to work at Vasilia, although he had to take time out to drive his young son to school most days and would take time off from excavations when the partridge season began. Eve’s last excavation work had been in England after the war, but Jim had not done any excavations since 1938.

Jim thought the cemetery might be even larger than Vounous and although many of the tombs had been robbed he saw evidence that some had not. He recognised three different tomb types, including one type of rock-cut tomb with no entrance (dromos). This type was named after the site where it was first found, Philia. The Philia period intrigued Jim: was it a precursor to the first phase of the Early Bronze Age or was it, as he suspected, a regional style limited to areas in the northwestern part of Cyprus and coexisting with other developments elsewhere on the island? He and Dikaios could not agree. It was hoped that this excavation would solve the puzzle.

No excavation work could occur without the permission of the Department of Antiquities and the agreement of the landowners. Gregoris Michaeli was the village representative on the Greek Ethnarchy Council and he and Ramadan Ali, one of the Turkish landowners, alternated as night watchmen at the site. Another Turkish landowner, Bayram Riza, was employed to carry excavation equipment and lunch to the site on his donkey. Both Ali and Riza had served with Jim in the Cyprus Regiment; Riza had been captured at Kalamata and Ali was a fellow prisoner of war. Andreas Stylianou worried that employing Turks might give the village a bad name. He was convinced that the village was a hotbed of terrorists and claimed the police from Lapithos were reluctant to go there. Andreas said there were threats to kill anybody who worked for them,32 but Jim stood his ground^33 and in the end half the workmen employed on the excavation were fellow prisoners of war. He had few concerns about their loyalty.34

Work began on 17 October, only a week after their arrival. Vasilia was a pretty site, situated on the first set of hills that rose behind the coastal plain, with a higher fir-covered ridge behind, and rising beyond, the twisted rope of the Kyrenia Range. The landscape was a monochrome watercolour world, each layer of wash fading into a softer blue. The site sloped down toward the coastal plain, carob and olive trees falling away in khaki lines toward the sea. Far off, the low coast of Turkey hovered on the horizon. At seven each morning they arrived at the site to begin work. By the middle of the day, even in October, the temperature had risen. After lunch the workmen lay on the ground in the shade of the olive trees, while Jim and Eve sat side by side on a rocky ledge, balancing notepads on their laps to write letters home. They agreed this was a heavenly place.

Digging started in the area with circular, beehive-shaped tholos graves, and quite soon they had excavated down to bare rock. One entranceway looked like it might lead into what they called Tomb 1. Planning and photographing step by step was dull work. Jim moved the men on to more tombs, and although the pace of excavation was fierce he quickly became dispirited. Most of the tombs had been looted in a manner he thought excessive, even for Cyprus.35 A local woman from Vasilia told Eve that when they were minding sheep and goats on the hills they amused themselves by picking up sherds and throwing them through the hole in the roof of one of the tombs, making it next to impossible to be sure that the pottery belonged to the tomb where it had been found.36 The graves were impressive architecturally, but there seemed little prospect of finding whole pots, which both Jim and Eve felt were needed to win over Sydney University and were important if they were to please their financial backers, including the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, which had subsidised the dig on the understanding that they receive objects from dated tombs. The museum had no interest in domestic material from habitation areas, which they thought unsuitable for exhibition.37 Hot weather made working in the humid tombs unbearable, and the compacted earth was like cement. Any pots prised from this mortar were unlikely to remain intact, especially given the speed with which they worked with picks and shovels and buckets. Jim spread his workers out, sending Tryphon and Bayram Riza hunting for more tombs and, with long experience, Tryphon found one. Tomb 2 finally produced an almost mint 1890 coin at floor level, which scarcely boded well. And then it rained. Jim’s spirits sank.

By 27 October he had declared Vasilia a ‘washout’.38

Peter Megaw agreed and suggested they try another site. He offered one located between Myrtou and Morphou, from which the Museum had obtained a useful group of pots. He thought it might prove more lucrative. In the end Jim opted for a site suggested by Dikaios, a site more or less within the sprawling city of Nicosia and which Peter Megaw told them would soon be destroyed by building developments. In just a single day they obtained permits from the Department of Antiquities and permission from the landowners, and began work at Ayia Paraskevi. Leaving a group of workmen to finalise work at Vasilia, they took others to this new site thirty miles away, and proceeded to excavate both sites simultaneously, hurtling along the rough dirt roads between each in the tiny Morris. In between times they also excavated a tomb an extra mile away: ‘started at 10.30 am, went through 6 feet of earth and 2 of rock, photographed and drew the burial, and had the pottery out on the roadside by 5 pm, just as darkness fell.’39 It is hardly surprising that the field notes for the work—not published until 1988—were ‘less than ideal’.40

At the last minute Tryphon discovered that Tomb 103 at Vasilia was relatively untouched and phoned Jim urgently. Jim and Eve raced back from Nicosia. Many of the pots in this tomb were, they believed, deliberately broken at the time of burial. This ‘killing’ of an object was common for metal objects but not seen before in pottery. One large pot or pithos was found intact, together with a magnificent alabaster bowl, the earliest discovery yet of alabaster in Cyprus.

Jim sent Basil details of their ‘sensational finds’ but Basil failed to arouse the Sydney Morning Herald’s interest, wryly observing that ‘what excites you and me in matters archaeological leaves the rest of the world out here pretty cold’.41

Vasilia was an important site, even if only a small number of finds were ‘sensational’. At the invitation of a British naval officer, Jim and Eve boarded a mine-layer to view the area from the sea, which prompted Jim to comment:

The obvious importance of Vasilia raises a question. It looks as if Vasilia commanded an excellent harbour for primitive craft, as well as a pass through the Kyrenia mountains, leading by an easy route to the valley of the Ovgos river and thence to the mining district round Lefka. It is possible that Vasilia was one of the main land terminals of a copper route, and that from it the metal was exported by sea. Perhaps it was even the main export centre of the copper trade for the land route to it is easier than around the shoulder of the Troodos range to the South coast. If so, the extent of the cemetery and the wealth of its occupants as shown by the alabasters is easy to understand. Yet the events which led to its abandonment remain lost to history.42

Their last month on Cyprus was spent at the Kumarcilar Khan, cataloguing finds in the drearily bitter damp.43 At Bellapais, where Jim and Eleanor had lived for eighteen months, the Vounous pots had been catalogued in parallel with the excavation. Much of the pottery taken from Ayia Paraskevi and Vasilia, however, would have to dry out in a Cypriot summer before it could be mended. They sorted, drew and catalogued what they could, but most of the work would have to wait another visit.

The weather affected their moods and health. Both Jim and Eve suffered from an allergic rash, although Jim refused to blame ‘Baby’, the stray cat at Tjiklos they had adopted. Apart from one quick visit to Salamis and Enkomi they seldom left the Khan. On 18 December Porphyrios Dikaios arrived for the ‘division of finds’.44 Cyprus kept the one good tomb from Vasilia, containing the large alabaster bowl, and the largest tomb from Ayia Paraskevi. As compensation for the poverty of their finds, Jim and Eve were offered another tomb group, from the Cyprus Museum’s own collection.45

After two months work Jim felt satisfied with this return to Cyprus and to excavations. They had found some beautiful pots and Jim bought more. He even managed to acquire three rare gold bands from Enkomi, which he could prove were found in 1936 and had not been stolen from the French. Dikaios granted export licences and judiciously Jim acquired whatever he could ‘in case the law gets changed in the future’.46

Terence Mitford, the excavator of Kouklia in the south of Cyprus, visited the Stewarts at Tjiklos one night. They chatted long into the night, gossiping about colleagues and teasing out the idea of establishing a foreign institute on Cyprus, along the lines of the British School in Athens or the Institute in Jerusalem. Jim believed that such an institute would not just help visiting scholars, but could play an important political and conciliatory role on the island. Both agreed that the Department of Antiquities had few resources apart from those associated with the conservation of buildings. And the island had no university.

Before he left Cyprus, Jim met informally with Sir Christopher Cox from the Colonial Office to discuss the idea, but he sensed there was little support from officials. Should anything come of it, however, Jim planned to put Basil’s name forward as director. ‘I think you have more tolerance than I do’, he said, tongue in cheek.47

At the beginning of the new year the Stewarts boarded a ship at Limassol. They said only brief goodbyes to friends and family, both expecting to return in a year or two. They sailed to Beirut, where they spent the day with the French archaeologist Maurice Dunand, who had been excavating Byblos for the past thirty years, and then sailed on to Alexandria and finally to Piraeus. A train took them to Athens, where they lunched with Sinclair Hood, Director of the British School. Jim visited a coin dealer and collected a hoard of Medieval Achaean coins that had been recommended to him. Sailing up the Adriatic in blustery weather they sorted coins in the writing room and a week after leaving Limassol landed in Venice. ‘Such a joy to have a bath’, said Eve.48

Jim remembered visiting Venice with his father one summer as a boy of thirteen.49 This time he had to pay the bills, Jim told Basil, but although ‘wickedly expensive’ they decided to lash out and ‘do’ the city. ‘Eve fell for Murano beads, of which we seem to have a supply sufficient for the world’, Jim said, but admitted that he ‘fell for glass animals and laid in a zoo’.50

Weighed down with pots, coins and souvenirs, they boarded the night train for Paris, where they had arranged meetings with colleagues and where Jim was overjoyed to find wine at 2 shillings a pint! They booked into the hotel where Jim had often stayed with his mother.51

The aim of their visit to Paris was to meet with Claude Schaeffer, the grand old man of archaeology. Schaeffer was now fifty-seven. Excavator of Enkomi and Vounous on Cyprus and Ugarit in Syria, Schaeffer had spent four years with the Free French during the war and had lost much of his personal library when the Gestapo occupying his house had burnt his books for heating. When Jim and Eve visited, they heard of the unusual arrangements that applied at Vounous. Apparently the agreement with the Cyprus Department of Antiquities gave Schaeffer half of all the material that Dikaios excavated, and Schaeffer thought this explained why Dikaios no longer worked at the site. At this meeting in Paris, Schaeffer agreed to hand over all his Vounous finds to Jim, who promised that it would be mended and studied at Bathurst. Schaeffer would fly out to see them when work was completed.52 Jim enjoyed the opportunity to thrash out details of little interest to all but a small group of archaeologists, telling Basil that their esoteric discussions ‘remind me of the description of a Highland regiment as kilted gentry preening to each other in Gaelic’.53

Everywhere he went Jim was at pains to report that Australia’s reputation stood high. In Athens he ‘gathered that the Athenian press had played up the alabaster’ and in Paris he decided that the Nicholson compared favourably with the Louvre and the National Archaeological Museum at St Germain-en-Laye. ‘There is no doubt,’ he told Basil, ‘that the Nicholson can be one of the ranking museums’.54

From Australia, Basil sent Jim and Eve regular updates. One event at The Mount he feared might worry Jim: ‘Your father fell down the stairs at the Mount on Xmas Eve while chasing a possum. He broke a rib and was in St Vincent’s here until four days ago. He was quite wonderful and must be very tough.’55

Jim didn’t doubt his father’s robust good health, but warned Basil that A.A. might not just be after possums. ‘I’m suspicious when I hear he was getting the gun to shoot possums inside the house—that is sheer lunacy and worried me, for it would do hundreds of pounds worth of damage … How are the cats?56

From Paris Jim wrote to Basil with details of baggage that could be expected to arrive in Sydney. This was on top of the twenty-three boxes already dispatched from Egypt. This consignment included ‘7 cases pottery, 1 small box of stone and bronze objects, 3 gold headbands, 2000 ancient coins—all from Cyprus, no commercial value, usual formula about display and teaching and research purposes. Also 1 small parcel of ancient pottery and metal objects from Lebanon—same guf’.57 How many of the objects were for the Nicholson and how many for his personal collection at The Mount remains a mystery. In Jim’s mind the two were inextricably entwined.

From Sydney, Basil kept Jim up to date with university gossip. All sorts of backroom deals were playing out, and Dale Trendall—now at the Australian National University—made a special visit to discuss the future of archaeology with the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Roberts. Basil thought the university a ‘cess pool’ and felt that, in the end, a new independent institution might remain the only way ahead. But he knew Jim too well and warned: ‘please, when you return be careful of the corns on which you tread; for a lot of the toes around this place are very sensitive.’58

News from Basil was compounded by the twists and turns in Basil’s own plans, caught as he was between a love of archaeology and responsibilities to his family. Jim found it impossible to follow ‘the wanderings of his brain. It exhausts me’.59 One minute Basil was living in Bathurst, the next in Sydney; for some time he studied law, at other times found himself working in the Toohey’s Brewery or investigating business opportunities. He told Jim he had finished writing up the result of the dig at Stephania, but then admitted it was not ready for publication.60

Basil’s problems lay with the precarious state of archaeology as both a subject and a department at Sydney University. Unlike Jim, Basil could not afford simply to follow his whims. He had a wife and children, and although Ruth’s property kept them from penury, Basil took his family responsibilities seriously. Jim had no understanding and little sympathy for these dilemmas. He complained about Basil’s indecision and worried that he would be returning to an ‘administrative muddle’.61

If Basil were to leave, Jim decided Hector Catling would be a suitable replacement, but whether Catling could be persuaded to leave England was quite another matter.62 Jim had met Catling in Cyprus, where he was working on a systematic survey of Cyprus, the sort of survey Jim had once hoped to conduct himself. Hector joined Jim and Eve on an excursion along the northern coast investigating sites. Jim was unaware that one event in particular disturbed Hector. Jim—a collector—had bought a pair of Roman coins, which he had made into earrings for Elektra Megaw. She adored them and loved wearing them, but the potential conflict of interest in the wife of a Director of Antiquities wearing coins of possibly dubious origin disturbed Hector and infuriated Peter Megaw.63 Caesar’s wife, Hector thought, should be above suspicion.

In Paris Jim and Eve boarded the train for Copenhagen, from where they would travel on to Stockholm. Although Jim had flown as a young man, he used planes infrequently, preferring the leisurely pace of ships and trains. Anyway, on occasions his doctor forbade him to fly on the grounds of fragile health. Jim was violently ill travelling through Germany. Hamburg station brought back memories of his last visit there, fifteen years before, and he had to force himself to be polite to the ‘Huns’.64

In Copenhagen they visited the museum. Eve particularly liked the Eskimo collection and they were shown around by Hans Helbeck, who remembered Eve fondly from his time at the Institute of Archaeology in London. He thought Jim and Eve a companionable couple, and tried to imagine them in the ancient house they had described to him—full of turkeys and cats. A natural depressive, like Arne Furumark, perhaps he saw a fellow sufferer in Jim.

Paul Åström met them in Stockholm as planned. Tall and handsome, Paul was twenty-six and brimming with enthusiasm for Cypriot archaeology. He had assumed responsibility for writing the Middle Cypriot section of the Swedish Cyprus Expedition, and was looking forward to working with Jim, who was to publish on the earlier period. Their research would, inevitably, overlap. Jim had invited Paul to Mount Pleasant to enable their close collaboration, and Paul and his girlfriend arranged to sail back to Australia with Jim and Eve. Eve was amused but flattered when his girlfriend, who spoke little English, curtseyed on meeting them. She was young and pretty, slightly built, but feisty and determined. Eve remembered all her life this first meeting with Laila Haglund.

They drove to Uppsala to visit Arne Furumark. Eve escaped the endless talk of pottery and took Paul and Laila to the cinema.65 In what spare time she had, she continued work on the Achaean coins but looked forward to England and family reunions. They planned to stay for a time with Eve’s mother at Milford-on-Sea and Jim would meet other family members, although only briefly. Eve remembered her cousin Giles’s attempt to engage Jim in conversation, but Jim had no interest in small talk. If the discussion wasn’t about archaeology he could be infuriatingly imperious and aloof.66

By the time Jim and Eve boarded their ship for the return to Australia, the political situation on Cyprus had deteriorated, as Andreas Stylianou wrote to explain. Two of their workmen at Vasilia—George Vasiliou and the Turkish Muktar—had been wounded in a knife fight and others in the village had been beaten up and had broken limbs and other injuries. Andreas felt vindicated. ‘Perhaps you will realise now why I was so worried during the excavation … Well I am glad it did not happen then and the excavations were not the excuse for the fight!’67 A few months later, the situation worsened, with reports of regular kidnappings and tit-for-tat reprisals. Jim began to have real concerns for Eve’s father, who lived on remote Tjiklos. Would Tom come to Australia, he wondered?68

The return to Australia saw a veritable retinue on board. Jim and Eve were joined by Eve’s mother Margery, together with ‘our Swedes’, Paul Åström and Laila Haglund. Steaming down the west coast of Greece, Jim thought of the sixteenth-century battle at Navarino and wondered if one day the wreckage of this event would be visible from a plane flying overhead. He was in a querulous mood and speculated that the uncomfortable weather they were experiencing might be the result of atomic testing.69 At Patras, Greek migrants joined the ship and Jim complained to his father that they were ‘a dirty scruffy lot of evil-looking rogues’. He was shocked to find them travelling first class.70 The luggage Eve had left on Cyprus had been held up by a strike and when they arrived at Port Said, ‘tired after a hectic scramble’, they had no summer clothes!71

Both Jim and Eve were ill during the voyage, perhaps the result of overwork and strain. Even so, they made themselves work during the mornings; there was always something pending. Duty and obligation fought with their obsession with detail and precision. One or other had to be sacrificed if the work was ever to end.

Eve looked forward to Mount Pleasant and to spending time with her mother. Jim was torn. He loved The Mount and his cats, but the trip reminded him of all that he had lost by leaving Europe. ‘The utter barbarism of Australia will be hard to bear now’,72 he told Basil. The messiness of Near Eastern politics contributed to his depressed and dispirited mood. ‘The wogs are fortifying the canal,’ he told Basil, ‘but it doesn’t look remotely like war yet or for a long time to come. If Israel is bankrupt, so is Egypt’.73

When their ship was involved in a mid-ocean collision with a tanker it simply underlined his foreboding.

Chapter 9

Mount Pleasant and Sydney, 1957–60

Jim and Eve returned to Australia in the middle of 1956. They had been away just under a year and returned with mountains of books and artefacts and promises they were unlikely to keep. This was Margery Dray’s second visit to Mount Pleasant, the first for Paul and Laila.

At The Mount the household rituals resumed. The cats were Jim’s domain, the turkeys Eve’s. Sheep farmed by tenants underpinned the whole enterprise. Wool prices in Australia remained high during the 1950s and the price of wool loomed large in much of Jim’s correspondence and his elaborate plans for archaeological expeditions.

Paul Åström was tall and elegant, an urbane young man who found himself flapping like a fish out of water in this strange new world. For a Swedish archaeologist from Lund, daily life in the Bathurst countryside was certainly novel. Paul attempted to make sense of it in a short essay ‘Glimpses from Australia, the great sheep-country’. ‘In Australia, they do not have shepherds but the sheep walk around on their own’, he was surprised to report. He described shearing sheds and wool classing at the Sydney auctions and was astounded to discover that there were more than one hundred million sheep in Australia—yet only nine million people! Searching for comparisons, he thought the unshorn sheep looked somewhat like haystacks or perhaps English judges. After shearing they were etched with red cuts and scratches. At a wool auction in Sydney he sat listening to the bids, but commented that ‘an outsider hasn’t a chance of understanding or following them; it feels like sitting in a room full of yapping puppies’.1

Jim and Paul spent their days deep in discussions on Middle Cypriot pottery, the subject of Paul’s doctoral dissertation. They developed a close friendship, although Jim happily declared Paul ‘useless in daily life’.2 Meanwhile trestle tables in the ballroom groaned under pot sherds laid out in messy piles. Born north of the Arctic Circle and attuned to solitude, Laila Haglund found pleasure in Eve’s calm and restful companionship as they sat for hours mending and drawing pots. Laila found an aptitude for technical drawing but was careful not to become just one of Jim’s assistants. Eve, for her part, enjoyed teaching Laila—everything from technical drawing to an appreciation of children’s literature. On one occasion a goose laid eggs but abandoned them and Eve persuaded Laila that she could hatch them herself. For several nights Laila went to bed nestling a goose egg in her bra and Eve was pleased to be proved right when a small gosling hatched. The landscapes and countryside suited Laila and she was keen to explore this new country. Basil’s wife Ruth brought her a pineapple and mango from North Queensland to taste and investigated rules on the export of native plant seeds to Sweden.3 As Laila walked the paddocks around Bathurst, she was struck by the numbers of stone tools lying in the fields. Jim airily dismissed them. She wondered whether anybody was interested in Australian archaeology.

Eve had looked forward to showing her mother her Australian life, but soon after their return from Europe, Margery fell critically ill. She was eighty. Eve and Laila took turns nursing her, the doctor prescribed medicine but there was little he could do. All who knew her adored Margery, and with her death Eve lost both her link to childhood and the person who loved her most. From England, Margery’s sister Ethel wrote sadly. ‘She must have come to tell me herself … I was sitting in my bed reading and suddenly found myself crying tho’ not knowing why. Just [about] the time she died.’4 From Cyprus, Tom replied to his daughter’s sad letter: ‘poor mother she never had much of a life and you were her only joy.’5 Eve was grateful that her mother had not suffered and arranged for her mother’s ashes to be returned to Bisterne, to the family cemetery, where she would lie beside the infant son whose death after only a few days had made her so protective of Eve.

In April 1957 Professor Gordon Childe, recently retired as Director of the Institute of Archaeology in London, returned to Australia. He was the most important theoretical archaeologist of the twentieth century and had not been back to Australia for decades.

Jim Stewart had known Childe in London. In fact it was Childe who had warned Jim that his plans for excavating tombs on Cyprus in the 1930s were misguided. They shared a nationality and a love of the Blue Mountains, but little else. Childe was avowedly Marxist, whereas Jim was decidedly conservative.

Childe was sixty-five, a solitary character, with a wizened face made uglier by thick round spectacles, and many thought him aloof, when he was simply shy. He enjoyed company but was used to his own. He visited Jim and Eve Stewart and stayed for a week in May and again in September. Laila found him captivating. They talked for hours about archaeology, sitting up long after Jim and Eve had retired for the night. Childe was amused by Laila’s habit of smoking a pipe.

When not at Mount Pleasant Childe often stayed at the stately old Carrington Hotel in Katoomba. Basil Hennessy would drive down from Bathurst with books from Jim’s library and frequently joined Childe bushwalking in the surrounding Blue Mountains, nervous at his tendency to walk too close to the edge of the sheer gorges. Although Gordon Childe had no personal interest in Australian prehistory, declaring it ‘boring unless you are a flint fanatic’,6 he tried to persuade Basil Hennessy to abandon Near Eastern archaeology and move into a scholarly area not yet treated seriously at any level of Australian life. Childe also tried to persuade Laila, and with more success.

Gordon had renewed his interest in geology and told the receptionist at the Carrington Hotel that he planned to write a book on the subject. On the night of 19 October 1957 Australia was in the midst of the spring racing season. Tulloch, most loved of Australian racehorses, had easily won the Caulfield Cup and was on track to win the Melbourne Cup. Talk in the bar of the hotel was mostly of the race, but a group of loud drinkers also had fun directing their taunts at the odd and ugly man drinking at the bar. Gordon moved away to chat with the receptionist. During the conversation he offered her his typewriter, that most personal of a writer’s items. He insisted and she finally accepted, putting it into the hotel safe. The same day he wrote a letter and posted it to his successor at the institute in London, Professor Grimes.

On 20 October he drove to a famous walking spot and continued on to Govett’s Leap. He took off his hat, pipe, mackintosh and spectacles, stepped back and fell from the cliff face. In the letter written to Grimes, a letter he asked not to be opened until 1968, he wrote that ‘Life ends best when one is happy and strong.’7

When news of his death reached England, gossip gripped the archaeological world. Was his death deliberate or an accident? The editor of Antiquity, O.G.S. Crawford, told Jim that a ‘chorus of laments’ showed how much Childe had been liked.8 Jim Stewart wallowed in gloomy fantasies and in a letter to Hector Catling said that Childe was murdered by ‘a certain political party’, adding that an attempt had also been made on him and Eve ten days after Childe’s death.9 Eve long maintained that Childe’s death was accidental and Basil and Laila agreed, none of them able to reconcile suicide with the cheerful, energetic and forward-thinking person whose company they had so enjoyed.

Paul and Laila decided to go their separate ways. Laila would remain another year at The Mount but Paul sailed for Europe in December 1957. He remained forever grateful for the opportunity to stay at Mount Pleasant and remembered Jim and Eve fondly for the rest of his life. Almost as soon as he boarded his ship, he and Jim began a detailed correspondence. Long lists of questions and answers—technical points on pottery typologies and relative chronologies—travelled between Sweden and Australia. Time delays were frustrating, misunderstandings unsurprising.

Their easy face-to-face conversation became less affable with distance. Disagreements were inevitable. Although Paul’s English was excellent, he knew that careful editing would improve it and sought Eve’s help. She reworked his sentences while Jim took time to guide, bully and berate Paul on the more technical aspects of his thesis. Paul worried that both Jim and Eve were spending too much time on his work, although he continued sending long lists of questions and sought Eve’s editorial advice. He knew that Jim was frequently sick and hoped his demands did not contribute to this. Jim assured Paul that it was a pleasure to help him but that they couldn’t do everything.10

Paul suggested Jim might fly to Sweden to act as one of his thesis opponents. Jim was flattered and eager to go, but in the end Gjerstad considered it an unnecessary expense. Jim complained that he had been misled and felt he had been made look foolish in academic circles. ‘I had set my heart on coming to Sweden,’ he told Paul, ‘I don’t like getting my plans upset. At the present moment small annoyances are apt to set me off.’11 In any case, doctors had warned against air travel so the trip would have been impossible.12 Paul supported the grant of an honorary doctorate for Jim, but warned it might prove difficult, pointing out that the decision to grant such a distinction would have to wait until his book appeared,13 a less than subtle hint that Gjerstad was becoming anxious that Jim’s Swedish Cyprus Expedition volume, promised a decade ago, might never eventuate.

Jim was ill for much of 1957. Conflict threw him into physical paralysis and he told Paul that on one occasion, when he threw a visitor out of the house for ‘unmitigated rudeness’, he was ‘only semi-conscious’ and for the next three days Eve had to help him bathe and dress.14 At one stage his doctors thought he might die^15 and Jim came to believe it as well. Unable to travel to Sydney to lecture, a loyal Basil once again stood in for him, but the university was irritated. Jim was seldom well enough to work and Basil might be forced to seek more secure employment—his latest idea involved working on Ruth’s family cattle property in Queensland.

Convinced he was doomed to an early death, Jim wrote himself a new role, believing he should now act as a ‘guide to other people, an organiser rather than an executive’. But, he added, ‘other people have to be willing to be guided’.16 Paul wrote about his personal problems and Jim attempted fatherly advice. ‘My first marriage,’ he admitted, ‘was an awful failure, and much of the blame lies on me because I put my career and my work first and my wife second. That broke my heart and has darkened all my life since’.17 He had learned through experience that a wife was an equal and advised Paul to learn this lesson as he had: ‘I am not ashamed to admit my youthful errors.’18 He had come to realise that the things most difficult to obtain are worth most.

The summer of 1957 was a scorcher. ‘We had all hell over Christmas’, Jim told Paul.

Now we have a real heat wave—97 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade, and not a drop of rain since you left. All the vegetables are dying, despite irrigation … Everyone is miserable, even the cats. Poor old Pooh-ewe has taken to eating violets to keep cool. Twirp demands a lettuce every evening.19

He and Basil were trying to finish photographing pots, but even water from the cold tap was 85 degrees.

In correspondence with colleagues across the world, Jim swapped archaeological theories and tested ideas. He aired opinions with little thought that people might compare notes. He wrote to Olaf Vessberg that Paul Åström’s knowledge of general Near Eastern archaeology was poor, and then criticised Vessberg to Paul.20 Archaeologists made up a small community and it was inevitable that people would talk.

Work piled up, obligation upon obligation—and much of it came to Eve. Jim had promised to help Paul Åström complete his doctoral dissertation on the Middle Cypriot period; his contribution to a history of the Crusades was still outstanding; the recently excavated material from Ayia Paraskevi and Vasilia had to be mended, drawn and studied; the volume on the Early Cypriot period for the Swedish Cyprus Expedition was promised but hardly begun; Jim’s corpus of Cypriot antiquities and his personal coin collection grew, with no end in sight, and there was both a farm and a university department to run. So much of what was promised—the editing, the mending and drawing, the running of the garden—were jobs for Eve. She willingly supported Jim’s ventures but wondered if he realised what each involved.

Eve was a meticulous editor, but slow. She edited papers written by both Paul Åström and later by his wife Lena Söderhjelm, checking sources and improving their English. Publication of the Dawkins translation of ‘The Chronicle of George Boustronios’ involved work that also fell to Eve, who prepared the index and slowly saw the volume through the complicated publishing process. All references had to be double-checked and she spent hours in Jim’s library. As work progressed, she checked proofs, found illustrations, decided on layout. Everything was finalised by hand and the manuscript typed and retyped.

Constant demands on their time took their toll. Jim’s grand schemes weighed Eve down with endless obligations and Jim felt trapped on a treadmill that would not stop. ‘I only wish that I could get rid of archaeology completely for two or three years’, he told a newly married Paul, advising him to ‘go and get drunk in a taverna, as I am sure it would do you both a world of good and I would love to be with you. Do you remember the night we drank all those bottles of whiskey with the help of the haggis?’21

Jim grizzled about work to Porphyrios Dikaios. Since their 1955 excavations he felt the need to add forty new types to his massive pottery corpus and realised the Swedes were unlikely to publish it, given its size. He had recorded over 10,000 pots but was still unable to see the patterns he longed for. ‘Just at the moment,’ he declared, ‘I never want to see another Early Cypriot pot again’. Convinced that publication must be definitive, he was surprised that the Swedes planned to publish their Late Cypriot volume of the Swedish Cyprus Expedition even before Dikaios had finalised the publication of the Late Bronze Age site of Enkomi. It was ‘sheer insanity’.22

It is not surprising that Jim and Eve were grateful for the quiet presence of Laila, who calmly helped Eve and who was a comfort to them both. Perhaps, they thought, a child would enrich their lives and for once they seriously considered the prospect. Might it be too late?

In the new year Basil took up an appointment as lecturer at Sydney University. Finally able to concentrate on archaeology, Basil gave Jim someone to lean on. When St Andrews, the college where Jim usually stayed during the teaching week, was unable to accommodate him, he asked Basil if he might stay with him in Sydney in exchange for housekeeping expenses. The only other option seemed to be to roll up his blanket in the museum, which he would do if travel outside the university became too exhausting.23

Jim hoped to expand the Department of Archaeology and sounded out both Hector Catling and Vassos Karageorghis, a Cypriot archaeologist now working as Assistant Curator at the Cyprus Museum. Neither was interested, whether because they knew the offer was only speculative, or they did not want to work with Jim, or simply that life in a remote part of the world did not attract them. Staffing issues began slowly to improve. A lectureship in classical archaeology, a technical assistant and a secretary were all promised. Their Bathurst friend Betty Cameron was recommended for the position of secretary. Recently widowed, she had moved to a house in Double Bay, Sydney.24 Jim hoped to lure Chrysostomas Paraskeva, from the Cyprus Museum, to the technical position.

One of Jim’s most promising students was Robert Merrillees, who would enter his Honours year in 1959. A graduate of the Sydney Church of England Grammar, he enrolled at Sydney University in 1956 to study ancient history and Latin and came under the sway of Jim Stewart and the ‘highly personalised way’ in which he ran the department.25

In 1958 Paul Åström assumed the Directorship of the Swedish Institute in Athens. Jim and Paul had hoped to collaborate on excavations but could never agree on details. Paul’s preference was for the careful and stratigraphic excavation of a settlement site. Jim disagreed with Paul’s costings, arguing that the kind of excavation work Paul envisaged would involve more people and resources than either could raise. Kalopsidha was one possible site, Hala Sultan Tekke another. Coordinating across different hemispheres would prove difficult, if only because the best times of the year for each would not suit the other. The academic year in Australia begins in March, as the European academic year moves toward summer holidays.

While planning the collaboration, Jim thought nothing of criticising Paul’s approach to settlement excavations to Peter Megaw. Paul wanted a permit to undertake a ‘peripatetic sondage’, which Jim now declared an ‘abomination in the sight of the Lord’, conveniently forgetting that this was almost exactly what he himself had asked Megaw to grant him before the war.26 As he explained to Megaw:

I am sorry to write this letter to you, but I do not want to see Cypriot sites messed about … Our good Cypriot sites have already been messed about quite sufficiently and I do not think that they should be interfered with again until one can get a proper expedition working on them.27

Either Jim had come to his senses about the idea of a roving permit or he was simply annoyed to find someone getting what he himself had previously failed to achieve. On the same day, he wrote a cheerful letter to Paul repeating his criticism: ‘I think it would be wisest to confine yourself to Kalopsidha and not go digging holes over other sites in the island.’28

Jim applied for leave from October 1958 to April 1959 to return to Cyprus. In his leave application he stressed that the excavations he planned to conduct on Cyprus involved collaboration with the Swedes but admitted that as yet no site had been chosen.29 The university gave its backing to the expedition, which again would be under the auspices of the Melbourne Cyprus Expedition. This time Jim proposed to take postgraduate students and introduce them to the basics of field archaeology. His plans involved a large group: Jim and Eve would be in Kyrenia of course, together with two students from the university; Jim expected Professor Hunt from Melbourne University to visit with his wife; and Marion Stevens, long a supporter of their work, would join from New Zealand. Jim even wondered if his father might visit.30 Sydney Vice-Chancellor Professor McCrae supported his plans and allocated £835 from the Research Fund for Cyprus.

The hoped-for collaboration with Paul Åström failed to eventuate. Everything depended on the political situation in Cyprus, which was increasingly serious.31 Late in 1956 Egypt’s President Nasser had nationalised the Suez Canal. Israel invaded and was joined a day later by Britain and France. British airfields in Cyprus were of strategic importance and British troops from Cyprus were involved in the invasion. In an unlikely Cold War alliance, the United States, the USSR and the United Nations combined to force a humiliating withdrawal. It was the British Empire’s last gasp.

The struggle for independence on Cyprus, which for many Greek Cypriots meant enosis or union with Greece, led to increasing attacks on British interests. Tensions between Turkish and Greek Cypriots festered. Kalopsidha, a possible excavation site, was in an area thought unsafe and the Kumarcilar Khan, Jim’s base in Nicosia where pots from the 1955 excavations were still stored, was in the Turkish part of Nicosia. Megaw agreed that few Greeks would dare to travel there to work. Jim was saddened to hear of the murder of his driver and worried at the rise in political violence, although the situation changed daily.32

Jim’s moods fluctuated between histrionic claims about his poor health and cheerful, almost exuberant bravado. The political situation looked bad but Jim believed he might be able to broker a truce with the Greek independence movement, EOKA.33 As Jim cheerfully pointed out ‘there will always be sporadic shootings, but it is wise to remember that the total casualty rate so far is only about 50% more than the normal murder rate’, although there was always the risk that the situation might deteriorate into civil war.34 Hector Catling, on the spot in Cyprus, warned that the road to Myrtou was dangerous; perhaps, thought Jim desperately, they could find somewhere nearer his old stamping ground, Bellapais.35

The British residents of Cyprus received a circular prepared by the Colonial Office in 1956, which was now reissued. Residents were advised to take extra precautions when driving and should not make confidants of Cypriot servants. It was best to carry a gun in a shoulder holster and not in the pocket ‘as it will probably catch in the cloth if you have to draw it quickly’. The government told residents to shop in the Turkish area of old Nicosia and avoid the Greek area.36 An article in The Times reported one death and several shootings in the Kyrenia district. A rural policeman was murdered in Karmi.37

Jim had paid a visit to Melbourne University during 1958 to lecture to students. John Mulvaney lectured in the Department of History, having completed studies in archaeology and anthropology under Grahame Clarke and Glyn Daniel at Cambridge. Mulvaney and Childe had met in 1957 and Childe thought him the only person with the technical skills to tackle Australian archaeology.38 Mulvaney was not impressed with Jim’s lecture but was delighted by the question one of his students posed. ‘Where did the people live?’ the student asked, ‘and how? Why do you only excavate tombs?’ Jim replied bluntly that tombs were the only source of whole pots.39 Mulvaney was shocked. This was not an archaeology of which he approved.

For an Australian intent on excavating in the Old World, the financial costs were steep. They still are. In Jim’s day financial backing came from museums, which sponsored excavations as a way of building their collections. As Jim explained to Hector Catling, ‘we need at least five or six tomb groups for Australian and New Zealand museums’. Donald Harden from the Ashmolean Museum expressed a typical attitude when he said he was happy to subsidise work on tombs as the museum wanted display quality material. Habitation artefacts did not fit the bill and they hoped for pots that needed little mending.40 ‘The period is very largely immaterial’, Jim admitted.41

Jim and Eve left Australia on the Iberia. Robert Merrillees and Molly Hartzell, Jim’s students, would follow a month later and, together with a Melbourne University student, Harriet Cook, would comprise the expedition. Possibly Paul Åström and his wife Lena would join them.

No excavation site on Cyprus had been chosen, although Kalopsidha might prove free of trouble and remained a possibility. Most of their time would be spent working on the Vasilia material left in the Cyprus Museum a little over two years ago. Newspaper reports quoted Jim as saying that Cyprus was no more risky ‘than crossing a Sydney Street in the traffic-hour’, but within a few days of their departure Jim telegraphed Basil in Sydney, asking him to check with Porphyrios Dikaios on the state of affairs on Cyprus and asking whether ‘he considers our project possible’.42 Had the expedition only involved him and Eve, Jim might have proceeded, but he felt heavy responsibilities for the students who would join them. On Dikaios’s advice the Cyprus trip was aborted. Jim’s father was relieved, as was Basil. ‘The thought of some future archaeologist resurrecting your remains from a Middle Bronze Age tomb into which you had been dunked did not seem to me to be a very pleasant thought’, he wrote.43 Eve’s father was disappointed but agreed with their decision^44 and told them that ‘quite a number of people have sold up here and are making Spain their next stop’.45

Molly and Harriet withdrew from the expedition, but Jim agreed to sponsor an extension of Robert’s trip. He would join them in England and France. Robert Merrillees left Australia in November 1958 to meet Jim and Eve in England. While Eve visited Bisterne, Jim and Robert travelled to Oxford and then on to visit the numismatist Peter Grierson in Cambridge. They called on Max Mallowan at the Institute of Archaeology in London and worked on Cypriot material amongst Flinders Petrie’s collection at University College London. At the British Museum they were welcomed by Reynold Higgins, who had known Jim as a fellow prisoner of war.46

In Paris, the group lunched with Claude Schaeffer and the next day Eve noted in her diary that Jim had a ‘bad night’.47 For five weeks Jim and Robert worked in the storeroom of the Louvre on material excavated by Schaeffer at Vounous in 1933 and never completely published. They ‘dusted, sketched, catalogued, drew and photographed all the pottery and bronzes’, and went on to work on other Cypriot material on display, as well as material stored in the basement of Schaeffer’s house in St Germain-en-Laye. For ease of work, many objects were taken back to their hotel, and in a room on the fifth floor they continued cataloguing and photographing material ‘in dank and grimy conditions’.48

Jim and Eve sailed for Australia in March 1959. Both were sick during the voyage. Robert wrote to thank Jim in April: ‘I find that I am overwhelmed by the recollection of the past five months, when I realise how much I managed to see, do and learn in the time we had in Europe’.49 He promptly wrote about his trip for the Union Recorder and diplomatically sent copies to everyone he could think of.50

At some point all the promises made would have to be kept, but the workload was more than either Jim or Eve could manage. At the beginning of 1958 Vassos Karageorghis had written to Jim. Vassos had worked as an Assistant Curator at the Cyprus Museum for the past six years but his relationship with Porphyrios Dikaios was uneasy. Ambitious and energetic, Vassos was a short man inclined to tubbiness who peered at the world through heavy dark glasses. He had completed a doctoral dissertation on Mycenaean pottery found on Cyprus and was eager to publish it. Peter Megaw was not interested in doing so, and Vassos began to canvass options. Would Jim publish it? His typed document was over three hundred pages and he was waiting for some material to be published so he could include it.

Vassos’s manuscript was ready by the end of the year and he sent it to Jim in London, with apologies for his poor English and with hopes that Jim might be kind enough to help with this.51 He sensibly retained a copy so he could begin work on the index. At the same time he negotiated on Jim’s behalf with Petro Colocassides, who had a group of bronzes that both Petro and Jim believed came from Vasilia, although Vassos disagreed, thinking they dated to a later period. He told Jim, in confidence, that few objects would be retained by the Cyprus Museum, perhaps three bronzes.52 He assured Jim that he had friends in Cyprus who were only too happy to help Australia.53

Neither Jim nor Eve was able to look at the thesis before the end of 1959 and the job of editing fell to Eve who added it to the work she promised Paul Åström and his wife Lena.54

As Cyprus moved towards independence, Jim worried what this might mean for archaeologists. In 1959 the armed struggle had ended with the signing of agreements and the appointment of a provisional Ministerial Council headed by Archbishop Makarios^55 with a Turkish Cypriot deputy, Dr Fazil Küçük. Would an independent Cyprus, Jim wondered, legislate as other newly independent countries had to limit the export of archaeological material? Would it still welcome archaeologists? Vassos Karageorghis assured him that Cyprus would remain friendly towards archaeologists. ‘I do not share your pessimism about the future’, he wrote. ‘I am sure we will stay in the Commonwealth, and the Antiquities Law will not necessarily follow the drastic changes it suffered in other countries. After all we want to attract archaeologists here, and by being generous we can do it better.’56

During 1959 Peter Megaw completed the transition to what would soon become a newly independent Department of Antiquities. He wrote to Jim, Terrence Mitford and Joan du Plat Taylor—all friends of Cyprus—canvassing their views on the future. Two sovereign zones—Akrotiri on the south coast and Dheklia on the east—would remain British, and Jim now offered to supply these areas with an antiquities service.57 No one had as yet surveyed the zones and Catling’s archaeological survey would soon wind up. They discussed again the idea of a permanent base of operations for foreign archaeologists^58 and Jim suggested a roundtable conference to consider the idea, perhaps along the lines of the Villa Ariadne on Crete, a house that had once belonged to Sir Arthur Evans and which now provided accommodation for visiting archaeologists. He proposed Basil could undertake the survey of the sovereign area^59 and thought that when Eve inherited Tjiklos it might serve as a research base.60 Ever the optimist, Jim asked Peter ‘if any means could be found of working our special interests into the Treaty and the new Republic’.

Separately, Jim discussed the idea of a foreign research centre with Vassos Karageorghis, who thought a completely Australian institute might be more ‘politically acceptable than one with the English’.61

Back in Sydney, Jim ran the Department of Archaeology as the paterfamilias of an extended family. He and Eve treated staff and students as friends or serfs, depending on the circumstances, but in general they cared for the staff and worked to make the department a happy one. When they descended on Sydney, they came laden with eggs or turkeys to distribute largesse to the masses and went out of their way to offer bountiful hospitality to visitors and students alike. Basil and Ruth had been married at The Mount and Robert Merrillees and other postgraduate students lived there for some time.

In her daily diary Eve recorded details of her turkey flock, the doings of sheep and dogs, together with the names of people who came for lunch, and the comings and goings of longer-term visitors. During 1959 the dairies record ‘J to S with Betty’; ‘J & B back’ more frequently. Before working at the university, Betty Cameron, Jim’s departmental secretary, had been married to a Bathurst doctor, Lloyd Cameron. Now widowed, she took the opportunity to drive between Sydney and Bathurst with Jim and became more and more an integral part of the household.

Despite the regular commute, Jim did not neglect his academic duties. Later gossip, promoted in the official history of the University of Sydney, has it that Jim ran the Department of Archaeology from Bathurst, steadfastly refused to come to Sydney and forcing students to work at The Mount.62 Eve’s daily diaries prove this to be incorrect. In 1958, before they left for overseas in October, Jim visited Sydney for nineteen weeks of the term and in 1959 it was twenty-three times, but Jim and Eve didn’t arrive back in Australia until April of that year. In 1960 Jim was in Sydney from Monday to Thursday twenty-six weeks out of an academic year of not much longer. Small bundles of student ‘thank you’ letters attest to visits, but not regular ones, by groups of undergraduate students.

Postgraduate students certainly stayed for lengthy periods, working on pottery or consulting Jim’s library. Robert Merrillees moved up to The Mount to work on the Schaeffer Vounous material, and after his appointment as Jim’s assistant was expected to stay for longer and longer periods. As he did to Basil, Jim now tried to control Robert. More perceptive, Eve thought it likely that Robert would not last two years, but would ‘want to go and find his feet overseas’.63

But it is true that Jim came to resent more and more the weekly commute to Sydney. ‘I’ve got used to being with you these last six months’, he told Eve as their daily notes resumed.64 He tired of the repeated travel and hated leaving Eve every week for three days and nights.65 Although conditions at the university were improving, he told friends he was seriously thinking of giving it up, although that would curtail their travel.66 He looked forward to being able to write up his research and contemplated a more domestic life. Jim told his good friend Christopher Blunt:

We have had our usual busy Christmas, selling off the turkeys. The festivities were a complete failure this year, as our senior cat died on Christmas Eve and that has upset us considerably. The weather has settled down to a normal summer heat and everything is looking beastly.

In a rare expression of domesticity Jim added, ‘I have bought a petrol rotary mower to try to cut down some of the more obnoxious weeds but the outside of the house is a perfect disgrace. The place is not getting proper attention this year’.67

On the days when Jim left for Sydney Eve rose early. While she waited for him to wake, she wrote notes he would find later. ‘Am getting so bored with filing—several years of it! But am beginning to see the table through the clutter. The world seemed so empty after you vanished on the platform yesterday. Your hound and I went for a stroll after tea, to cheer ourselves up, and found a nest of five eggs … ’68 In the pockets of his pyjamas: ‘Taking pretty green pills regularly I hope?’

From Sydney Jim often wrote to Eve, sitting in bed at the beginning of the day. Taking up his fountain pen he would start, as usual, ‘Good Morning Darling’ and continue with the minutiae of academic life. ‘Usual silly business at Andrews last night and slept badly. Not bleeding but don’t feel well.’69 He wrote to her most days he was away, some notes written in the rush of a busy day, others more slowly at day’s end. He signed off, as always, ‘Kiss me my Eve’.

Mount Pleasant cats sometimes found their way to Sydney. One of them—Kate—travelled to Sydney with Jim as a present for Betty Cameron. Often Betty brought Kate in to work and she had taken to lapping water off the dewy tops of milk bottles. ‘At the moment she’s sitting on my slide box in front of me, washing’,70 Jim told Eve. When she lost a tooth Jim wrote to Eve on her behalf. ‘Thanc u for hafing me to stai. I loth my tooth and haf to go bac to the dentis nex tyim I cum up. Love Kate.’71

The next day he ordered a sterling silver pendant for Kate from his friend Ron Byatt. He asked for one side to be engraved ‘The Nicholson Museum’, and on the other side Betty Cameron’s address in Double Bay. Jim would pay for the present; Eve needn’t know.72 More and more, Jim stopped at Betty’s place before returning to St Andrews for the night.

Chapter 10

Australia and Cyprus, 1960–62

Life at The Mount tentatively entered the twentieth century with the installation of a telephone, in Jim’s favourite spot on the front verandah.1 Eve used it to ring her cousin John at Bisterne on the day of his engagement. ‘It was,’ he said, ‘a great thrill. Mummy was hanging over the staircase in the hall, Daddy was listening in the middle room and visualising your house’.2

Jim’s weekly commute to Sydney placed strains on his marriage. Professional and social commitments exhausted both Jim and Eve and their time was seldom their own.

From his university desk Jim wrote:

Good morning, I thought I’d get a quiet weekend fixed up as Betty is staying down. Then Basil wanted to come up. Then Lawrence wanted to come up to collect the venereal rams. Then Keep said Lawrence hadn’t consulted him and he wanted to come with Lawrence. Then Alan said he wanted to come up. The upshot is that Alan is coming for Friday night only, Keep and Lawrence probably for Sunday night only but possibly Saturday night also.3

The train trip to Bathurst was long and tiring. Often the weather was dreadful.

‘What a scramble it’s been lately’, Eve said. ‘Really I think I’d sooner drive to Lithgow in a blizzard than have our weekend wrecked with more visitors.’ She reminded Jim it was his father’s birthday, only to realise that this meant they should invite him for the weekend: ‘So maybe we won’t have any peace at all.’4 Frequently Jim was sick and irritable and often her smiles were ignored. ‘You know,’ said Eve, ‘I was wearing a cheerful face to greet you the other day, but you were too sick & miserable to notice’.5

At forty-six, Jim had aged visibly. His once slender frame had ballooned from alcohol abuse and kidney disease, although he continued to dress stylishly, in silk shirts and immaculate suits, a short tartan tie above a paunch held in check by a leather belt. He had grown fat but it was not the comfortable rounding of a prosperous middle age. No precise diagnosis of Jim’s illness is possible, and his symptoms—when described—can have many causes. He complained of profuse bleeding, sometimes from the tongue, and of lethargy and earache.6 Sometimes he flew from Sydney to Bathurst to avoid the tiresome train trip but at other times his doctors forbade him to fly.7 At the end of 1959 he told Peter Megaw that he was so sick of doctors he was applying his own remedies and felt happier and more cheerful than at any time since the war.8 The following year he failed the medical test required by the university superannuation fund.9 ‘I don’t think there is any danger of me dying in the immediate future,’ he told Peter Megaw, ‘but once or twice in the last couple of weeks I have wondered how long I can go on. Nevertheless I have every intention of outliving all my contemporaries’.10

Jim’s doctor visited regularly, driving up from Bathurst to sit on the verandah for a congenial chat. They shared a brandy and Jim continued drinking alone or with company well into the early hours of the next morning. His doctor’s warnings against excess were futile and he revelled in ignoring them. One day he returned from the doctor’s. ‘He’s told me not to eat salt’, he laughed, and grabbed a handful from the salt dispenser beside the stove, swallowing it in one gulp.11

Eve spent all her waking hours worrying about his health, working to keep him going and struggling to protect him.12 She followed him with sad eyes. They had mellowed. Eve hoped for children and, although they were both ageing and Jim was often ill, she urged him to investigate medical options^13 but in their mid-forties, the hope was forlorn.

Jim tried once more to make contact with his own son and friends and family passed messages between Jim and Eleanor. Many of Jim and Eve’s friends knew nothing of Peter’s existence. Ron Byatt, Jim’s best man when he and Eve married in 1952, was astonished to learn, during a visit to Albert Baldwin in London in 1957, that Jim was a father. There was bitterness and blame on all sides.

In January 1960, Eve received news that her father had died peacefully in Cyprus. Eve had lived with her father only intermittently and their letters were friendly but seldom intimate. Nonetheless his death severed another link to her childhood and to the island she loved.

Tom Dray’s lawyer wrote with details. Tom had entered a private clinic in Nicosia but the noise of traffic disturbed him and:

he insisted on returning to Tjiklos a few days before Christmas where, I have no doubt, he was happier to end his days surrounded by his Kyrenia friends. Although his memory became at times weak he remained quite conscious until the last day of his life and was well aware of his approaching end to which he referred openly with his usual philosophical detachment.14

Eve was the principal beneficiary. Tom Dray’s bank account in Kyrenia held £16,000; he left a legacy of £4000 to Mrs Duckworth and £2000 each to his Turkish gardener and Greek cook. Beside the houses on Tjiklos, Tom left town properties in Kyrenia and an Egyptian villa. The lawyer warned that large duties might be levied on the Egyptian property ‘as your father ignored the advice of his former solicitor in Cairo to recast his Will in a form calculated to reduce the incidence of these’.15 Jim told Megaw that the various tax-free legacies did not leave enough money to pay death duties owed.16

By the middle of 1960, the status of archaeology at Sydney University was at last improving. In a letter to Paul Jim described his plans.

At the moment it looks as if I am to have an almost adequate department of two Senior Lecturers, one Lecturer, two Technical Assistants, a Museum Assistant and a secretary. The only position which causes me any worry are the two Senior Lectureships, which it will be difficult to fill with people of the necessary quality … I am now in a position to reorganise the department.17

At the end of the year Jim finally achieved the recognition he craved. He asked Paul Åström, Kurt Bittel and William Albright to act as referees for his application to the inaugural Chair of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Sydney, a professorship endowed by a bequest from the philanthropist Sydney physician, Edwin Cuthbert Hall. Paul was a recent friend and colleague but Jim had not seen Bittel or Albright for decades. He was appointed on 2 August 1960. An announcement was published in the Daily Telegraph and contained multiple errors—Flinders Petrie’s first name, Jim’s imagined directorship of the British School at Athens—but they correctly named the cat he held in the photo. It was Kate.18 ‘I hope you’ll not be kept waiting too long for the good news,’ Eve said in a rushed note to Jim as he left for the train to Sydney, ‘Dominic’s just hopped up on to the table to say he hopes so too; he’s looking forward to having a Prof. around the place—it’ll make a change from a Bish’.19 Sir Marcus would be upstaged.

Soon after his appointment Jim wrote to the university’s finance officer informing him that, although only £80 was allowed for carpeting a professorial room, he had spent over £100 and would take the extra money from another account. The university accountant, Mr Bongers, was appalled by Stewart’s offhanded approach to money. In minor matters, however, Jim had a Scot’s obsession with small change. A memo from his secretary seeks to explain why five and sixpence, the change from the cost of his lunch and cigarettes, went missing from his desk.20

Once appointed professor, Jim approached the Acting Vice-Chancellor. Banging on an old drum, he pointed out that the Nicholson Museum was inadequate to support the current courses: ‘the Museum is as important to us as a laboratory is to Chemistry’,21 he stressed.

Jim expected to hand-pick staff, although none of the people he approached was keen to transfer to Australia. He wanted Chrysostomas Paraskeva from the Cyprus Museum as his technical person, but although tempted, Chrysostomas could not afford to jeopardise his Cypriot pension. Paul Åström’s career had flourished. Now Director of the Swedish Institute in Athens, he was unlikely to move. Jim asked Joan, now working in the library at the Institute of Archaeology in London, about possible applicants for the new positions and tried to set up a lectureship for Veronica Seton-Williams, but that also was unsuccessful. He wondered if Megaw might be attracted if a Medieval position were found. Hector Catling did not want to leave England. Jim’s requirements for staff were idiosyncratic and in a letter to Catling he said he wanted someone over thirty, perhaps with an army background, an easy character.22 Possibly someone who fitted the image he had of himself. As he had done with Catling, Chrysostomas and Paul, Jim sounded out Vassos Karageorghis about moving to Australia and wrote magisterially, dismissing almost all the known world.

There are no candidates from England who are acceptable and Australians are too inexperienced and are, as a rule, lacking in initiative and imagination. Americans are quite hopeless and we are more or less agreed at the University that we will not take any more. There is nobody in India or Pakistan who would be the slightest use to me and in Ceylon archaeology does not exist for practical purposes. There is nobody in Europe worth considering and altogether I feel rather desperate since I am faced with the introduction of new courses which Basil Hennessy and I simply cannot handle on our own.23

At the beginning of the year Jim appointed Robert Merrillees as his research assistant, whose duties and responsibilities were:24

to assist me in my research work, in any way that I may direct … As I told you before, I shall expect you to contribute one pound a day for your keep, but this does not include personal laundry, cleaning and toilet materials … I trust you will put yourself in my hands and let me guide you along what I consider to be the proper paths … humility is a valuable asset.25

Ongoing plans to collaborate on excavations with Paul Åström were repeatedly shelved and they continued to disagree on the type of site to excavate, Paul preferring test digs at a settlement site, Jim preferring tombs, always his natural preference. Jim calculated that the planned 1961 excavation season would cost around £12,000, an extraordinary expense for only five weeks of excavating and four months in Cyprus.26 He was grateful that Sydney University would cover the salaries for himself, Robert and Betty Cameron as he planned to train both Robert and Betty, although why he felt the need for a departmental secretary to be trained in field archaeology is never explained.

Jim clung to his old obsessions and appealed to Dikaios, soon to be Director of an independent Department of Antiquities, for special consideration to have free rein.

Would it be possible for me to have a rather wide permit allowing me to excavate over a specific area of country instead of being tied to a given site? I hope to be able to dig during February and March on a fairly large scale, but it would suit me if we could work on more than one site in order to get a variety of pottery. You must also bear in mind that to a certain extent this is a training dig for my Research Assistant and my Departmental secretary, neither of whom have been in the field before.27

The request was similar to one he had made of Megaw in 1936 and for which he criticised Paul Åström in the mid-1950s.28

Jim’s numismatic friend Christopher Blunt planned a visit to Cyprus in 1960 and Jim wrote him letters of recommendation. One was to Petro Colocassides, ‘my general agent for antiquities in Cyprus and the best of the coin dealers. Don’t you go swiping anything that he is keeping for me!’ he warned, ‘he is perfectly reasonable about prices, or at any rate used to be, although I expect he will charge you more than I would have to pay. However I don’t think you will find very much since I have a standing order for all the Lusignan coins that come in’.29 Silver coins, were simply ‘tumbling in and so far we have 479 gros and half-gros’.30

Blunt was unable to visit Tjiklos but reported on a possible Venetian coin hoard held by Petro Colocassides. Jim told Christopher that this was ‘probably the tag end of the Ledra Street find, which included quite a lot of gold. I rounded up everything I could for the Cyprus Museum in 1955 but I fear that Petro was not particularly honest over the deal since some of the gold has found its way into other hands in recent years’. Even as he continued to collect, Jim apologised to Dikaios for keeping for so long coin hoards that he had borrowed from the Cyprus Museum years earlier for study. The urge to collect was strong but Jim’s capacity for completing research was weak.

Karageorghis reported that unemployment was the cause of an immense amount of looting at Dhenia and Jim asked Vassos to act as his agent and buy anything that the Cyprus Museum did not want. ‘You have a perfectly free hand to act on my behalf up to about £100.’31 Jim’s acquisitive streak remained undiminished.

Jim’s tendency to gossip continued to make colleagues wary. ‘In confidence’, he criticised Vassos Karageorghis to Peter Megaw and Megaw, ‘in confidence’ to Vassos. He complained to Vassos that Megaw’s actions made the University of Sydney hostile. ‘The division of finds in 1955 was not really a very fair one’, he complained and explained that ‘it was Megaw’s friendliness in 1935 which led me to specialise in Cyprus. Things only began to get bad when Megaw came in 1936 or 1937 and from that time on the Cyprus Museum never had quite the old friendly atmosphere. Since the war Dikaios has been consistently difficult and sometimes deliberately hostile’.32 Yet he wrote to Dikaios congratulating him on his appointment as Director of Antiquities—‘a fitting crown to a distinguished and successful career’33—and continued to offer financial support for Dikaios’s publication of the Late Bronze Age site of Enkomi.34 Jim told Megaw that Vassos’s thesis would not have received even a bad second class Honours at Sydney and, in relation to Vassos’s work at Salamis, he said he deplored the ‘vast expenditure … when there are more urgent tasks to hand’. All in all he felt Vassos needed ‘a good hard kick in the bottom’.35 Jim’s comments were ill considered or duplicitous or both.

His plans for a return to excavations in Cyprus would leave Basil, as usual, in charge of the department but Jim was annoyed. He had heard rumours of discussions between Basil and John Dunston, Dean of the Faculty of Arts, and wrote to the Vice-Chancellor pointing out that Basil had no ‘mandate’ to go above him. Jim complained that Basil was behind in his research obligations and told Basil: ‘I am appalled by your admission that you had been telling people inside and outside the University that I was impossible to work with and by the amount of mischief which this may have caused.’36

Jim left instructions. Ten years earlier he had listed the jobs Basil was to perform while overseas and their relationship remained one-sided. Jim refused to admit any change. The Vice-Chancellor, he told Basil, wanted Jim to keep his finger on departmental matters and Basil was to send everything to Jim in Cyprus for his instructions, despite the considerable delay this would create. Jim agreed to give Basil some leeway for his lecturing in the first year course but for Archaeology 2 decreed that: ‘you may give them general talks but these must follow my book [the Handbook to the Nicholson Museum] entirely and should perhaps take the line of explanation rather than fact giving, although I think you should start the year by giving a series of lectures on the geography of Cyprus. I feel that your main task is to give slides to illustrate my book.’37 He told Basil to report to him weekly.

Basil loved Jim and Mount Pleasant but had learned to measure his glass, to sip slowly and let it sit. He was thirty-five, married, a father with responsibilities and a career to pursue. Jim refused to loosen the tight leash and Basil came to resent the demands on his time. How could Jim expect him to come to Bathurst for the vacation? How could he simply leave Ruth and three children to manage alone?38 Sometimes Jim’s black moods frightened him, and his irrationality and bitterness corroded their friendship.

In late 1960 Jim, Eve, Betty Cameron and Robert Merrillees boarded the SS Iberia, Jim wondering who among them would first succumb to a nervous breakdown.39 Jim and Eve were out of touch with the Cypriot scene and were returning to a new country, Cyprus having won independence from Britain on 16 August 1960. The team was laden with supplies—some of which Jim earmarked for Porphyrios Dikaios to help with his excavations at Enkomi—and two manuscripts for Eve to work on.

One much-delayed obligation was the editing of Vassos Karageorghis’s thesis, which they had promised to publish over a year ago. It had caused them trouble because they both insisted on meticulous editing. ‘Work on your book,’ Jim told Vassos, ‘is proving very much more difficult … largely because you so often quoted titles and excerpts from publications not quite correctly, so that every reference and every title is being checked’. He claimed to have four people working on the text, which was being progressively retyped.40 Jim airily wrote that Vassos should not worry about the work and delay, and thought he would be cheered to know that they were finding many similar discrepancies in Jim’s text on the Early Bronze Age for the Swedish Cyprus Expedition.41 Some months later Jim explained they had not done much with Vassos’s book because they were too busy with income tax and sheep shearing.42

Jim’s manuscript was much delayed. Gjerstad planned a single volume on the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age in Cyprus, and agreed that the Neolithic period should be tackled by Porphyrios Dikaios, leaving Jim to deal with the Early Bronze Age. But Jim and Dikaios could not agree on the chronology of the so-called Philia culture, both believing it belonged in their period. Dikaios suggested that their work should form two separate parts of a single volume and Jim was inclined to agree.43 In the middle of 1959, Porphyrios Dikaios sent Gjerstad his manuscript for the Neolithic part, Swedish Cyprus Expedition, Volume IV, Part 1. Gjerstad waited for Jim’s contribution to complete the volume. In January 1960 Jim assured him that his manuscript on the Early Cypriot period − Part 2 of Volume IV − would be finished ‘in the course of the next few weeks’.44

Vassos Karageorghis met the group at Famagusta. Jim had asked him to purchase a car and they drove ‘BUG’ to Tjiklos, but neither Jim nor Eve liked her as much as ‘MARY’, their car in Australia.45 Jim arrived with money to buy more material for the Nicholson and planned to ask Porphyrios if there was anything the Cyprus Museum would sell. He was also overjoyed to get his hands on his favourite cigarettes, Troodos A. He had already asked Vassos to buy 1000, which he hoped would last the six-month visit and wondered idly if he could arrange to import them into Australia.46

The group arrived in Cyprus with the general intention of investigating the earlier phase of the Bronze Age on the north coast.47 Jim complained to Peter Megaw that looting seemed worse than he had ever known it, but added with no sense of irony that he didn’t know where the pottery was going ‘since I cannot find it on the market’.48 Within a week Jim had formally applied to Porphyrios Dikaios to excavate an area known as Lapatsa near the village of Karmi.49 While waiting for landowner approval and departmental permits, Jim, Eve and Robert worked in the Cyprus Museum on material from their earlier excavations at Vasilia and Ayia Paraskevi. When the weather turned wintry they felt homesick and Jim declared himself fed up with English expatriate life.50

Mary Ann Meagher, a Sydney University archaeology student holidaying in England decided to visit Cyprus on her return trip to Australia. Tall, blond, smart and self-assured, she wore enormous Sophia Loren dark glasses and a long fur coat that gave her an air of sophistication. Soon after arriving in Nicosia she visited the museum to see for herself the objects she had studied in the Nicholson Museum’s handbook. Those oddly shaped pots from Vounous were mesmerising—and she mentioned to an attendant that Jim Stewart, who had dug them, was her lecturer in Sydney. ‘Oh,’ the attendant said, ‘he’s downstairs in the store-rooms’.51

And so, almost by accident, Mary Ann joined the small group of Australians working at Karmi. Jim and Eve and Betty—a jealous squabbling and uneasy trio—moved into the big house on Tjiklos, where Tom Dray had lived. Mary Ann joined Derek Howlett and Robert Merrillees in a smaller house nearby. Derek had been offered the position of technical assistant at the Nicholson Museum—he applied for the job from Norwich, was appointed with few formalities, and travelled to Cyprus to work on the excavations. He would return to Australia with the group later in the year. Slight, with unruly shaggy black hair squashed flat by a multi-coloured beanie, he had a brooding expression, having left his girlfriend Sonja behind in England. Robert Merrillees was, apart from Jim and Betty, the only other ‘official’ Sydney University team member. Derek found Robert irritating and criticised his lack of practical surveying skills.52 Well over six feet tall, gangly and with an infectious grin, Robert towered over Derek in more ways than physically.

The other Australian member of the group, Robert Deane, joined only for a short while. Jim had arranged for Bob Deane to work in the Sudan with the Egyptologist Professor W.B. Emery. At this site each day’s work was meticulously recorded in a series of dig books at the end of the day, and then every week each trench supervisor gave a summary of the work that had been accomplished, at which time the students discussed issues and problems. Bob Deane was frankly appalled at the lax approach taken by Jim Stewart at Karmi and shocked when Jim laughed at his request for a dig book.

Despite Bob Deane’s recollections, Jim and Eve did maintain detailed accounts of excavation funds, which makes their presumed lack of dig records surprising. Marion Stevens from New Zealand had contributed a small amount of funding and Sydney University paid the salaries of university staff for six months. Few archaeological excavations would include in their costing the value of wool, but this was during the boom years for wool, and Jim’s wool cheque of £5926/9/9 was duly added to the Melbourne Cyprus Expedition Fund.53 Passage from Australia to Cyprus cost £1832/10/0 and Derek Howlett’s fare from London to Australia a further £136/2/6.

Base expenses itemised in the account book include wages, postage, the wood account, tools and, finally, the costs for packing. Each cup of coffee was accounted for, beside general supplies, entertainment and even money paid to beggars or donations to the blind school. Cigarettes were a regular cost. Occasionally there is an entry for ‘baksheesh’. One such record says ‘pyxis’, which suggests that Jim may have followed Flinders Petrie’s practice of rewarding workmen for particularly important finds.

Eve had brought an 8-mm film camera and, with no photographic experience, planned to make a film of the excavation. Her film log provides an idea of how the work progressed, although in the end not all the film footage was usable. Work began at Lapatsa on 27 February 1961 and finished on 24 March. For several weeks two sites—Lapatsa and Palealona—were dug simultaneously.54

As usual, the quiet and efficient Tryphon Koulermos was dig foreman. Unlike many foreign archaeologists, Jim always hired a Cypriot foreman and the men appreciated this.55 Tryphon had first worked for Jim and Eleanor at Vounous in 1936, was a close friend and had been a part of Jim’s earliest plans for a grand survey of Cyprus. He continued to be Jim’s most trusted workman, someone he could—and often did—leave in charge.

Yiannis Cleanthous became another trusted member of the team and was the Department of Antiquities’ official representative at the excavations. He remembered the first time he had seen Eve, some time in the 1940s. At the age of eighteen Yiannis worked for the department at St Hilarion, where he spent most of his time studying for the government exams. One day he looked out of his office to see a ravishingly beautiful woman dismount from a horse, which she tied to a carob tree beside his donkey. Now, many years later, he would work for her.

In 1961 Yiannis, a gregarious storyteller, was the departmental officer responsible for Kyrenia Castle—‘the king of the castle’ he boomed to all who asked. Derek, Robert and Mary Ann often visited him there and he was amused at the competition for Mary Ann’s attention but complained loudly that they drank too much of his brandy.56 Dark-haired and handsome, Yiannis roared up to the excavation each day on his black motorbike.

The tombs the Stewarts planned to excavate at Lapatsa near Karmi were on land owned by Yiannis’s father-in-law and where he farmed carobs. Only when Jim agreed that no trees would be harmed did Yiannis persuade his father to let the Australians dig. His uncle owned the other potential site, Palealona. Jim was shrewd about employing people with useful contacts; paying Yiannis ensured that his father-in-law and uncle remained on side.57

Other friends volunteered. Two former British Army nurses, Phyllis Heyman and Betty Hunter-Cowan—both with the rank of major—lived together on Tjiklos. Locals knew them as the Cave Ladies and they were famous for their English eccentricity. Phyllis cooked; Betty was the wealthier of the two. Whenever invited for dinner, they separated for the evening, so that the stories and gossip each collected could be shared later during many weeks of companionable solitude. Local children remember with horror the enormous bloomers billowing from their clothesline.58

Jim was ill for most of the excavations and bad-tempered. ‘The alcohol seems to have killed a lot of his sense,’ Yiannis reflected years later, ‘and he was getting angry so easily and was becoming eccentric. He didn’t like to hear the noise of my motorcycle approaching the excavation so I had to turn off the engine from 200 yards away so as not to make any noise approaching’. Yiannis remembers on one occasion offering Jim sage tea—a folk remedy—for his illness. ‘This is pig’s urine’, Jim shouted flinging it on the ground.59

Jim found walking difficult and was often led to the site on a donkey. Black and white negatives were stored in numerous empty packets of Veganin, a painkiller containing paracetamol, codeine and caffeine.60 Overdoses of paracetamol cause kidney and liver damage, codeine causes drowsiness and constipation, and neither should be consumed in large doses or with alcohol.

Gjerstad was still waiting for the promised manuscript proofs. He was sympathetic but couldn’t wait forever and even considered completing the editing himself. In confidence he asked Dikaios to find out about Jim’s health and was told that ‘Stewart was not in very good health … as far as I understand it was his heart or blood-pressure or both which were giving trouble. Although advised to stay in bed for a fortnight he never did’.61 Dikaios thought the delays to work on the proofs were as much the result of the excavations as of ill health.62 Perhaps Jim had cried wolf once too often.

Over five weeks thirty-five tombs were gouged out of the slope below the village of Karmi. Eve remembered the dust and dirt as she squatted by each tomb, balancing a board on her lap and drawing site plans. She had known many of the workmen for years. Tryphon of course—an experienced excavator, a square of a man, with a face chiselled into lines like those sculpted in the compacted soil by the shovel and pick. He and Yiannis kept the men in line. Eve pacified them when Jim’s outbursts or demands threatened to break the thin thread of respect tying them together. Mounds of pottery sherds piled up beside each emptied tomb, later to be shovelled into hessian bags tied and labelled for transport back to Australia. An immense amount of work remained.

At Lapatsa the excavation employed twelve labourers, a donkey man and a night watchman. High in the northern foothills of the Kyrenia Range, Lapatsa sat on a hillside and was, as Jim explained:

extensively terraced with stone walls and … heavily wooded with olives, carobs and pine trees. The wind up in the trees makes a noise like the sea but on quiet days there is nothing except the braying of donkeys and the sound of the woodman’s axe. The nearest village is called Karmi and it is about two miles away but we have a little church dedicated to Ayia Marina just below us and an excellent spring of water where there is a buried dragon. Karmi is a delightful village, miserably poor but extremely picturesque and full of cats. At the moment the almond blossom is out and all the wild flowers. We are just beneath the Castle of St Hilarion which rises up another 1000 ft. on top of a sharp pinnacle of rock.63

After only two days of work, snow fell. Jim thought the site disappointing, in part because so many of the tombs had suffered water damage and the layout of tomb entrances was confusing. On 1 March Jim applied for a permit for Palealona; six landowners gave permission.64 Also heavily looted, Palealona was to dramatically relieve Jim’s disappointment.

Jim was on site when a bas-relief was found in Tomb 6 at Palealona. On the wall of the tomb entrance a half-size human figure—legs, head and torso—had been roughly cut. Jim immediately sent Derek and one of the workmen to phone Dikaios in Nicosia with the news. The closest phone was a steep scramble up to St Hilarion and a snowstorm made their ascent tricky. At first Dikaios was sceptical. No such sculpture had yet been found from a Bronze Age site on Cyprus—but no one ever knew what Jim would come up with. Dikaios had known Jim for many years. Finally persuaded, he visited Karmi the next day and Eve photographed Dikaios and Jim standing together on the trench wall. They were ‘like kids in a sweet shop’, so delighted were they with the find.65 In honour of the holidaying Sydney University student, the figure was dubbed the Mary Ann, although today archaeologists believe the sculpture is of a man.66 Jim was excited but knew that special conservation was needed if the sculpture was to be preserved. He used his contacts at St Andrews College, where he stayed in Sydney during the university term, to obtain funds to erect a protective shed over the tomb and asked the Cyprus Museum to send a conservator.

More was to come. With the timing familiar to many archaeologists, the very last day of excavations produced the most important find. A single, unlooted tomb dating to the Middle Cypriot period produced a wealth of burial goods, including a faience bead and a pottery cup from Crete, dating to the Middle Minoan II period and in the so-called Kamares ware style.67 Uncharacteristically, Jim engaged his fantasies and imagined the objects were souvenirs collected by, perhaps, a seafarer who joined his ship at Lapithos and ‘took service with one of the vessels travelling between the Syria ports and the Aegean’.68

A popular childhood game uses a flat square plastic case full of sliding plastic tiles—usually eight or fifteen—that together form a picture. A space without a tile allows the others to move—left or right, up or down—so the picture becomes confused. Not until all the tiles are back in their original place will the picture re-emerge. Complex pottery typologies within and between sites are like the tiles in a puzzle: the vertical line of tiles corresponds to the stratigraphy of a single site; the horizontal line to the connections between sites within a geographic area. Archaeologists must move the tiles until related typologies, placed side by side, line up so that the stratigraphy of one site aligns with the stratigraphy of nearby sites. Only then will the true picture emerge. Jim saw the Kamares Cup as the key tile.

By linking a datable period in Crete to an undated period in Cyprus, Jim believed that the Kamares Cup solved the chronological problems besetting the whole of the Near East. The find was, he wrote, ‘the most important discovery since the 1890s, since it is so definite and the repercussions so wide spread’.69 He asked Dikaios to release the find to the press and Dikaios did so, while making it clear that the announcement was at Jim’s request.

Jim wanted to repay his workmen’s hard work and planned to pay bonuses but Yiannis demurred. Much better, he thought, for a collective celebration, a party to mark the end of an unexpectedly successful season. A long low table was set on the hillside under the olive trees, with bread, salad and lemons laid out in piles. The workmen arrived dressed in neat white shirts and pressed trousers. They lit a fire and, when the charcoal was just right, laid over it a long spit of skewered kebabs. Unfortunately the party coincided with the arrival of the conservator from the museum.

Jim was unwell but came to watch as the conservator placed a frame over Mary Ann and filled it with gypsum. Jim made him promise to take extra care.

‘If you ruin that figure I will shoot you.’

‘Mr Stewart I’ve done hundreds of these’, the conservator assured him as he filled the frame, and then went to help with the kebabs.

The gypsum was left too long, went rock hard and, as the conservator began to lift the frame, poor Mary Ann’s pelvis came away.

‘My God’, Yiannis recalled years later. Jim roared in rage and threw his stick to the ground.

‘You museum people are only good at making kebabs and having glasses of wine and coffees.’

It was the only time Yiannis saw him really furious and for once the workmen went silent.70

Nonetheless the feast was a success. Jim sat opposite Tryphon with Betty and Eve on either side. Betty Hunter-Cowan had brought her guitar and sang to the young man on her left. Someone brought a piano accordion, and when the meal was finished the men danced and sang.

At the end of the season’s work, Jim gloated that Karageorghis ‘rolled over’ when the Karmi finds were divided. Jim and Eve, Betty, Derek and Robert would sail for Australia with over seventy packing cases full of artefacts. Despite his internal jubilation, Jim could be gracious and wrote to Archbishop Makarios from on board the SS Himalaya thanking the government of Cyprus for their kindness and assistance and congratulating him on the efficiency and courtesy of all the government departments they had dealt with. He asked that the Archbishop convey his gratitude to both Dr Dikaios and Dr Karageorghis and noted the important role that the Department of Antiquities played in developing the tourist trade. He expressed optimism for the future of Cyprus.

The group stopped briefly in Egypt where, once again, Jim loaded up with books. To the intense annoyance of the university’s finance people, Jim arranged for the shipment of material from Cyprus (at a cost of £584 in freight) and Egypt (£150) and bought over £920 worth of books in Cairo. None of these costs were approved and on the party’s return to Australia Mr Bongers from the university’s financial area raised the matter with higher authorities. ‘The Vice-Chancellor asked me to say further that he takes a serious view of any staff committing the University to expenditure without the prior approval of the Senate or the Finance Committee or the Vice-Chancellor as laid down by the University By-Laws.’71

Despite his cheerful correspondence written on board SS Himalaya, Jim was desperately unwell. A few days into the voyage he collapsed and was confined to his cabin for the remainder of the voyage. On arrival in Sydney he was immediately hospitalised and spent two further periods in hospitals in Bathurst. At times he was delirious. Tethered to his hospital bed, he dictated letters to friends and colleagues and Eve typed them, propping the typewriter on the edge of his bed. The excavations, so unproductive at first, had succeeded beyond Jim’s expectation and he believed that the discovery of the Kamares cup would mean a complete reassessment of Near Eastern archaeology and history, making its discovery one of the most spectacular of the century! The season was, he told everyone, the natural completion to Flinders Petrie’s work. Often Eve sat beside Jim proofreading his manuscript for the Swedish Cyprus Expedition. Sometimes, reluctantly, she shared the job with Betty.

Everything seemed in order at Mount Pleasant: ‘more sheep than ever before, more turkeys than usual (over 500 of them), but fewer outside cats as several of the older ones have vanished; the Bishop is very much the Senior Cat, very dignified, but quite well even though he is over 12 now.’72 Basil is fairly sure that Callan had shot most of the outside cats.73

But Jim’s father was seriously ill and within a month of their return, Jim travelled to Sydney to be with him. A.A. died in July 1961, aged 90. He was old and had been ill for some time, but it was still a wrench. Jim had grown close to his father.

The return to Australia should have been triumphant. The excavations had proved successful and Jim was returning to an enlarged department. Max Mallowan had recommended Judy Birmingham as a Near Eastern lecturer and Vincent Megaw would teach European prehistory. He was Peter’s nephew, recommendation enough. Jim had suggested Alexander Cambitoglou for the Classical Archaeology position and Dale Trendall, now at the Australian National University, agreed. Derek Howlett was not his first choice for the technical position, but under Eve’s guidance should manage. He hoped the university would soon appoint a ‘Quaternary’ person.

But much had changed. In Kyrenia Jim had received Basil’s telegram with news of his decision to leave Sydney University and enrol in postgraduate studies at Oxford. Jim could do little about it and with great sadness, accepted the resignation. Tears were shed. They were as close as father and son could be, with all the friction that such relationships engender. Jim felt he had let Basil down and said so. ‘On the contrary,’ Basil said, ‘You’ve set me up to succeed.’74

Another fracture line finally cracked. Robert was the only student in 1959 to complete an Honours year, but Jim seemed determined to prevent him obtaining a First, even if this meant manipulating both exam and result. On the ship sailing home a final rupture occurred and by July, Robert confirmed that he could not—and would not—work at The Mount and his offers to fulfil his duties from the university store room at the Golden Grove in Sydney were met with antagonism. They argued on the telephone but the break was complete.75

‘You work according to my instructions’, Jim had demanded. ‘And when I ask you to do a thing I expect it to be done unless there is a very good reason. I will have some influence on your life for the next twenty-five years if you wish to continue Archaeology,’ he warned, and made good this threat when asked to write a reference for a Commonwealth Scholarship. While his report to the Institute of Archaeology where Robert Merrillees planned to enrol in postgraduate study was measured, the reference was vicious. Jim wrote to his bank withdrawing support for a personal overdraft to Robert. A wealthy man, Jim used money to curry favour and manipulate. Eve had predicted for some time that Robert would want to make his own way, but Jim was blind and refused to see.

Eve had long since made her peace with both Basil and Robert—the role of mediator came more naturally to her, as she had demonstrated with the Cypriot workmen at Karmi. More than anything though, she was glad that Jim had finally made peace with the only real son he had. Jim’s stepmother Hope negotiated a meeting and, at fifteen, Peter Stewart finally met the father he had never known. Peter was a young man with a passion for the country and a single-minded determination to become a farmer. If Jim had ever had any doubt about his paternity, these doubts disappeared when he met his son, who was sandy-haired with a complexion like his father’s that would freckle and redden outdoors. There was certainly no doubting the physical similarities between them and Jim was delighted to at last meet him. Friends and family urged him to move slowly. In September and again over the New Year, Peter visited Mount Pleasant, and shot rabbits, which Maroulla stewed in red wine.76 Jim’s good friend John Ouvrier told Eve how wonderful it was to see Jim’s delight in his son. In his turn Peter ‘assured me, after a bottle of vin rose that he too had had a wonderful time’.77

For the rest of the year, Jim lurched between desperate ill health and extravagant plans for the future. Writing to Vassos Karageorghis he let slip that the doctors had thought he might die, but he and Eve still found time to send a ‘consignment of bears’ to Vassos’s children for Christmas. Karageorghis reminded Jim, gently but increasingly firmly, that his manuscript had been with them for some time, also taking the opportunity to urge Jim to fulfil his obligations to publish his Cypriot finds.

Meanwhile Eve failed to finalise her father’s estate on Cyprus and Tom’s property in Egypt remained to be sorted. To her great relief Mrs Duckworth had at last left Tjiklos but the estate became impossible to administer from long distance. One property, Aspenden, had water problems and when her tenant drew water, the nearby town ran dry. Another of her tenants was unemployed and unable to make payments. Repairs to the houses seemed never-ending. Tenants fought over their access to carobs and olives and the property had not yet been transferred to Eve. Until that happened, all repairs were charged to her lawyer’s personal accounts but this could not continue indefinitely. Her legacy was becoming more of a worry than a source of income.

Jim was keen to advertise his recent success and wrote a report on the Kamares ware cup for Antiquity, where Glyn Daniel, a fellow student at Cambridge, was now editor. Daniel rejected the article—after many delays—as too technical.

Reluctantly we have come to the conclusion that, as it stands, your article is a straightforward and fairly difficult excavation report with an inventory, and that it is not really what we are aiming at in Antiquity … I feel that for this journal we have to get articles of wide general interest signalising [sic] an important discovery or setting a discovery in its widest contexts, or giving accounts of a new synthesis.

Daniel concluded by saying that

it is not space that crowds you out, but that your article is—let’s face it—pure archaeological primary scholarship with no concessions to the general reader (presumably a mythical figure but he subscribes to Antiquity).78

Paul Åström agreed to publish the report in Opuscula Athiensiou.

Jim and Eve had yet to provide a short report to the Department of Antiquities in Cyprus, still waiting for details of their earlier 1955 work, although Eve had finalised the proofs of the volume for the Swedish Cyprus Expedition, but Jim worried about the number of corrections needed.79 He returned the manuscript at the end of 1961 and in January 1962 expressed concern that they had not received the second set of proofs.80 Now a professor, he felt able to address Gjerstad by his Christian name and asked Einar to do the same.81 Each letter to Gjerstad included a request for stamps to add to Eve’s collection.

Amongst all these worries—establishing new staff in the department, the emotional turmoil of farewelling Basil and seeing Robert go, of losing a father and gaining a son, of illness and worry, of requests for publication and of promises not kept—Jim and Eve had to answer regular requests from people wanting to visit. In August the year before they had to remind people that ‘Mount Pleasant is a private house and not a museum, a fallacy which, despite denials by himself and Mrs Stewart, does not seem to die in Bathurst’.82 Would no one leave them be?

Eve had few friends and none she could lean on. Ann Baldwin, the wife of the coin dealer Albert Baldwin, was one of the few who understood and to whom she could confide.

I, too, had ample warning, & learnt to lie from day to day; Sept. of last year, for instance, I got Jim an ‘advance’ Xmas present (a transistor radio, to try and keep him amused when he was restless, but didn’t feel up to doing any work) as at that stage I didn’t think he’d hang on till Xmas … I felt so powerless to help him … that’s why, last Jan., I insisted on introducing a trained nurse into the household, to try & combat Betty C’s influence … But I think the worst part is having to keep one’s knowledge to oneself. Once or twice Jim started crying because he was so tired of always feeling ill, & he didn’t want to die—what could I say to comfort him when I knew it was inevitable?83

As Jim’s health failed Eve saw it as her duty to protect him. Writing to the Vice-Chancellor, she asked that Alexander Cambitoglou be allowed to make decisions on Jim’s behalf and worried that Betty—staying frequently at The Mount—brought Jim work even before breakfast.

Jim’s failure to separate the personal and professional spheres of his life had disadvantages. Caught between two competing women, Jim had enjoyed the jealous tension in Cyprus but now bridled at their bitchiness. Eve shrank when she remembered the day he lashed out at both of them, flinging papers across the room.84

Eve clung desperately to Jim and reached for support. Derek Howlett’s girlfriend Sonja had arrived from England and was a trained nurse. Eve asked for her help and the couple moved to The Mount so that Sonja could nurse Jim. She argued with Betty, who insisted on keeping him awake, talking and drinking, after she had administered medications.85

Through it all, Eve maintained her obligations, posting Christmas cards and making sure she had presents for friends in Cyprus and England, and continuing to field requests. Vassos needed a report on the 1961 excavations. Could she find work for a recently arrived Cypriot woman? How was the editing of Vassos’s thesis progressing? Where would she find the money for death duties payable on Tjiklos?

On Wednesday 31 January Jim was admitted for the last time to St Vincent’s Hospital in Bathurst and died on the 6 February. The death certificate listed hypertension and cardiac failure, but four years of imprisonment, alcohol and cigarettes surely played a part.

In his last days in hospital Jim had spoken with his local politician and expressed the wish that Sydney University might eventually own his property, his library, and his collections. Mr Bernard Deane, MLA, made representation to the university but the Registrar replied coldly: ‘As you no doubt know, Professor Stewart died yesterday. It seems therefore that there is no need for further action or discussion about his estate.’86

Eve hoped for a small private funeral, but this was not to be. Jim’s was never a private life. Not wanting a fuss, she asked Alexander Cambitoglou not to come, but he could hardly object to members of staff attending if they wished. Betty and Mary Ann wanted to attend at all costs. On the morning of 8 February, cars drove up the range from Sydney. Mary Ann brought Eleanor and Peter, but Peter attended the funeral without his mother.

Within two days Eve would host a visit by Alexander Cambitoglou. Professor Roberts and his wife arrived for lunch. Judy Birmingham came to use the library. Plans began for a memorial exhibition. Betty was asked to leave Mount Pleasant. Derek and Sonja stayed. Never happy with the Australian habit of boisterous matey banter, Eve felt more comfortable with a conservative English couple who were similarly reserved and careful.

When everyone had finally left, a freshly dug mound and small wooden white cross in the front garden were the only reminders of what had happened. Jim had asked to be buried in his orchard. Later visitors were aghast but Eve liked it. She told Paul Åström: ‘it helps me to feel that he is still here’, adding that she wished Paul were in Australia.87 She had so few friends to lean on.

Eve sent out notification of Jim’s death. Every day brought more letters to be answered. The more difficult ones she set aside. Formal letters of condolence arrived—General Nasser wrote from Egypt, Archbishop Makarios from Cyprus—as well as professional expressions of sadness and of regret for the loss to the archaeology of Cyprus. Many of the writers had never met Jim but had corresponded regularly and enjoyed the personality that shone through his letters. Porphyrios was shocked; he knew Jim’s health was poor, but had no idea the end was so near. He sent a copy of the formal communiqué from the Department of Antiquities.

Virginia Grace from the American School of Classical Studies in Athens had known Jim since before the war and she had visited them in Kyrenia during the Karmi excavations. She was pleased now to have done so, and told Eve:

Glad not just for meeting once more, but for knowing you, and seeing how he was looked after, and with what tact as well as tenderness. It was wonderful that this season was such a climax in rare finds, for his satisfaction, though I am afraid this added to the load. I hope you have been able to get a little rested, and that you may have the strengths and desire to deal with his unfinished work so it can take its final shape and immortality.88

Reynold Higgins, a fellow POW, had also known Jim

under the most trying of circumstances, and was always impressed by his refusal to give in. I don’t think he ever really recovered from Germany.89

Eve spilt ash on the letter from Jim’s Cambridge tutor and it burnt two small brown holes in the thin blue aerogramme, but she scarcely noticed.

Although not overtly religious, Eve had been raised in a religious household. One of the letters of condolence came from an old friend, Launcelot Flemming, now Bishop of Norwich. Flemming had recently lost his mother and enclosed a copy of the diocesan letter in which he tried to explain his feelings of loss.

In Eve’s reply, words and abbreviations tumbled over themselves as she poured her heart out.90

Dear Launcelot

I have read, & re-read, your personal letter of 10th Mar. & the copy of your letter to \ Norwich Churchman, many times; often I have been on / point of writing to you, but I hesitated: why sh’ld I bother you? I’m muddling along all right—& I know what a burden even one more letter in \ mail can be.

Besides, I’m not quite clear exactly what I want to say to you; I’m not a thinker like Jim. That’s why I was able to help him in his work: he was a scholar & I concentrated on practical things like drawing pots & proof reading; in that way we made a good team. But in other ways I failed him utterly. An only child, selfish & self-centred, I didn’t attempt to understand him, I expected to be the only pebble on the beach. So if he sinned, it was because I drove him to it; it’s my fault that a shadow came between us, so that in the last 2 or 3 years I didn’t give him all \ love I sh’ld have done. When we are re-united, I hope I shall have more understanding.

And now it’s too late for regrets! As I realised when my mother died, while visiting us here, 6 years ago (I could so easily have made her happier).

In my mother’s case, although I lament the separation, wh. has severed my childhood’s links, I am glad that she was spared further suffering. But with Jim it’s quite different, he was 48 not 80, & \ peak / of his career, looking forward to retiring fr. \ University & \ tedious administration /\ Dept. so that he could settle down to research & writing. Why sh’ld he have had to die, when there was so much he wanted to give \ world? Somebody like me could well have been spared instead of him.

I feel that ‘Hell’ for Jim will be regretting all \ work he’d intended to do (much / it work wh. only he could do) & wh. He never finished. But I hope that this is not so. As you say, life after death must involve an entirely new dimension; we cannot hope to comprehend it, but perhaps imagination can give us glimpses? At one time I helped @ a school for blind boys in Cyprus; its \ custom, @ Easter, to have hard boiled eggs dyed w. different colours, & these boys expected to have their coloured eggs, even though we had to go round saying: ‘You have a red egg; you have a blue egg’—it meant something to them, even though nearly all had been blind from birth.

Yes, in many ways there is no distinction between \ quick & \ dead; Jim will always live in his work. After 9 months, there are often moments when I feel he will come back again, that he just can’t be gone for ever! I’d got so used to him being away in Sydney 3 days a week that it’s quite natural for me to be alone in the house—& I haven’t swept away every trace / him, many things are still lying where he left them & then I look out /\ window & see his pathetic, temporary cross. At his special request he is buried here, in his garden.

Well, as you’ll have realised, I’m still in a jumble—but I’m all right, really. A kind & understanding young couple fr Norwich have kept me sane all this time. I think Jim told you that he was getting Derek Howlett, from \ Castle, to join his staff here. Derek has now married Sonja Clouting (a Middlesex trained nurse, also fr. Norwich); they came up here last Jan. to take charge / Jim when I c’ld no longer cope, on my own. Since then, they’ve kept an eye on me, & have included me in their family—I do feel that I am more than a friend; I’m to be godmother to \ 1st baby (because they think I need a ‘human’ interest. Jim’s relations are all very friendly too.

D&S have helped me so much because they’ve known that I just needed an audience to pour out my woes, & they’ve sat & listened patiently—I usually didn’t need any answer or comment. I seem to have poured myself out to you—it’s been a great help—but no answer or comment is needed.

PART 3

Wentworth Falls

Chapter 11

Australia, 1962–90

Nearly twenty years after Jim’s offer to work on the Early Cypriot volume of the Swedish Cyprus Expedition, Gjerstad was still waiting. He had used persuasion, cajolery, even bullying, and finally offered to edit the volume himself. Jim had not visited Sweden since 1958 and the only news Gjerstad had of him came indirectly or in delayed replies to letters.

The text was written, the proofs sent for checking. It should have taken no time to complete but it was not when Jim died.

Within a fortnight of his death, Eve wrote to Gjerstad. She had finalised work on the proofs and thanked him for his telegram of condolence, while expressing concern that Gjerstad himself had been unwell. She was sad that Jim would not see this publication. The preface would stay. So much of Jim was in it: his thanks to her for providing the working environment he needed, and to the cats for their companionship; his complaints about the university and its administration; his refusal to accept any blame for the late arrival of the text. Eve read Jim’s final sentence with a leaden heart. ‘Perhaps the future will be brighter may it be so!’1

Within quick succession Eve had lost her mother, her father, her father-in-law and her husband. Her father’s and her husband’s wills entailed complicated financial business. Although her father had left property in Cyprus and Egypt, it could not be released until death duties were paid and on Cyprus alone these amounted to around £10,000. She and Jim’s Bathurst lawyer were joint executors of Jim’s will and the estate would have to realise considerable money to cover the death duties that would be levied. Jim’s library and coin collection would have to pay their way, as would his collection of antiquities. The will was finally sworn for probate at £262,066.2 Jim left Mount Pleasant to his son Peter, who would take control when he turned twenty-one in 1967, only five years away.

Three months after Jim’s death, Eve wrote to her old friend Joan du Plat Taylor listing the jobs she had to complete. She had corrected the proofs for R.M. Dawkins’s translation of ‘The Chronicle of George Boustronios’ while sitting on Jim’s hospital bed and it would be published by Melbourne University Press in 1964. Vassos’s monograph on Mycenaean pottery in Cyprus was still waiting, many years after they had agreed to publish it. When she found time Eve retyped the manuscript, trying to improve the English and checking each reference as she went. Paul Åström promised to publish Jim’s ‘corpus’ but the text needed checking and expanding, and this was on top of the excavation reports of their work in 1955 and last year. Much of the pottery still waited to be mended and drawn and she didn’t feel confident writing up Jim’s conclusions. And the excavations at Karmi weren’t finished—four or five chambers near the bas-relief of Mary Ann remained to be excavated. Alexander Cambitoglou suggested that Judy Birmingham might help. Basil was too busy overseas but at least he had finished his work relating to Stephania. Jim’s numismatic friends offered advice and she hoped one or other might visit so they could decide what to do with the coins, the casts and notes. Albert Baldwin was not the only one who asked what would happen to Jim’s coin collection.

‘The house is full of notes, drawings & photos,’ Eve told Joan, ‘which Jim was planning to work up into articles when he had time’. So many letters needed answers and along with everything else she had to talk to the workmen about how to keep the sheep going through the winter as there had been so little autumn rain and feed was short.3 ‘I don’t know what I do with my time; I seem to be always either writing letters or else looking out documents for the lawyer, the accountant or the University—and I never seem to get anywhere’,4 she told Philip Grierson. Five years would pass quickly. How could she finish everything in time? Would she ever be able to retire to Tjiklos? She felt quite alone.

Eve considered herself part of the Department of Archaeology at Sydney University. She had worked at the Nicholson Museum even before the department existed, and Jim’s work had always been hers. Alexander Cambitoglou was placed in a difficult position. He had only been in Australia a matter of months, had rarely met with Jim, knew little of the background to the proposal regarding Mount Pleasant or the acquisition of the Golden Grove. Suddenly he had to run a department that, thanks to Jim’s perseverance, had expanded. Eve saw no reason to believe that the Melbourne Cyprus Expedition would not continue, or that the preoccupations that had been hers and Jim’s would not remain the department’s. The film she had taken at the Karmi excavations was part of her long-term plan to raise extra funds for excavation work and she wrote to Cambitoglou outlining what she intended. ‘I hope this doesn’t sound as though I’m trying to organise your Department’, she said, and proceeded to ask that her letters be sent through university channels, and at university cost.5 Betty Cameron, who continued as departmental secretary, briefed Cambitoglou. That Eve had thrown her out of The Mount in the week before Jim’s death may have contributed to her jaundiced view. In any case, Cambitoglou had to work out how to deal with Eve: a recent widow; an archaeological collaborator; and someone used to having her own way. The department, he told her, might be able to help Eve work on Jim’s publications but only ‘within the limits of a department which is, as you know, already far too busy’.6

Cambitoglou’s plans were not Jim’s and within weeks of his death—and two days before Stewart’s position was advertised—he began to revise the budget of the department and foreshadowed ‘the inevitable changes in policy direction as a result of Professor Stewart’s death’.7 He had already alerted the Vice-Chancellor to the possibility that members of the Greek-Australian community might seek to establish a chair of Byzantine and Modern Greek studies.8

The Chair of Near Eastern Archaeology was advertised in the middle of 1962. Paul Åström applied, naming Eve as a referee^9 but she was never asked to provide one and was not surprised. Jim was hardly popular with the university administration. Another name she heard mentioned was Hector Catling. But she knew little of what was happening and felt increasingly excluded.

By the end of 1962 no appointment had been made and on 8 November the Registrar notified Cambitoglou that:

at its meeting of 5 November, the Senate approved the following alteration in the Establishment of the Department of Archaeology to take effect as from 1 January 1963:- One Chair … to be filled in addition to establishment unless it is filled from within the University, in which case it will be counted as a conversion. It was determined that the precise form of this Chair be determined at a later date. It is not proposed to attempt to fill the Edwin Cuthbert Hall Chair of Middle Eastern Archaeology for the time being.10

Alexander Cambitoglou remembers that the Registrar told him if he didn’t apply for the Chair they would assume he didn’t want to remain at Sydney University.11 Sydney University had chosen its administrator and intended to keep him.

Cambitoglou had to walk a fine line but he was better suited to the role of administrator than Jim ever had been. Where Jim had been intemperate but open, Cambitoglou was correct, polite and very closed. Years later Judy Birmingham thought the changes wrought by Alexander Cambitoglou were ‘diabolical’. Although she had only known Jim for a short time, she remembers his approach as fluid and interesting. Cambitoglou, she thought, reduced everything to straight lines.12

Jim had never separated parts of his life and despite a predilection for elaborate lists and budgets, his papers were in a mess and Eve was left to sort them out. The university was faced with the problem of unravelling the tangled threads. The university accountant told the Vice-Chancellor, Stephen Roberts:

urgent investigations are being made along the lines requested … in 1953 Mr Colby went to Bathurst and prepared an inventory, copy of which is attached. Since that time, however, pretty well all the things listed were transferred to the Golden Grove building and the items still at Bathurst are those shown on the attached list, which include things left in 1953 together with purchases since that date … I am attaching also the report prepared by Sir Victor Windeyer at the time of the investigation in 1953. Information is also being obtained from the Accountant, University of Melbourne, about payments relative to the Cypress [sic] expedition fund, so as to expedite matters.13

Jim had taken from the university library all the books not required by students and moved them to The Mount.14

Four months after Jim’s death, Alexander Cambitoglou raised with Eve’s lawyer the possibility of purchasing Jim’s library and coin collection.15 Jim had often expressed his wish that Sydney University’s Fisher Library inherit his library, but death duties now meant it must be sold.

In 1963 a new librarian took up appointment as University Librarian. Harrison Bryan would work at Sydney University for eighteen years and go on to head the National Library of Australia. New to Sydney, Bryan had few preconceptions, no obvious prejudices, and a job to do. He was professional and gentlemanly. And he knew how to handle Eve.

Not long after his arrival he wrote in a courteous letter full of complicated qualifications: ‘I share the view, which I find to be fairly generally held, that it would be most unfortunate indeed if this library was unable to do itself the honour of housing such a notable collection.’16

Bryan drove to Bathurst to assess Jim’s library—all 580 linear feet of it. The library was extensive. Not only had Jim amassed archaeological books and periodicals, but also references on all sorts of supporting subjects, such as the geology, geography, botany and zoology of the Mediterranean and Near East. Bryan’s report to the University Senate was clear. He strongly recommended buying the library and thought the asking price of £15,000 was ‘by no means an over estimate’.17 Both he and Cambitoglou agreed that the best place for the collection was Sydney, which at the time had the only school of archaeology in Australia.

Eve began to haggle. As executor she had to realise as much money as possible for the estate, but also found it difficult to relinquish control. Two months after Bryan’s visit she raised the offer to £16,500 and began to add conditions.

Once we have got over the initial hurdle we can discuss details, such as finishing the catalogue, housing, safeguards for the proper care and maintenance of the library, how soon you can take over paying subs. to periodicals (at present being paid by the estate) and so on. I am sure we will be able to come to amicable arrangements over these matters.18

She requested that the library never be dispersed.

Bryan sent librarians to The Mount to catalogue the books. Eve was grateful for the professionalism of the staff, who made things easy for her.19 Although she wanted to retain some control over the library, Bryan was polite but firm; when she tried to impose conditions she was gently rebuffed. The university could not accept a library with conditions, Bryan explained, although he softened his rebuttal with an offer to pay for a bookplate to be placed inside each volume. Eve was touched and asked an artist friend to design one. She thanked Harrison Bryan. ‘I must say it has been a pleasure doing anything I could to help you as you have all been so kind and made things so easy for me.’20 It only took kindness and courtesy to win her over. Soon the bookshelves would be bare.

What was she to do with Jim’s coin collection, nearly 5000 coins, each stored with file cards and plaster cast in specially designed cabinets? Jim had left no instructions about the disposal of the collection—Eve said he wanted it kept intact.21 She believed it must be catalogued and studied but no written instructions existed. Only days after Jim’s death, numismatic friends wrote not just to offer condolences but to ask about the collection’s future.22

Albert Baldwin worried that there was no single person with the capacity to complete a catalogue. Jim had built his collection with loving care and Baldwin believed it was, ‘for its content and scope’, unique.23 Philip Whitting agreed there was no one in Australia capable of cataloguing it and suggested that various of Jim’s friends might be persuaded to work on individual sections of the collection.24 This would necessitate bringing the collection to England and as it formed part of Jim’s estate, this would need the approval of both executors.

Keen to keep the collection in Australia, Eve tried to sell it to the Museum of Arts and Sciences in Sydney. Jim’s friend and fellow numismatist Pat Boland visited The Mount to value it. He was astonished to find the door open, Eve asleep upstairs, and a note to the effect that he should let himself in and begin work.25 Boland tried to negotiate a sale. At first the museum agreed to acquire the collection for somewhat over £17,000. A special request to the New South Wales Minister for Education would, they hoped, provide a one-off grant for its acquisition.26 But Eve kept changing her mind. She checked again with Albert Baldwin, who now valued the collection at around £25,000 and Eve haggled over her own small coin collection and a spoon from the Stavrokono hoard. She argued that a sale could only occur if a qualified numismatist was appointed to work on it. Boland’s nerves frayed with the flaying they received from all sides.

By late in 1965 Eve’s asking price had risen to £30,000 and matters came to a head late in the year, as Eve, Derek and Sonja Howlett prepared to leave for England and Cyprus. The director of the museum sought clarification from Eve, who had no appreciation of the need to give prompt advice to Treasury. Without this, the museum would have to wait another year before a further request could be made. The director called the situation ‘fluid and inconclusive’.27 Eve replied that the Stavrokono spoon was worth an extra £1500 and should not be sold separately, adding that ‘once the stumbling block of finance can be overcome we can go into such matters as adequate curation and publication of a detailed catalogue, both of which I have stressed in previous letters’.28 She would not let go.

Boland had tried to obtain this collection since Jim’s death, but he came to doubt it was possible.29 The conflict between the new value and the probate valuation was a matter for concern, as was the way in which negotiations had gone on for many years.

In the middle of 1966 Eve wrote smugly to the museum’s director.

As I have not heard from you for some time I assume you have given up the idea of purchasing my husband’s coin collection. However, I think it is only fair to let you know that we have just had a very good offer for it, from England.

She was sorry the coins would leave Australia, but pointed out that it was probably best that it should be available to more scholars.30 There was no reply. She travelled with the coin collection to England.

Albert Baldwin worried at Eve’s delays. In the middle of 1967 Peter Stewart would come into his inheritance. Death duties would be levied and Eve’s lawyer warned that a decision on the coins must be made immediately; the control of the estate would soon pass from her hands and Albert Baldwin would have to take direction from others.31 In Kyrenia, preoccupied with plans for work that was going nowhere and arguments with Derek and Sonja, Eve dithered.

And then there were the pots. Almost every student who studied archaeology at Sydney University in the 1960s heard whispered gossip about the Great Pottery Controversy.

Jim and Eve had brought an enormous quantity of material to Australia, including pottery sherds and other excavated material from Vasilia, Ayia Paraskevi, Lapatsa and Palealona. Seventy-three purpose-built boxes held material just from the 1961 excavations. But who would work on the material? Although the Melbourne Cyprus Expedition maintained funds for excavations, there was little money available for the enormous amount of work that would be needed post-excavation. As is too often the case in archaeology, everyone wants to do the fieldwork, but no one wants to do the analysis—the routine, often boring, work that takes so long and without which publication is impossible. Yet without publication, archaeology becomes simply a self-indulgent form of controlled destruction.

Almost as soon as Cambitoglou assumed control of the department, he closed the Nicholson Museum for renovations. Although it was not before time, all efforts went into the refit and not surprisingly work on the Cypriot pottery stalled. There were no staff to work on it apart from Derek Howlett who, for much of the time, was away sick. He and Cambitoglou clashed and their fight was bitter and personal. Intemperate letters were exchanged. Eve offered to help and asked that the pottery be sent to her at The Mount.

In March 1963, a year after Jim’s death, thirty-one small cardboard boxes and an additional wooden box arrived at The Mount from the Nicholson.32 More material remained in Sydney but Alexander told Eve that Derek would not be available to work on it. Eve was appalled to learn that unqualified people were handling the material^33 and, increasingly frustrated by delays, complained to Cambitoglou.34 If no one in Sydney was available to work on the material, she said, she could deal with it herself at Mount Pleasant.

Cambitoglou asked Eve to return Schaeffer’s Vounous material, which he understood was at The Mount^35 and the coins that belonged to the Nicholson.36 In the middle of the year, Derek was sacked.37 Eve’s status was clarified when she was refused a parking certificate at the university^38 and then barred entry to the Nicholson’s technical areas.39

Who owned the excavated material? Although Melbourne University had sponsored the excavations, they contributed little money. Sydney University covered some costs—Jim, Robert Merrillees and Betty Cameron were all on salary at Karmi. Cambitoglou was reluctant to cede control of the excavated material, although he had little interest in it. Eve argued that the question of ‘ownership’ was irrelevant. ‘It is really only guardianship,’ she said, ‘until the material can be handed over to the real owners: those institutions which contributed to the excavation’.40 She continued to urge Sydney University to send the material to her so that she could meet her obligations to Cyprus. Recently appointed as Director of Antiquities, Vassos Karageorghis had demanded a written report on their excavations only days before Jim’s death.41

Confidential memos and private meetings consumed university time in 1964 and 1965. Whispered gossip ran wild in the department. Eve grew angry and impatient. She offered to come to Sydney to help with the packing but was rebuffed. In February 1965 Cambitoglou wrote to the Vice-Chancellor; they were yet to obtain eighty packing cases and needed to check the contents against various object lists. This might take some time, he thought, and added:

Unless packing is properly supervised, lists checked and properly receipted, the University may find itself in legal difficulty. I hope you will agree with me that we could not allow outside packers into the store rooms of the Nicholson Museum.’42

What happened next led to even more trouble.

On 16 March 1965 Eve acknowledged receipt of forty-three boxes of material from Vasilia and Ayia Paraskevi. At last she could begin the mending and drawing work that was essential for a final written report. Her letter to Cambitoglou was annotated with a note to Sir Stephen Roberts, the Vice-Chancellor:

Sorry to trouble you, and litter your desk with more b … (Jim would have had a word for it!), but it seems that you are considered the ‘correct channel’ for correspondence, so I had best keep you informed.43

Michael Quinnell was an archaeology student at Sydney University. He had learned something of object conservation from Derek Howlett, and was now involved in packing material to send to Eve Stewart. He recalls there were twenty Early Cypriot tomb groups packed in large wooden crates and stored at the Golden Grove. They were moved to a room under the Nicholson, where the tomb groups were laid out and checked against typed lists. He remembers that most of the pots were complete. Some had been repaired but most were in one piece, although many had hairline fractures—they were ‘springing’. The globular bodies of the jugs were particularly fragile. Michael was present when Alexander Cambitoglou decided to employ Grace Brothers, a Sydney furniture removal company, to pack the material. They wrapped the pots as they would fine china or glassware, and crammed them into tea chests. Before they began, Michael warned them not to pick up any of the jugs by the handle. Of course one of the workmen did and was left holding a handle and spout, the body of the pot shattering on the floor. This, Michael remembers, was the only pot broken at the museum. All the rest broke in transit.44

Four days later Eve wrote to Cambitoglou. ‘Never again will I rely on your word’, she told Cambitoglou. ‘Who was the cretin who packed them? No “packed” is not the right word, it looked as if everything had been deliberately bundled into the tea chests in a manner calculated to do most damage.’45 Not only were objects broken, but four cases were missing, together with Jim’s plans and field notes, which she had sent to Sydney for a memorial exhibition for Jim in 1962. Eve wrote repeated and furious letters. In August 1965, over three years after Jim’s death and nearly four since the Karmi excavations, the acting head of department Richard Green told the Vice-Chancellor: ‘I would be grateful therefore if you would let her know that the Department will not be available for her or Mr Howlett’s inspection, as everything has been done already that can be done.’46 Eve’s exile from Sydney University was complete.

Four months later, after a letter from Eve’s solicitor, the four missing cases were miraculously found. Eve archly referred Cambitoglou to Luke XI:9–10: ‘So I say to you: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.’47 At least she retained a sense of humour.

Eve threatened to sue the university for damage done to archaeological material and the loss of Jim’s field plans and site notebooks. The Melbourne Cyprus Expedition met to discuss the matter. Sir George Paton, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Melbourne, queried whether Eve had any legal right to either objects or notes, given that the expedition had been nominally Melbourne University’s. A letter to Dr Nicolaou, Acting Director of the Department of Antiquities in Cyprus, elicited a response they hoped not to hear. The holder of the excavation licence was Professor J.R. Stewart, not the institution. The Director, Professor Stewart, was responsible for the distribution of finds to contributors.

The Melbourne Cyprus Expedition committee convened. Professor Hunt, from Melbourne, wrote confidentially to Cambitoglou suggesting the meeting should ‘state clearly who is the authority for the distribution of the material when repaired … If Mrs Stewart’s threats of legal action mean that she thinks she owns the stuff, then she will want to distribute herself’. He suggested they argue that Sydney had made the greatest contribution, as they had paid the salaries of university staff. ‘Please leave my name entirely out of this. It is my personal advice to you’, he added.48 At the meeting on 29 March, Professors Paton, Crawford, Hunt, Jackson and Cambitoglou were present, along with John Carter from Melbourne University and Eve. The committee agreed to sponsor Derek Howlett to work with Eve on the archaeological material until the middle of 1966 and to contribute £2000 to a last excavation on Cyprus to be led by Eve Stewart.49

In August 1966, a confidential memo from the Vice-Chancellor of Melbourne University to the Acting Vice-Chancellor of Sydney University noted that:

At the luncheon meeting today Sir George Paton told me that the Melbourne-Cyprus-Expedition had granted travelling expenses from the Melbourne Cyprus Expedition funds to Mrs Stewart on the strict understanding that no legal action would be brought against either the University of Sydney or the University of Melbourne in the future. He also told me that Mrs Stewart had signed a document to this effect and that she had been granted the requisite travelling funds.50

As far as both universities were concerned, this was the end of the matter.

As co-excavator Eve hoped to complete excavation work at Karmi. She and Derek and Sonja Howlett left for Cyprus late in 1966 but first they would tour England with the film she had made of the Karmi excavations. Eve had persuaded herself that the film would be warmly welcomed but she was hopelessly out of touch. Although she wrote seeking support, and visited thirty-three schools in three months, the money raised was paltry. In any case, TV was awash with a much more popular show ‘Animal, Vegetable, Mineral’, on which Sir Mortimer Wheeler and Glyn Daniel—well-known, highly respected archaeologists—appeared regularly. The group sailed for England in late 1966, en route to Cyprus.

Tom Dray’s estate in Cyprus and Egypt continued to pose problems which were exacerbated by distance. Eve’s lawyer in Cyprus explained the seemingly intractable day-to-day problems. Of the various ‘plateau dwellers’ who rented houses on Tjiklos, he thought that ‘jealousy and meddlesome activities’ was the most apt description of their lifestyles. Petty rivalries came to a head over olives, each family suspecting the other of harvesting olives from trees they did not own.

The Cave Ladies were a unique problem. ‘However charming they may be in many ways’, Eve’s agent reported, they actively discouraged tenants from renting houses on Tjiklos. One potential renter was told fiercely that the area was a bird sanctuary and no dogs were allowed and the lawyer felt that if all potential tenants had to be persona grata with the Cave Ladies, Eve would never earn any rent at all. So fractious were relations between the various inhabitants of Tjiklos that the lawyer declared himself happy to resign and let the Cave Ladies take over!51

The political situation on Cyprus also deteriorated during the 1960s. Distrust between Greek and Turkish Cypriots festered as groups agitated either for union with Greece (enosis) or Turkish partition (taksim). One of the Cave Ladies, Betty Hunter-Cowan, explained.

I don’t know what sort of reports on the position here are getting out to you, but it is fairly dicy [sic] in the island, with only the British troops—bless their khaki socks—stopping the EOKA thugs from massacring the Turks. We are keeping Tjiklos blatantly British and neutral and are now in No-Man’s land between the Turks, who occupied the Pass on Boxing Day, and the EOKA boys in Kyrenia.52

In March 1964, United Nations paratroopers had occupied Tjiklos and were installed in the main house. Although this sounded ominous, Eve’s lawyer pointed out that it was better than having Tjiklos ‘smashed up in fighting between Greek and Turk’. There was little likelihood of finding tenants for the houses, ‘unless, of course, we have an influx of U.N. Officials’.53 As Tjiklos was in the UN danger zone, rents had halved.54

The Cyprus visit was a disaster. Eve had applied to Vassos Karageorghis for a permit to excavate at Palealona,55 explaining that she wanted to complete the excavations, open two extra tombs to the east of Tomb 9 and take soil samples for pollen analysis. She planned to hire Tryphon and six local workmen. Nothing seems to have come through and without any institutional support it was unlikely she would obtain a permit.56 The group stayed at Tjiklos for a couple of months. Eve’s diary records petty squabbles with Derek and Sonja, and her general disillusion, but little else. She was desolate that she had sunk to clearing looted tombs with volunteers: ‘what a lowering of J’s high principles.’57 At least she was able to show her film at Karmi, although Tryphon was unable to attend. She obtained export permits for sherds and pots and flew from Nicosia airport on 26 May 1967.58

Eve returned to Wentworth Falls and a new house. Peter Stewart had turned twenty-one and assumed ownership of Mount Pleasant. Derek and Sonja moved into Lymdale, which had been Jim’s mother’s house. No one who knew Eve was entirely sure how they had managed to pay for the house, but it was widely believed that she bankrolled the family.

For decades Jim Stewart had believed there was a need for an international research facility on Cyprus and when Eve had inherited Tjiklos in 1961 this seemed to offer a solution.

Now Eve revived the idea and wrote to friends and colleagues seeking support. Confidentially she told Megaw of her plans.59 A planning committee included Basil Hennessy, now working in Armidale at the University of New England. Basil discussed the idea with Vassos when in Cyprus in 1972; a brochure was prepared and the Australian Women’s Weekly ran an article.60 Eve fussed over the formalities of meetings and constitutions and wrote duplicate letters seeking support to everyone she could think of. She worried over names and abbreviations—SARI, NEAF, SPADE. She expected the proposed foundation would play multiple roles: it would pay for the publication of Jim’s work; it would provide a centre on Cyprus for visiting scholars; and it would support student research. She saw Derek and Sonja Howlett as being permanent staff for the centre on Cyprus, although not everyone agreed with this proposition.

From Cyprus, Judith Stylianou advised Eve to obtain official support. In the middle of 1974, Basil—now back at Sydney University—reported on a meeting with the Australian Government in Canberra.

The upshot of it all was that I should be called before the Committee early in July to put our case and, hopefully, the Special Ministry of State will then contact the Department of External Affairs to ask them to make enquiries of the Government of Cyprus. They point out that this would not mean an immediate financial commitment but that if they were prepared to go this far that we could rest assured that we will also get financial assistance when the climate was right.61

Less than a month later on 15 July 1974, right-wing members of the Cyprus National Guard, supported by the military Junta in Athens, deposed Archbishop Makarios in a military coup, claiming that Markarios was a Communist and hostile to enosis. On 20 July 1974 the Turkish Army invaded from the north and bombed Kyrenia. British residents of northern Cyprus were evacuated by ship. They were advised to meet at a nominated site and those who were unable to make the rendezvous were told to proceed to any of the open beaches along the northern coast, taking sheets and blankets with which to spell out ‘UK’ on the sand.62 When a final ceasefire was negotiated, the Turks held forty per cent of the island. This 1974 ceasefire line—today a messy line of rusting barbed wire and drums of cement—came to be known as the Green Line. The only country to recognise the Turkish state of Northern Cyprus is Turkey.

Few people at the time believed partition would last. Politically naive, Eve wrote to the Turkish consulate in Australia in February 1975 to investigate their possible support for a research centre at Tjiklos, now under Turkish military occupation. Gossip spread in the small archaeological community and Hector Catling, by now Director of the British School at Athens, wrote to Eve pointing out that, even if the rumour of her gifting Tjiklos to the Turks was untrue, ‘the rumour, as long as it goes unchecked, can only do a great deal of harm to your position vis-à-vis the Government of Cyprus and the Department of Antiquities, and, I fear, to the generality of Australian archaeologists in Cyprus and Greece’.63 Basil explained to Eve that United Nations international law forbade archaeological work in military occupied areas. A reply from the Turkish authorities is annotated in Eve’s handwriting, ‘No further action taken’.64

By 1976 Eve had accepted defeat. Lymdale had been sold, Derek and Sonja returned to England, and she realised that, for the moment, Tjiklos was lost. A year later, towards the end of winter, she planted an apricot tree in the front yard of her house on Armstrong Street. Like the mulberries, this would make good jam, she thought, as she grabbed a shovel from the back landing. She took two objects whose meaning only she understood—Jim’s ‘Pengy’ and her own ‘heirless puppy’—and pushed them into the damp soil at the base of the hole. Like a foundation deposit, she thought, amulets to protect against harm. Neatly she recorded the event in her daily diary.65

Chapter 12

Wentworth Falls, 1990

Dower House was a grand name for the six-roomed weatherboard cottage at the edge of the Blue Mountains. The name itself contributed to the sense of worlds juxtaposed and misaligned.

Inside the cottage a miscellany of clutter struggled for space: round-backed cedar dining chairs, a pine kitchen table, antique maps of Cyprus on horizontal weatherboard walls alongside china plates bearing scenes of Australian wildlife. In the sitting room, embroidered cushions and curtains shared space with ancient pottery and faded postcards of Kyrenia. Sketches of donkeys and koalas took pride of place along the mantelpiece. Three grey filing cabinets lined one wall, together with metal catalogue files, wooden boxes of photographic slides and a wooden cabinet with shallow drawers. An exquisite walnut veneer secretariat and a plain cedar bookcase were shoved together and cardboard boxes of books, files and loose sheets of paper spilled onto the fraying Persian carpet. Books, their spines soft from constant use, lay on every surface. A heavy sea trunk squatted beside the back door; another beside the laundry tub stood on green linoleum, its feet inlaid with ivory and lacy wooden fretwork. An Early Bronze Age pot in the bathroom sat oddly beside the tortoiseshell hairbrush in its special bag. Over everything, a patina of dust. In each object a story, a layer in the woman’s life. The stratigraphy of any life is complex. Only careful excavation can expose those stories, but it is a limited sort of truth.

Few people knew this woman. Most residents of Wentworth Falls, if they thought at all about the old lady who lived alone on Armstrong Street, imagined a genteel background, though her battered parka and trousers, baggy at the knees, had seen better days. Her English accent was proper, almost prim, and her answers to questions precise. She seldom lost her temper but didn’t suffer fools. Although the interior of her house seemed chaotic, she knew precisely where everything was and could tell each object’s story. Visiting tradesmen thought her kind but eccentric and although she never locked her door, few people crossed her threshold.

Scarcely five feet tall, hair combed back from her face, Eve’s eyes lit up at the sight of animals. She knew the names of all the birds that inhabited the gullies in the bush along the cliff’s edge: noisy butcherbirds and small busy pardalotes, the red flash of a crimson rosella as it streaked across the tree line. Practical and deft, she could kill and pluck a turkey and once stitched up a mauled bird using baling twine and a hook used to sew hessian bags of grain. Later, when the bird was killed and trussed, no evidence of stitching or wound remained.1 She would like to have been a vet and nothing made her angrier than cruelty to animals.

Eve finally had to deal with the immense body of work that had so consumed Jim’s life, his ‘Corpus of Cypriot Antiquities’. Dozens of ring-bound binders confronted her, each containing details of pottery types collected over decades and endlessly reworked.

Paul Åström had offered to publish the corpus, suggesting at first that xerox copies might be sufficient, but neither Eve nor Basil thought this acceptable.2 Eve decided to pay for photos and drawings from her ‘research’ funds and enlisted Paul’s help to write to museum directors who would be more likely to take notice of a professor than ‘an unknown female’.3 There were so many references to check and she had to collect photos and drawings from museums around the world.

‘You may have heard that I am finalising my husband’s Corpus of Cypriot antiquities’, Eve wrote repeatedly to curators around the world. ‘All the types are listed in S.C.E., IV, 1A,4 and most are illustrated there, but they are not described because Jim intended to bring out the Corpus as soon as S.C.E. was published—as it turned out, he did not even live to see the latter in print. So people must find a large part of S.C.E. unintelligible … I apologise for giving you so much trouble’, 5 she always signed off. Each letter took her to a past she remembered vividly.

When she wrote to Claude Schaeffer she was back in Paris in 1959, waiting for Jim and Robert Merrillees to finish work in the hotel room. Correspondence with Dr Chehab took her to Beirut and her first visit to family there as a child in 1926. She knew little of the recent civil war in Lebanon but hoped that his beautiful museum had avoided destruction.6 The Royal Ontario Museum had Cypriot pots in their Lady Loch collection. She had only met Lady Loch once, she wrote, but remembered her charming house and garden in Kyrenia.7 She apologised to the curator of the Brussels Museum for not writing in French. ‘Forty years ago I would not have hesitated … but now I am out of practice although I can still read it easily.’8

The curator at the Manchester Museum wrote to say that Jim had taught his wife at Sydney University, the curator from the Fitzwilliam Museum knew Jim’s Cambridge tutor at Trinity Hall, Mary Cra’ster at the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology was led to study archaeology after a visit to Jim and Eleanor in Bellapais as a child. Eve remembered Mary as a child when she had visited Nicosia to take part in a mounted paper chase on her pony.

You probably knew my aunt Ada who, with a friend, started the Kyrenia hospital. She went on living in Kyrenia after she retired from nursing. And I’m sure you knew my father. He was building a house at Eski Bakca, next to Mrs Houston, about a mile to the west of your grandfather’s house. After Mr Routledge died, my father sold Eski and went to live on Tjiklos.9

While waiting for photos and permissions for the corpus publication, Eve delved into Jim’s long-neglected manuscript on the Lusignan coinage. Jim had worked on the manuscript on and off for many years and when he died Eve sent it to Christopher Blunt, who took it on holiday. His rereading confirmed that it must be published but he could see why Jim had not been entirely satisfied with the manuscript ‘as it now stands’. He suggested various changes to the text, but they would all involve a lot of work. She was not qualified to do it,10 but after many years, the Cypriot numismatist Andreas Pitsillides offered to help and she started to tidy up the document, teaching herself the complex genealogies of the Medieval Lusignan family.11

In 1978 Eve paid a ‘flying visit to Cyprus’.12 Before leaving she wrote to Basil. She would fly out on 16 April and return a little over a month later. She wanted to make sure that, even though she was fit and healthy at sixty-four, if she did not return, Basil would know where things were and warned him that ‘clearing up here will be a helluva job’. Although neighbours and Laila Haglund, the latter now living in Sydney, could deal with some things, she was afraid that all the archaeological material ‘would be dumped on your head’.13 Palealona and Lapatsa were reasonably straightforward but she was afraid that under cartons of sherds there might be more things. The main problem, of course, would be the corpus. Few people other than Eve would understand the complex series of letters and numbers (in superscript and subscript) that Jim had used to try to make sense of Cypriot pottery.

The purpose of the 1978 visit was twofold. She would work on pots in the Cyprus Museum and try to find out what was happening with Tjiklos. She stayed in Nicosia, paying expenses through what she called the Stewart Archaeological Research Trust, a financial fiction that she employed to separate her money and compartmentalise expenses.

I got a wonderful welcome from all my old friends and was so happy to be back in spite of the sadness of the situation. Two barbed wire fences stretch across the island from East to West; mainland Turkish soldiers are ensconced on the North, Greeks on the South, with U.N. forces between them. Virtually all the Greek Cypriots have been turned out of the North, often at a moment’s notice, with only the clothes they stood up in. Turkish Cypriots from the South were sent north, but there are far fewer of them so, in the Kyrenia district, there are several empty villages while many people in the South are still living in tents in refugee camps … With some difficulty I got a permit from the Turkish military authorities to stay with English friends in Kyrenia, but I was not allowed to visit Tjiklos, which is occupied by soldiers. There is an amazing difference between the two sides. The North is a sleepy Turkish province, the South is booming; factories, high-rise blocks of flats and hotels to cope with the increasing influx of tourists, are springing up everywhere. The cost of living has shot up, but so have wages; formerly all the Museum Attendants came to work by bicycle, now each has a car. Solar-heated water for houses is the rule rather than the exception.

I could go on forever about my beloved Cyprus …14

She organised a party for Tryphon, which she paid for herself, but the room heater she bought for him was paid—as Jim would have expected—out of the Research Trust. Like Jim she kept detailed lists of expenses. Tips, beer, matches and always cigarettes. Tryphon gave her two almonds, and back in Wentworth Falls, she planted them in pots and waited. In a southern hemisphere summer they germinated and when they were strong enough she planted them in her back garden, where they would remind her of Tryphon’s smile and his rough hands digging through the limey soil to pull up a small cup with the pattern of Kamares ware.

She returned again briefly in 1981, again to work in the museum. She spent two nights with friends in Kyrenia, but was unable to visit Tjiklos. Andreas Pitsillides remembered her visit fondly. She met an old friend from England but was anxious to return to her dog, Tammy, in Australia. When she left, Andreas felt he had lost a member of his family and he worried when he read of bushfires in Australia later in the year.15

A year after this visit, she wrote to Ino Nicolaou at the Cyprus Museum, wondering why the international money order she had sent had not been cashed. She had written to Vassos, but after many months she still had received no answer. ‘Is he ill again?’ she asked Ino. ‘I am well,’ she added, ‘and have plenty to keep me occupied: finishing Jim’s work, looking after my garden and, recently, making blackberry jam’. She wrote later asking for photographs but some of the pots she wanted photographed could not be found. ‘It is unfortunate,’ she replied, ‘because each pot is the only example of its particular type’—proof, if any were needed, of the tendency of the corpus to split pottery types into smaller and narrower categories.

After completing work on Jim’s history of the Lusignan coinage she returned to the Bronze Age, where she felt more at ease.16 It was such a pity that so many of the pots she wanted drawn could no longer be found in the Cyprus Museum.17 ‘I can’t believe that I’m nearly 70’, she told her friend there, Elias Markou. ‘I feel 20 years younger.’ She was happy to hear Elias’s news—he had been working with Paul Åström in Greece and visiting grandchildren. It was summer for Elias, but a bitterly cold winter in Wentworth Falls. They exchanged Christmas cards. Byzantine icons and scenes of the Cypriot countryside for rural scenes of animals in the Australian bush.

Not all her correspondence was cordial. Eve lost patience with the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. She was astonished to discover that their costs for photographs ranged between $70 and $100 and she certainly could not afford to send them two copies of the final publication. Although the three pots in the museum were the ‘only recorded examples of their respective types’, she would not now be able to illustrate them.18

After Mary Cra’ster retired, Eve’s letters to the Cambridge University Museum of Art and Archaeology went unanswered.

Where are my photographs? It is over a month since you wrote to tell me that you had given the pots to your photographer—so where are the photographs?

This is URGENT …

My eyesight is failing; I must get the final volumes of the Corpus published while I can still see what I am doing.

It is no use saying ‘hand the work on to someone else’. There is only one man still alive who could read my husband’s notes, and he has his own work to finish and publish.

I will wait one more week. After that, if the photos have not arrived, I will have to put in the Corpus: ‘Illustrations not obtainable from CUMAA’.19

Few people were prepared to give as good as they got. Eve demanded photos and drawings of material at the Nicholson Museum. Jim’s successor at Sydney University was Basil and Eve wrote to him in annoyance. Was she obliged to include an explanation in the corpus, ‘No illustrations available of the following types because Prof. J.B.H., of Sydney University, is sitting on the drawings of pots from our excavations’.20 Basil replied, equally irritated: ‘I have received your ill-mannered letter and the immediate reaction is to tell you to go to hell but I presume that won’t save time.’ As usual, he said, Eve thought that Jim and her work formed the centre of the universe, when in fact Basil had obligations to the university, his students and his own research. Any offers of help with Jim’s material were made simply for ‘old times sake’ and she should learn to be less demanding and more polite.21

Over the years Eve tinkered with the text of the corpus, adding material, correcting mistakes, replacing terms that were now outmoded. Gradually the manuscript became as much hers as Jim’s. By now she could confidently assert that what Jim had begun was in fact a ‘typology’, that it would never—could never—be a ‘corpus’ in the way that Trendall and others had produced scholarly catalogues of black figure ware or other decorative arts held in museums around the world. These Cypriot artefacts continued to be unearthed and she could see no end to it. Really, this was a reference guide—a list of types. An attempt to bring order. But by now she knew that the world was a messy place. Attempts to pin it down, like a butterfly in a collection, were futile.

In a dark blue memo book Eve recorded her ‘work’. She listed the letters written and postage costs. Blue entries were ‘personal’, red related to the foundation, and those marked ‘C’ were concerned with coins or the corpus. Entries for the foundation reached a peak in 1974 but petered out after the Turkish invasion. Letters concerning the corpus then took over. In 1984 Eve wrote eighty-eight letters to individuals or organisations seeking information for this monumental work.

While moving some boxes with pottery sherds from Karmi, she uncovered a mixed bag of sherds—from Cyprus, ’Ajjul, Megiddo, Ur and other places in Asia Minor. She wondered where they had come from? How had she missed them? She thought Basil might like them for the Nicholson, wrote to him straight away and in due course delivered Roman coin moulds, some Medieval bowl fragments and sherds, sherds and photos from Megiddo and Beth Shan, a fragment of Roman pavement she remembered collecting at Tjiklos, and some pots that had been bought from Petro (Type XIII F 3a a1 − according to the ‘corpus’ classification).22

In 1988 Paul Åström published the first volume of the corpus and the excavations at Ayia Paraskevi and Vasilia. Eve wrote the foreword for the latter. She remembered, with great fondness, a different Cyprus. ‘In those days Vasilia was a “mixed” village, with the bell-tower of the Orthodox church and the minaret of the mosque both pointing heaven-wards … I am glad that neither Jim nor my father (H.R. Dray of Kyrenia) who also loved Cyprus and her people, were alive in 1974, they would have been hurt and saddened.’23 Despite her dismay at events in Cyprus, Eve was ‘exhilarated to see Jim’s work beginning to appear in print, at last!’ She had taken time over the corpus, but it had taught her much.

Although I always worked with Jim, he made the decisions, I only acted on them. It was not until many years after his death that I felt competent to act on my own initiative; in 1962 I would have been incapable of producing the Corpus in its present form.24

In 1989, aged seventy-five, she began work on Part 2.

On 19 April 1990, Eve sat at her kitchen table, papers layered across its white painted surface, her feet barely touching the linoleum. Her crepe-paper face was soft, with laughter lines at her eyes, silver hair stained nicotine yellow. She crushed a butt into the ashtray beside her typewriter as a draft stole through a crack in the window and the boats on her faded curtains rocked. She pulled her parka close, took up the magnifying glass, adjusted the angle of the lamp and leaned closer.

When she had finished she reached for a folder marked ‘British Museum’ and filed the letter she’d been reading with others in chronological sequence. What a nuisance that only four photos had arrived instead of the five she had ordered, but at least Dr Tatton-Brown had replied promptly and seemed clear and efficient. Which could not be said for all the people she dealt with. How many times was she obliged to remind them of earlier letters that she could only assume had been lost in the post. Sometimes the staff changed—too often she thought—and her letters fell into limbo. She slid a page of paper into the typewriter.

Dear Veronica, I don’t think we need go on being so formal, do you? Thank you so much for your letter of 30 March, it was kind of you to take so much trouble over the bowls from Fenitshes. The photo of Yortan A62 has not arrived. Could you please investigate? I’d really much rather have a photo than a Refund!’25

She signed the letter and reached for the blue memo book to record the day’s work. Today’s postage would be entered as ‘C’ because it was a research cost associated with the corpus. This month she had read over the proofs of the book on Lusignan coinage and posted three boxes of coin casts to Michael Metcalf at the Ashmolean Museum. She was no numismatist and much happier dealing with pots—even Yortan ones.

Eve covered the typewriter and stood up. Tammy, the nondescript black and tan dog at her feet, pulled herself up and padded along the hallway, where Eve collected a lead from on top of the sandouki, a heavy wooden trunk in the hallway. Today Tammy could come with her to the post office and afterwards they would ramble along the edge of the bush and perhaps see the lyrebird they had surprised yesterday.

At the post office, she collected her mail, a few circulars, a card from Giles but no business letters. They drove back across the highway and turned right into Armstrong Street where Eve helped the dog from the back of the van. Old age slowed both of them and they had to content themselves with shorter walks. Together they set off down the path, Eve treading carefully on a new hip and Tammy slowed by arthritis. She wondered again about the Yortan pots. Jim thought they were important but she could not recall the details and would have to look back over his letters from Turkey and the notes he kept when he had dug at Kusura. Some of these letters should go to Cyprus. She was a widow without dependants but could hardly throw them away.

They found their lyrebird and Tammy sat still while Eve’s clouded eyes followed the bird picking silently through the undergrowth. The wind from last night meant good tree fall and she collected twigs and branches for the fire on their way home. This afternoon she might work in her potato patch or make jam. Later she would sit and flick through Georgette Heyer, whose stories were so familiar that, despite her failing eyesight, she could read with ease.

In the evening she turned on the radio to listen to the news and sat with a brandy by the fire, Tammy asleep at her feet and the Cypriot rug on the armchair for warmth. The Red Polished pot on the mantelpiece was one from Karmi that she particularly liked. Part 1 of the corpus had been published and parts 2 and 3 were with Paul; she was now concentrating on the next volume—‘currently wallowing in knob-lug bowls (they may well drive me round the bend)’, she told Robert.26 She was proud of the book, although it was such a pity that Paul had not waited for her corrected proofs. After so many years, a little longer would have made no difference and it took a lot of effort to type up the addenda and corrigenda.

She remembered the first time she met Paul Åström. After months of excavations on Cyprus, Jim suggested they visit Sweden. Eve liked Alfirios Westholm very much, and glanced at the little red Dala horse he had given her, which now sat on her mantelpiece. Eve smiled when she remembered how Laila had curtseyed when introduced.

She had begun to sort through the layers of her life, going through Jim’s files, returning some letters to their authors, selecting others to send to Cyprus. She put them in order, filed by name or place, arranged chronologically. Neatly. Other objects she stored in cardboard boxes. She fingered the rectangular square of metal, a dog tag attached to a greying piece of string. Beneath her thumb she could read it as if she were blind—Oflag X/C 3700.

She sighed as she sipped her brandy. She wondered what would happen to everything when she died. Would anyone be interested?

Epilogue

Legacies

Eve Stewart died in a nursing home on 8 December 2005, aged 91. At her funeral both Laila Haglund and Robert Merrillees gave eulogies. Basil Hennessy spoke of her skills as an archaeological draughtswoman, and Professor Paul Åström remembered his time at Mount Pleasant. From America Stuart Swiny wrote of her ‘timely support’ for the Cyprus American Archaeological Institute.

Laila’s children, Karin and Kerstin, had known Eve since childhood and remembered her vividly. They could still taste the bread she baked, the special porridge and homemade plum jam:

We went for walks down the bush tracks looking for fire wood and in the evenings in front of the fire we played board games and cards, at which Eve was brilliant. It was always cold at night in Wentworth Falls and it was so nice to jump into that big bed with a hot water bottle and an Agatha Christie novel to read and to fall asleep listening to Eve and Laila chatting away in the living room.1

Eve belonged to another age, one that became more remote with time. Born at the rag end of Edwardian England, she died as the twenty-first century rolled around. As she aged, Eve tried on attitudes more aligned with the modern world but she never wore them easily. Her close friendship with Laila Haglund and Laila’s children may have influenced her decision to write to the Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser, in 1991 condemning plans to dam the Franklin River. Her financial support for the World Wildlife Fund for Nature, on the other hand, was a natural extension of her love of animals and the Australian bush. Her rare engagement with politics included manning stalls for the Liberal Party and later led her to join Grey Power. ‘I don’t like either Labor or Liberal, and I can’t stand Fred Nile who seems to be “down” on everybody’, she told Robert Merrillees.2 Into old age, she could still write trenchant and intemperate letters of protest. A letter to the radio station 2GB complained about a new announcer and was written the year she turned seventy. ‘How long are you going to continue to employ that insolent, self-opinionated man, who has recently taken over on Saturday and Sunday evening?’3 she began and filed a carbon copy of the letter under ‘Radio’, immediately after correspondence with Professor Dan Potts at Sydney University, and in front of receipts for her subscription to The Readers Digest.

Eve Stewart had no job, although she continued to use writing paper with Sydney University letterhead, but with the address struck out, for decades after Jim’s death. She tried to maintain a separation between her personal finances and those she set aside for research, but apart from time as a volunteer at the Cyprus Museum in the 1930s and a short period working as a technical assistant at the Nicholson Museum, all her work was voluntary and self-funded. She expected others to do the same and could not understand when they did not. She came from a world where obligation and duty held centre stage and it was the only world she knew.

On enlistment in the army in 1939 Eve gave her vocation as ‘archaeologist’, but like many women she was happy to defer to her husband, and by 1978 her English passport gave her occupation simply as ‘archaeological draughtsman’. Certainly Eve was an archaeological draughtsman of great distinction and an efficient editor to whom many scholars turned. Her coin casts were technically excellent, but her skills were not simply technical. Her broader knowledge of numismatics grew as she dealt with Jim’s research on the Lusignan coinage of Cyprus and Andreas Pitsillides was certainly impressed by her scholarship. As she worked to complete Jim’s corpus she strengthened her knowledge of Early Cypriot material and grew confident making decisions and drawing conclusions; numerous requests in her archive attest to her detailed knowledge of archaeological material from Cypriot sites. In the course of meeting her obligations to Jim’s memory and ensuring his legacy, Eve remade herself. From Mrs J.R. Stewart to Mrs D.E. Stewart—and always, and simply, Eve.

Eve Stewart never forgot a birthday or failed to meet deadlines for posting Christmas cards and presents overseas. On the ninetieth birthday of her cousin John Mills she arranged for a card to arrive on the exact day, although she hadn’t seen him for decades and had always been closer to his younger brother Giles. But John was important, a member of parliament, resident owner of Bisterne, and family. In a similar vein she kept detailed lists of Christmas cards, noting who she’d received cards from and those she’d sent them to. This was what was expected, and she never failed.

Eve’s letters were generally cheerful, professional, and correct in more than simply grammar. They were almost never personal or revealing.

The sale of Jim’s library to the Fisher Library was the easiest of Eve’s duties on his death. The ‘Stewart collection’ came to hold a special place in the Fisher, housed in its own space and consulted with reverence by visiting academics.

Against Eve’s wishes the collection was eventually dispersed among the main collection. All evidence of it as a private collection was lost, and books and articles previously in pristine condition and beautifully bound were subjected to the wear and tear of student use. The library ended, Basil says, in tatters. Occasionally a student will take a book from the shelves and wonder about the bookplate inside the front cover.

Jim’s massive collection of coins, a collection of international significance, was finally sold to the established firm of A.H. Baldwin and Sons, a family business run by Jim’s old friend Albert Baldwin. The firm favoured scholarship over profit and was generous in providing access to numismatists wanting to study material. In due course, John Seltman, son of another of Jim’s friends, the numismatist Charles Seltman, began a PhD study of the coinage of the Lusignan dynasty. He borrowed a copy of Jim’s manuscript on the Lusignan coinage from Christopher Blunt and in 1994 published a volume on the coins of the Crusader states. Much of the content bore a striking resemblance to Jim’s manuscript. A.H. Baldwin and Sons agreed to lend Seltman some coins from the Stewart collection to assist with his research in America. Several years after the loan, one of the managing directors of Baldwins was horrified to see some of these coins for sale at a coin auction. He flew immediately to Washington to confront Seltman, who returned the remaining coins and promised to pay back losses. In 1974, most of the remainder of the collection was offered to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, but neither could afford to buy everything on offer and so the remaining coins, numbering in the hundreds, were sold to private collectors. Only because Jim and Eve were so meticulous in making plaster casts of the coins is it today possible to re-create his original collection and, therefore, the original hoard from the village of Stavrokono, the village Jim visited with Petro Colocassides in 1947, that fateful year.4

Jim Stewart believed that the Nicholson Museum could be world-class. In moments of paranoia he believed that another world war was imminent and that with Europe destroyed the Nicholson would be the only repository of material from the ancient world. Over the years he amassed objects—skulls from Jericho, ivories from Nimrud, even a hoard of over three thousand Roman coins acquired by auction in 1949 from Taunton, where Jim and Eleanor had once lived.5 Sadly, he spent little energy making sure that the material was properly curated, catalogued or conserved.

The Nicholson was planned as a teaching museum. Jim appointed a teaching fellow responsible for managing visitors and school groups, and encouraged students to handle material and use objects to learn about the past. No doubt standards were not those that are expected today, but it was a far cry from the art museum it became under his successor. Keenly aware of the value of archaeological material, Jim did not see objects simply as works of art.

After the 1966 reorganisation of the museum, Professor Cambitoglou opened the exhibition with a lecture that extolled the virtue of beauty for its own sake, remarking: ‘We don’t apologise for displaying a beautiful Greek drinking cup.’ Students learned that the small or ugly or vernacular was of lesser value. One student, engaged to restore pottery at the Golden Grove, was mortified one day when he dropped and broke a pre-dynastic Egyptian pot. Fearfully he told Cambitoglou, who simply dismissed the material and told him to throw it away.6

Assistant curators have always done most of the work at the Nicholson but have rarely been acknowledged. Vincent Megaw, first appointed to the staff by Jim Stewart in 1961, remains furious that, during Cambitoglou’s long reign, so little attention had been paid to objects not of Greek or Roman origin. Some objects—the Nimrud ivories or the Jericho skull—cannot be dismissed, but in general the emphasis has long been on a museum, like the Department, ‘of Classical Archaeology with appendages’.7

After completing his doctorate at Oxford, Jim’s student Basil Hennessy went on to become Director of the British School in Jerusalem and lectured at the University of New England in Armidale. In 1973 the Edwin Cuthbert Hall chair in Near Eastern Archaeology was fully restored and Basil became only the second Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology at Sydney University. While at Sydney University he began excavations in Jordan, first at the Chalcolithic site of Teleilat Ghassul (1975–77) and, from 1978, at the more complex multi-period site of Pella in the Jordan Valley. In much the way that Jim had hoped, students from all over Australia learned archaeology while working at Pella and the camaraderie engendered there under Basil’s gentle guidance meant that many of these students remained in touch and retained fond memories of Jordan. All major teaching institutions in Australia and all state museums and heritage departments include people who at one time or another worked at Pella.8 I am one.

After nearly two years at Mount Pleasant Laila Haglund married and moved to England to study at the Institute of Archaeology in London, which Gordon Childe had once directed. When she returned to Australia her husband Malcolm Calley took up a position in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Queensland and Laila helped to design the anthropology museum at the university. In 1965, building developments at the Gold Coast uncovered and threatened an extensive Aboriginal burial ground. With support from student volunteers, Laila Haglund excavated 140 burials and produced evidence of the site’s use for a period of nearly one thousand years from 900 CE to the twentieth century. As no legislation existed to protect such sites, Laila helped draft the first cultural heritage legislation for Queensland, the Aboriginal Relics Preservation Act, in 1967.

Paul Åström remained as Director of the Swedish Institute in Athens until 1963. He was a lecturer at the University of Missouri and director of the Swedish Institute in Rome, before taking up a position as Professor at the University of Göteburg, where he remained until his retirement. His house in Göteburg was, he told Jim, ‘my Mount Pleasant’ and from there he ran his publishing series, Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology (SIMA). In retirement he was able to do what Jim had failed to do, with the University of Göteburg acquiring his property. On his death, editorial responsibility for SIMA passed to Professor David Frankel and Dr Jenny Webb from La Trobe University in Melbourne. The Swedish Australian connection remains.

After graduating with a PhD from the Institute of Archaeology in London, Robert Merrillees joined the Australian Foreign Diplomatic Service. He served on the Australian Permanent Mission to the United Nations and was Australian Ambassador to Israel, Sweden, Finland and Estonia, Bulgaria and Greece. Even as a diplomat he continued an active interest in archaeology, publishing scholarly work on Cypriot archaeology. In 1999 he was appointed Director of CAARI, the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute, which Eve had done so much to support.

Peter Megaw never held an academic position but influenced a generation of Byzantine scholars. In 1962 he was appointed Director of the British School at Athens, and on retirement went to the Harvard Centre for Byzantine Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington. He directed conservation and excavation works on Cyprus at a number of places and finally established a base at Paphos. He died in 2006 aged ninety-five.

In 1964 Vassos Karageorghis was appointed Director of the Department of Antiquities, on the departure of Porphyrios Dikaios. He remained director until his retirement in 1989, when he became the official advisor to the President of the Republic of Cyprus for a further three years and subsequently a member of the Board of the Leventis Foundation. Not until 5 May 1964, six years after he had sent it, did he receive back from Eve the edited text of his manuscript and as director, Karageorghis made a reputation for demanding that excavators publish excavation reports promptly. Just days before the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, Basil wrote to Eve, attaching a letter from Vassos. In it he made it clear that Basil would pay the price for being Jim’s student. ‘Of course you are not to blame,’ wrote Vassos’, but as the “successor” of an Australian enterprise you have somehow to suffer the consequences’. He would only reconsider his decision to refuse Basil an excavation permit if and when he saw the first proofs of the publication of Jim’s Cypriot excavations.9

Alexander Cambitoglou remained Professor at Sydney University until 1989 and Curator of the Nicholson Museum from 1963 to 2000. Between 1967 and 1975 he directed excavations at the Iron Age site of Zagora on the island of Andros, and subsequently directed excavations in northern Greece at Torone. He founded the Australian Archaeological Institute at Athens in 1981 and remains its only director.

Jim never believed that Australia could produce archaeology of worth. He loved Australia but could never take it seriously. If he was uninterested in Australian archaeology, even more was this true of the department under Alexander Cambitoglou.

Judy Birmingham and Vincent Megaw, both appointed by Jim, arrived only months before his death.

Judy Birmingham was trained by Kathleen Kenyon, who believed that all archaeologists must learn their craft through their own landscapes. It was inevitable, therefore, that Judy would be drawn into archaeology in Australia. She founded the Australasian Association for Historical Archaeology and taught the first course in historical archaeology in Australia.

Vincent Megaw also believed that archaeology was a discipline, not a geography. He became interested in the pioneering work of Australian archaeologists like John Mulvaney and his research interests moved in that direction. He published The Dawn of Man in 1972, co-authored with Welsh-born Australian archaeologist Rhys Jones. Megaw was Professor of Archaeology at the University of Leicester for ten years (1972–82) and took up a personal chair at Flinders University in 1995.

Judy Birmingham and Vincent Megaw were only allowed to work on Australian archaeology projects during their holidays or in their spare time.

When the border between North and South Cyprus opened on 23 April 2003, Bellapais quickly became a major tourist destination. Visitors come to see the house where Lawrence Durrell had lived during the troubled years of the 1950s. Tourists can choose between two ‘trees of idleness’ under which Durrell found inspiration and wrote Bitter Lemons. Tourist buses park outside and the abbey itself has been brought to life by music festivals. An expensive restaurant overlooks the plain below, with the abbey as a backdrop. The house where Eleanor and Jim lived and the workshop where they mended pots are difficult to identify.

The tombs of Vounous have been robbed for generations. Most recently, a Turkish Cypriot has robbed—or so he claims—dozens of tombs, removing thousands of objects. He has an intimate knowledge of the pottery of the Early Bronze Age on Cyprus and has been responsible, he proudly boasts, for ‘mending’ many of the pots he has seen on display in museums. His career as a tomb robber came to an end when he was arrested taking one of the pots out of the country, but he escaped a jail sentence. Now he and his son run a pottery workshop, which I visited with an art lecturer. Father and son make exquisite copies of the pots once looted from the Vounous tombs. Now, the father puts his name to them and sells them as souvenirs. Recently the Centre for Traditional Crafts on the Greek side of Nicosia has signed a contract with him to supply pots for their display shop.

Ayios Philon, near the tip of the Karpas in northeastern Cyprus, still feels remote. The house where Joan and Eve, Judith and Kim lived is in ruins, the roof has collapsed, but the stone walls still stand. The view through what was once the front door has not changed—golden ripples on the sea as the sun sets, a harbour view little changed since Roman times. On the beach beside the ruined house is a six-room hotel, each room overlooking the beach where a broken rubber swan lies wrecked on the shore. When I visit, the Turkish proprietor and his family are welcoming. Their brochure speaks of the history and beauty of the place and at the reception a photocopy of Joan du Plat Taylor’s article on Ayios Philon is pinned to the wall. At dinner a young Kurdish waiter complains about the ‘cold’ English visitors and longs for the snowfields of his homeland. The Alsatian dog is tired of tourists and grumbles when his sleep is interrupted by the petting of strangers.

In Northern Nicosia the Kumarcilar Khan remains derelict. It has never been restored as Jim and Peter Megaw planned, but the nearby Büyük Khan has and is lively with tourist shops selling Turkish carpets and art works. Scaffolding suggests a similar fate awaits the Khan.

The village of Karmi is now known by its Turkish name—Karaman. After the expulsion of its Greek residents the village stood derelict until 1982, when foreigners were allowed to renovate the houses on renewable twenty-five year leases. English residents have restored the houses and made their presence felt. Outside the village store are English notices advertising jazz concerts and items for sale. Jim would have smiled at the notice announcing the ‘cat feeding roster’ for the village.

Below the village, a rusted signpost points to the Bronze Age site of Karmi. The holes of emptied tombs dot the slope. One tomb entrance is protected by a rubble brick stone hut built over it. Within this hut, Mary Ann still stands guard at the tomb entrance, but there is graffiti on the walls of the hut and the floor of the tomb entrance is littered with cigarette packets.

On the opposite side of the island, near the town of Paphos, is another Karmi. Yiannis Cleanthous stayed in Bellapais for as long as possible after the Turkish invasion of northern Cyprus in 1974 but now lives in Kyrenia Street in the village of Lemba and his house is called ‘Karmi’. The house is not his—the original owners were Turkish—but he can live there as a Greek refugee from the north. Under an enormous mulberry tree we sit nibbling sweet biscuits and Yiannis leans forwards on his staff and his eyes light as he talks of Karmi and his beautiful Bellapais. He tells me about the time he met an Australian lawyer on Cyprus in the 1960s and they talked of the deteriorating political situation. The lawyer, just appointed to the position of Chief Justice of Cyprus—an appointment he was unable to take up—was Ken Jacobs. His wife, Eleanor, was Jim’s first wife and mother of Jim Stewart’s only son.

In 1964 the United Nations took control of the strategic plateau of Tjiklos and Eve’s lawyer eventually persuaded them to pay rent. In 1974, during the Turkish invasion of northern Cyprus, the land was confiscated and occupied by mainland troops.

In 1985 Stuart Swiny from the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute visited Eve at Wentworth Falls. They talked as they took Tammy for long walks in the bush. Eve began to think that here might be a suitable beneficiary. Previously, Basil had helped sort out her Egyptian property. As the proceeds of the sale could not leave Egypt she had donated them to the American Schools of Oriental Research. The institute was an affiliate.

In 1986 Eve’s lawyer found a buyer for Tjiklos. Despite hopeful estimates that the property was worth over a million dollars, the land sold for only $US150,000.

Having failed to establish an Australian institute in Cyprus, Eve supported the Cyprus American Archaeological Research Institute. The money from the sale of Tjiklos helped to purchase a building for the organisation in Nicosia. Students from all over the world stay there, in the J.R. Stewart residence. Inside the foyer, in the cool tiled entrance, visiting students collect the keys to their room in envelopes lying on the carved wooden trunk that once belonged to Tom Dray and sat on the floor at Tjiklos. Ornate carved wooden bookcases hold lace and souvenirs collected by Eve’s aunts. A map on the wall of the director’s office is of Cyprus. On the back, Eve’s uncle wrote that it is a copy of a fifteenth-century map given to him by Zenon Pierides—the man whose chance meeting on a train led to the Swedish Cyprus Expedition.

From Kyrenia Castle, with a set of good binoculars, it is possible to glimpse abandoned houses on the plateau of Tjiklos. No binoculars are needed to see the massive statue of Atatürk or the billowing red and white flags of Northern Cyprus.

Jim Stewart’s son Peter sold The Mount to the Morgan family in 1969 and, as the property would no longer be owned by a Stewart, Peter arranged for Jim’s body to be exhumed and reburied in Wentworth Falls, beside his parents. One of the onlookers was a small boy, Christopher Morgan, who was ghoulishly delighted when one of the gravediggers lost his footing and stumbled, his foot puncturing the coffin. As an adult and a student of archaeology at Sydney University, Christopher remembered the event. The irony of Jim Stewart’s own tomb being excavated was not lost on him.

Lymdale has been sold many times and the extensive property is now cut into different plots. All sign of A.A. Stewart’s miniature train line and model-boat lake are gone, although both are recalled in the house’s heritage listing.

Eve’s house in Armstrong Street was riddled with termites when she died in 2005 and has been largely restored. I don’t know if an apricot tree thrives in the back garden, or if the foundation deposits planted beneath it have been dug up and thrown away. Nor do I know if Tryphon’s almond survives the bracing Australian climate, a climate similar to that of Cyprus but its opposite. Summer at Christmas, winter in July. Topsy-turvy, as Eve thought in 1947.

The cemetery in Wentworth Falls sits beside the busy Western Freeway linking Sydney with Bathurst. One large stone mausoleum dominates the cemetery. Jim’s parents are both interred here. He and Eve are too.

Jim Stewart was a collector who saw archaeology as another way of collecting. He was a numismatist who saw coins as historical evidence. He was a thinker who seldom was prepared to put his broad ideas into print. Like so many archaeologists before and since, he was slow to publish and enjoyed the ‘dirt archaeology’ of the field more than the analysis afterwards in the workroom.

The POW notebooks were written during years of forced solitude, but Stewart was gregarious and in normal life would rather entertain a group in conversation than sit in an office writing. After the war his thoughts curled in on themselves. Details devoured him and crippled his critical capacities. His return to Australia removed him physically from the landscapes and archaeology of the place he loved. Absent from them, he lost perspective. Even so, the posthumous publication of his volume for the Swedish Cyprus Expedition shows the breadth of his knowledge. As Hector Catling wrote:

the quintessence of Stewart’s knowledge and understanding of his period, showing how fully alive it was in his mind … He understood that an archaeologist’s duty includes reconstruction and interpretation as much as description and analysis.10

Jim’s reluctance to form conclusions without complete data was a flaw that Winifred Lamb had recognised as early as the 1930s. But archaeology does not deal with the finite. There will always be another excavation, new finds, a novel way of extracting information, radical methods for analysing data. His corpus would always prove elusive and the search for it was, in the end, futile.

In the late twentieth century the world of archaeology was growing and the amount of archaeological evidence to explore ever increasing. Long gone were the days when any single individual could collate all the evidence—even of a small sub-set of material—into a single publication, albeit a multi-volume one like the corpus. Trends in archaeology ebbed and flowed, the tide shifting from grand theories based on flimsy evidence to ever more specialised investigations of evidence extracted from smaller and smaller artefacts, and now finally resting on ancient DNA. The conflict between visions of the woods and the trees remains, but is played out in different ways.

In 2011 Sydney University’s Department of Archaeology received a bequest of over $6 million. The money would endow a new Professor of Archaeology. The bequest came from the estate of Tom Brown, a lawyer who lived for most of his life in western New South Wales, and who had made an extensive collection of Aboriginal artefacts. Persuaded that removing artefacts from their context destroys valuable information, he enrolled to study archaeology formally at Sydney University.

When commenting on the bequest, Sydney University’s Dr Ted Robinson lamented the fact that archaeology students were funded at a lower level than science students, despite the fact that ‘we need more than a pencil and access to a library … we do a huge amount of fieldwork, we need labs and we do a lot of archaeological science’.11 It was an argument that Jim had made, unsuccessfully, many times.

Jim Stewart’s attitude to cultural material is abhorrent to a modern archaeologist, but in 1961 when John Mulvaney conducted the ground-breaking excavations at Kenniff Cave in Central Queensland, he admits he knew few Aborigines and there was little interest in the way contemporary Aborigines might react to the excavation of their past. Few scholars were interested in who owned the past. It was scarcely even a question.

Hindsight can blind us to the past. It is all too easy to condemn the activities of archaeologists who knew nothing of and cared little about the people whose past was being excavated, destroyed, removed and studied. But we should be careful how we judge past actions.

In 2011, the Australian Archaeological Association had one thousand members. At the annual conference that year, in the provincial Queensland city of Toowoomba, one session was devoted to meeting the graduates. Over twenty archaeological consulting firms sponsored a cocktail party and new graduates were encouraged to ‘network in a relaxed environment with potential employers from the consulting, industry, heritage, government and education sectors’. The New South Wales Roads and Maritime Service was there, as were mining giants Conzinc Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton.

How will future archaeologists view the work of archaeologists today?

Jim and Eve Stewart loved Cyprus. They devoted their lives to studying its archaeology, but in equal measure they loved the island’s landscapes and its people. Archaeologists never lose the thrill of reaching down to pick up a sherd left lying on the ground, the excitement of discovering how a landscape has formed over time, the challenge of piecing together the jigsaw puzzle of the past. All archaeologists come to respect the land they walk on. Jim and Eve Stewart were no different.

Wealthy, spoilt, difficult and brilliant, Jim Stewart charmed and inspired students and irritated university administrators. Distinguished by his encyclopaedic knowledge of Cypriot material, his archaeological and numismatic legacy is substantial − but marred by an acquisitive streak that sits uneasily with today’s archaeological standards.

Eve ensured Jim’s work survived and that his name lived in more than the memories of a small group of former students. Without institutional backing, with limited finances and alone in a dilapidated house at the edge of the Blue Mountains, she continued their work. Dogged and persistent, feisty to the end, she persevered.

Appendix

The D.E. (Eve) Stewart archive—in praise of handwriting

Eve Stewart maintained meticulous files, but whether these were always kept this way—or whether they were neatened over time—is unclear. She filed letters, photos, Christmas cards and various newspaper clippings, telegrams and receipts according to the person to whom they were addressed or from whom they were received. Many of the folders had been reused—names crossed out or overwritten—and some of them were numbered, suggesting an attempt at categorising or cataloguing, but it’s impossible to know precisely. When I saw the files for the first time, the material within each manila folder had been arranged in chronological order, so I could read the stories easily from beginning to end.

Both Eve and Jim frequently kept carbon copies or duplicates of correspondence and correspondence files were not ‘static’ repositories. Many letters are annotated with comments. Important passages are boxed in red pencil. These highlighted passages are usually about promises made—particularly promises about publication or finalisation of reports—and the boxed details are quoted back in later letters.

Sometimes Jim and Eve wrote letters on the same day and about the same event—usually to their respective parents. Many of these simply recount events, but the different emphasis placed on such events gives an insight into their characters.

Most of Eve’s archive consists of the letters she and Jim wrote to each other and to people around the world. The breadth of material is significant, but the gaps are all too obvious. As a couple they were close and wrote to each other frequently when apart. When they were together there is of course no correspondence, so there is no easy way of re-creating details or emotions. Similarly, most surviving correspondence includes Jim or Eve as active participants. It is almost always polite. There is very little in the third person, no correspondence between people discussing Jim or Eve, making comments about them rather than to them. This correspondence might have been far less polite.

Sometimes even the paper tells a story. Just as Jim used cigarette packets as his writing material in the POW camp, Eve continued to use Sydney university letterhead paper many years after Jim’s death and long after her bitter feud with the university. Sometimes she crossed out the address; at other times she wrote on the back of the page. At the end of her life, nearly blind, she continued to write on an antiquated typewriter. Because typewriter ribbons were no longer available for her machine, she placed carbon paper between two sheets of plain paper. Unable to see what she typed, but hoping that the pressure of the keys on the carbon paper would transfer to the back sheet of paper, her typewritten letters become at times erratic and include frequent apologies.

Because of their joint obsession with stamp collecting, Jim and Eve usually tore stamps off envelopes, often removing the date stamp as well. This is particularly annoying in the case of letters from Eve’s mother, which are often undated. Where the letters remain in their envelopes, I was frustrated to find the date stamp is usually ripped off.

Parents today complain that their children have lost the ability to spell and that the world of SMS and text messaging has reduced the written word to a series of abbreviations. Eve’s adolescent diaries are full of similar shortcuts—B4, /,\, @. She used abbreviations when she had limited space, as in the diaries, or when she was writing with haste or emotion, as in her letter to the Bishop of Norwich.

Today’s modes of instant communication—computers, photocopiers, fixed and mobile phones, webcams and social networking—make it difficult for younger readers to comprehend the difficulties that Jim and Eve faced. There was no phone at The Mount until the 1960s and Eve had no phone at Wentworth Falls until the 1990s. Everything that was written—lecture notes, research papers, correspondence—was handwritten or manually typed. There was no easy way to edit text—not even any white-out fluid. Manuscripts were typed and retyped, footnotes typed on a separate page and pasted to the bottom of foolscap pages of text. On the other hand, because of this sort of communication, much of it remains. Without easy communication by email or phone, Jim and Eve wrote letters—sometimes daily—to each other and to numerous people around the world. It is a remarkably comprehensive correspondence and gives a picture of the working lives of a close couple, their interests and professional connections. I often wonder if in the future we’ll be able to recreate the lives of people in similar circumstances, or will telephone calls and emails and computer files all be lost.

Jim and Eve were frequently irritated by the time delays that occurred when writing letters to people overseas and there were often misunderstandings and confusions. In 1947 Eve was in Cyprus, waiting to join Jim in Australia but unable to obtain passage on a ship. Their letters are numbered and frustration mounts when letters (with instructions, reprimands, apologies) arrive out of sequence. Jim used the same system of numbering in his earlier letters to Eleanor from the POW camp, and later in his letters to Basil Hennessy in the mid-1950s.

Until I started this research, I had never taken much notice of people’s handwriting, although as a teacher, I had been conscious of the extent to which illegible writing irritates the reader and can unnecessarily affect a student’s marks.

Most of the material I have read in the personal archive consists of letters, handwritten for the most part. Gradually I began to recognise a writer even before I saw their signature. I knew that O.G.S. Crawford and Hector Catling preferred to write on small pages, half a page turned sidewards so that it was wider than deep. Both of them had pretty awful handwriting but it was the two folders of letters from Judith Stylianou (née Dobell), the Byzantine scholar, that most daunted me. It took months before I dared tackle them, so convoluted was her handwriting and so idiosyncratic her spelling. I rejoiced when she used a typewriter. I had only just finished reading Miriam Davis’s biography of Kathleen Kenyon when I came across a receipt from the Institute of London. The signature was a thin spidery doodle and, while I struggled to read it, I remembered Davis’s comment about Kathleen Kenyon’s impossible handwriting—sure enough this was hers! I knew that Eve’s mother would cover every scrap of paper, writing sideways along the edges when she had finished the page. She always gave the day and date, but, because she wrote so frequently, seldom the year.

Eve kept a folder for each correspondent and the contents of each folder formed a sort of life. I saw handwriting deteriorate with age, growing larger as eyesight failed, and looping painfully with arthritis. Sometimes I would read a whole folder in a morning and watch someone age and fail before my eyes.

Handwriting is personal. We immediately recognise a letter from a friend or family member. Graphologists read handwriting and believe it reveals our personality. Our signatures—even in the modern electronic world—are ours alone. We expect them to give us entry, permission, access—and to be in some sense proof of who we are.

Recognising handwriting is not the same as knowing a person, yet, after months of research, it is easy to fool yourself into believing that it is. I saw Eve’s handwriting where others did not. At Sydney University’s Nicholson Museum there is no record of Eve working there, although I know she was employed for a few years as a technical assistant. Looking through the museum files, I could see immediately where she had added a note to a document, or filled out a catalogue entry.

My first day in Nicosia during my first research trip to Cyprus was a Sunday and I strolled idly through the old city. I arrived at the museum before it opened and sat in the shady foyer looking at the painted ceiling, the massive doors with multiple locks and the museum attendants eating ice creams as they waited to begin work. The museum is an old-fashioned museum, crammed full of objects arranged chronologically. There are some written panels with limited explanations but, although unimaginatively displayed, I was relieved that it wasn’t full of elaborate interpretation and interactive displays aimed at competing with the internet and taking up space and money that could be devoted to objects and research. I immediately moved toward the Bronze Age displays, ignoring—as I generally do—the classical sculpture and overdrawn formal pots of the Classical period. I love Bronze Age Cypriot pottery. It is handmade and quirky, full of the individuality that made Jim’s corpus a futile attempt at imposing order.

Amongst the display of pots was a large but broken alabaster bowl in the centre of the cabinet. As I looked closer I gasped with a sort of personal and exclusive delight. On the inner rim was the pottery register number—and immediately I saw that it was in Eve’s handwriting.

Timeline

Notes

FOREWORD

1. O’ Hea, Margaret, ‘The Archaeology of Somewhere-else: A Brief Survey of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology in Australia’, Australian Archaeology, no. 50, 2000, pp. 7580.

2. Craig Barker, Aphrodite’s Island: Australian Archaeologists in Cyprus: The Cypriot collection of the Nicholson Museum, University of Sydney, 2012.

PROLOGUE

1. Eve Dray to JRS, 18 October 1947, DES archive.

2. Undated letter from JRS to Eve Dray, DES archive.

3. JRS to Eve Dray, ‘Wednesday’, otherwise undated, 1947, DES archive.

4. JRS to Eve Dray, 16 June 1947, DES archive.

5. JRS to Eve Dray, 24 July 1947, DES archive.

6. JRS to Eve Dray, 16 June 1947, DES archive.

7. JRS to Eve Dray, 27 May 1947, DES archive.

8. Jim Stewart’s usual signature in letters to Eve.

CHAPTER 1—England, Egypt and Cyprus, 1914–36

1. Major-General Giles Mills, pers. comm., June 2010, Bisterne.

2. ibid.

3. Eve Stewart to Nicole Hirschfield, 4 July 1997, DES archive.

4. Thomas Dray’s date of birth is variously given as 1879 and 1880. The date appearing on his birth certificate is 1879.

5. Major-General Giles Mills, pers. comm., June 2010, Bisterne.

6. The passages quoted here and below were written by Thomas Dray in a leatherbound notebook but are undated. The title of the work, ‘H.T.R. Dray’s biography’ was added by Eve Stewart, DES archive.

7. See note 6.

8. Eve Stewart, recorded interview with Dr Laila Haglund, late 1990s.

9. Major-General Giles Mills, pers. comm., June 2010, Bisterne.

10. Margery Dray diary, personal papers, Mills family, Bisterne.

11. The Times, 12 April 1924.

12. Eve Stewart, recorded interview with Dr Laila Haglund, late 1990s.

13. Margery Dray diary, 28 August 1921, personal papers, Mills family, Bisterne.

14. Major-General Giles Mills, pers. comm., June 2010, Bisterne.

15. This and following quotes come from an undated description written by Eve Stewart called ‘I remember life in days gone by’, DES archive.

16. Eve Stewart to Nicole Hirschfield, 4 July 1997, DES archive.

17. Margery Dray to Eve Dray, 17 October 1934, DES archive.

18. Rita Severis, ‘The English Parikia (1900–1960)’, unpublished manuscript.

19. Rina Catselli, Kyrenia: A Historical Study, Kyrenia Flower Show, Nicosia, Cyprus, 1974.

20. Dorothyann Betts, The Old British Cemetery Kyrenia: Shadows of Empire, Soylem Publishing, British Cemetery Committee, Mersin, 2010.

21. Franklin Lushington, Cottage in Kyrenia, Ernest Benn, London, 1952, p. 203.

22. ibid., p. 229.

23. Catselli.

24. Margery Dray diary, 24 October 1931, personal papers, Mills family, Bisterne.

25. E. Dray diary, DES archive.

26. E. Dray composition book, 3 February 1928, DES archive.

27. Eve Stewart, recorded interview with Dr Laila Haglund, late 1990s.

28. Eve Stewart, 60 years on. 1933–1993, letter to Royal Holloway College, 8 February 1993, DES archive.

29. Undated reference from French lecturer, N. McWilliam, DES archive.

30. Eve Stewart, recorded interview with Dr Laila Haglund, late 1990s.

31. Undated reference from Principal, Janet Bacon, DES archive.

32. Mortimer Wheeler, Still digging: Interleaves from an Antiquary’s Notebook, Michael Joseph, London, 1955, p. 89.

33. Quoted in Jacquetta Hawkes, Mortimer Wheeler: Adventurer in Archaeology, Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd, 1982, p. 99.

34. Eve Stewart, recorded interview with Dr Laila Haglund, late 1990s.

35. R.E.M. Wheeler, Maiden Castle, Dorset, Reports of the Research Committee of the Society of Antiquaries of London, no. XII, The Society of Antiquaries, Oxford, 1943, p. 3.

36. Eve Stewart, recorded interview with Dr Laila Haglund, late 1990s.

37. Major-General Giles Mills, pers. comm., 2010.

CHAPTER 2—England and Cyprus, 1936–39

1. DES to Nicola Hirschfeld, 4 July 1997, DES archive.

2. British Museum, How to Observe in Archaeology: Suggestions for Travellers in the Near and Middle East, 1920, Introduction.

3. See Ellen Herscher’s lecture ‘From plunder to Partnership: American adventures in the archaeology of Cyprus’, 18 January 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOvm3OoLOYc. Cesnola was encouraged by Pierides, whose grandson would support the Swedish Cyprus Expedition. When art tastes changed in the 1920s, the Cesnola collection was removed from display at the Metropolitan Museum and some objects were sold. Not until 2000 did Cypriot objects again go on display in the museum.

4. Porphyrios Dikaios, A guide to the Cyprus Museum, Nicosia Printing Works, Nicolaou & Sons Ltd, 3rd edn, 1961.

5. Einar Gjerstad, Ages and Days in Cyprus, Paul Åströms Forlag, Göteborg, 1980, Introduction.

6. State Archives, Nicosia, Cyprus, SA1: 500/1936.

7. Eve Stewart, recorded interview with Dr Laila Haglund, late 1990s.

8. 8. Dr Laila Haglund, pers. comm., 2011.

9. See Jo Anne van Tilburg, Among Stone Giants: The Life of Kathleen Routledge and the Remarkable Expedition to Easter Island, Scribner, New York, 2003.

10. Severis.

11. DES to Nicola Hirschfeld, 4 July 1997, DES archive.

12. Sydney Morning Herald, Thursday 15 December 1938, p. 23.

13. DES to Nicola Hirschfeld, 4 July 1997, DES archive.

CHAPTER 3—England, Cyprus and the Near East, 1930–38

1. Reference from G.M. Barker, Headmaster, The Kings School, September 1930, Trinity Hall archives, Cambridge.

2. The school report is quoted by Robert Merrillees in ‘Professor James R. Stewart: a biographical lecture’, On Opium, Pots, People and Places. Selected Papers: An Honorary volume for Robert S. Merrillees, Paul Åströms Forlag, Savedalen, 2003, p. 144. The Leys School has no copy.

3. The Leys School year book, 1931.

4. Headmaster of The Leys School to Reverend G.A. Chase, Trinity Hall, 16 March 1931, Trinity Hall archives, Cambridge.

5. Florence Beatrice Landseer Stewart, probate documents, 13660 Probate packets, New South Wales Records Office.

6. Four typed letters from JRS to A.A. Stewart covering the period 19–28 August 1932, together with a packet of photographs, DES archive.

7. JRS to A.A. Stewart, 21 September 1932, DES archive.

8. A popular report of this work was published by Penguin Books: Ur of the Chaldees. Seven Years of Excavation by Leonard Woolley, nd.

9. Margery Dray diaries, personal papers, Mills family, Bisterne.

10. JRS to A.A. Stewart, 23 September 1932, DES archive.

11. JRS to A.A. Stewart, 28 September 1932, DES archive.

12. Glyn Daniel, Some Small Harvest: The Memoirs of Glyn Daniel, Thames & Hudson, London, 1986, p. 57.

13. ibid., p. 78.

14. The Kings School Newsletter, May 1934, p. 27.

15. The Kings School Newsletter, May 1935, pp. 30, 32.

16. The Times, 11 June 1934.

17. This is suggested in a letter from Eve Stewart to Robert Merrillees, 17 July 1981, DES archive.

18. Argus, Tuesday 6 August 1935.

19. R.E.M. Wheeler, Maiden Castle, Dorset, Reports of the Research Committee of the Society of Antiquaries of London, no. XII, The Society of Antiquaries, Oxford, 1943, p. 112.

20. ibid., p. 74.

21. Petrie diairies, Petrie Museum, University College, London.

22. Letter from JRS to W.B. Emery, 8 November 1959, Nicholson Museum archives.

23. JRS to Paul Åström, 28 July 1957, personal papers, Göteburg, Sweden.

24. A.A. Stewart applied for leave from the Board of the Sydney Technical Museum Advisory Committee in October 1933, Powerhouse Museum archive, Sydney. To be fixed by typesetter

25. Park Cottage is now a listed house. See http://www.imagesofengland.org.uk/Details/Default.aspx?id=418802&mode=quick

26. The Times, 30 January 1935, 5 June 1936.

27. The Kings School Newsletter, September 1935, p. 20.

28. JRS to Alan Wace, 19 August 1935, personal papers, Cambridge.

29. JRS to Alan Wace, 1 September 1935, personal papers, Cambridge.

30. ibid.

31. Man, October 1940, vol. XL, pp. 179–80.

32. JRS to Alan Wace, 15 October 1935, personal papers, Cambridge.

33. Argus, Tuesday 6 August 1935.

34. JRS to Alan Wace, 16 September 1935, personal papers, Cambridge.

35. JRS to Alan Wace, 5 November 1935, personal papers, Cambridge.

36. ibid.

37. JRS to Alan Wace, 20 November 1935, personal papers, Cambridge.

38. JRS to Alan Wace, 5 December 1935, personal papers, Cambridge.

39. JRS to Alan Wace, 25 December 1935, personal papers, Cambridge.

40. The Wilkins Fellowship gave Jim £40 for travel and expenses. By comparison, an agricultural labourer in England in 1936 earned £1/12/9 a week. See http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~alan/family/N-Money.html#1914.

41. JRS to Alan Wace, 2 January 1936, personal papers, Cambridge.

42. JRS to Alan Wace, 13 January 1936, personal papers, Cambridge.

43. JRS unpublished travel story, 1936, CAARI archive.

44. JRS to Alan Wace, 26 April 1936, personal papers, Cambridge.

45. JRS to Alan Wace, 24 May 1936, personal papers, Cambridge.

46. JRS to Alan Wace, 25 May 1936, personal papers, Cambridge.

47. David W. Gill, ‘A rich and promising site’: Winifred Lamb (1894–1963): Kusura and Anatolian archaeology’, Anatolian Studies, vol. 50, 2000, pp. 1–10.

48. Nature, 27 February 1937, p. 361. See also Gill.

49. Winifred Lamb, ed. David Gill, ‘The inspector interferes’ in The Treasure Hunters, Centre for Egyptology and Mediterranean Archaeology, Swansea University, 2008, pp. 55–72.

50. JRS to Alan Wace, 26 May 1936 (a long diary-like letter written over many days), personal papers, Cambridge.

51. Undated referee report by Winifred Lamb for JRS, DES archive.

52. JRS to Paul Åström, 20 August 1957, personal papers, Göteburg, Sweden.

53. David W.J. Gill, ‘Winifred Lamb 1894–1963’, in Breaking Ground: Pioneering Women Archaeologists, eds Getzel M. Cohen & Martha Sharp Jukowsky, University of Michigan Press, 2006, p. 444.

54. See reference in Ancestry.com

55. E. Stewart & J. Stewart, Vounous 1937–38: Field Report on the Excavations Sponsored by the British School of Archaeology at Athens, C.W.K. Gleerup, Lund, 1950, p. 9.

56. Sir John Myers to JRS, 28 December 1936, CAARI archive.

57. V. Gordon Childe to JRS, 16 February 1937, CAARI archive.

58. State Archives, Nicosia, Cyprus, SAI 1622/1936.

59. It’s worth noting, however, a letter from JRS to Alan Wace (29 June 1936), which mentions that ‘wander and sondage’ permits had existed at one time, but that ‘they are suspended now because the American Cilician expedition and Gjerstad abused the terms of theirs’.

60. State Archives, Nicosia, Cyprus, SAI 1622/1936.

61. See, for example, JRS to Walter Beasley, 26 August 1947, Australian Institute of Archaeology.

62. E. Stewart & J. Stewart, Vounous 1937–38, p. 40.

63. Alex Diamantis, pers. comm., October 2010.

64. Stewart & Stewart, Vounous 1937–38, p. 7.

65. Alex Diamantis, pers. comm., October 2010.

66. Margery Dray, undated description of a visit to Asinou, CAARI archive.

67. DES to Robert Merrillees, 20 May 1981, DES archive.

68. Virginia Grace to JRS, 10 August 1937, CAARI archive.

69. Stewart & Stewart, Vounous 1937–38, p. 7.

70. Eve Stewart, recorded interview with Dr Laila Haglund, late 1990s. See further, DES to Robert Merrillees, 20 May 1981, DES archive.

CHAPTER 4—War, 1940–45

1. Kim Collingride, later Kim Wheeler, quoted in Sydney Morning Herald, Thursday 15 December 1938, p. 23.

2. Eve Stewart, recorded interview with Dr Laila Haglund, late 1990s.

3. ibid.

4. Postcards from Eve Dray to Margery Dray, 31 August 1939, 2 September 1939, CAARI archive.

5. Service record (Army number W/20608), Army Personnel Centre, Glasgow.

6. Kurt Bittel to JRS, 17 March 1939, CAARI archive.

7. JRS to Alfirios Westholm, 10 October 1939, Medelhavsmuseet archives, Stockholm.

8. ibid.

9. ibid

10. JRS to Alfirios Westholm, 30 November 1939, Medelhavsmuseet archives, Stockholm.

11. JRS to Alfirios Westholm, 13 March 1940, Medelhavsmuseet archives, Stockholm.

12. Details and quotes below from undated notebooks filed as ‘British Council Expedition’, DES archive.

13. Undated notebook filed as ‘British Council Expedition’, DES archive.

14. A.H.S. (Peter) Megaw to JRS, 8 December 1939, DES archive.

15. Alan Wace to JRS, 22 March 1940, CAARI archive.

16. British Council to JRS, 1 February 1940, DES archive.

17. University College, London, special collections.

18. JRS to Alfirios Westholm, 30 October 1939, Medelhavsmuseet archives, Stockholm.

19. JRS to Alfirios Westholm, 5 February 1940, Medelhavsmuseet archives, Stockholm.

20. Service record (Army number P/142100), Army Personnel Centre, Glasgow.

21. Alex Diamantis, pers. comm., 17 October 2010.

22. JRS to Alfirios Westholm, 14 May 1940, Medelhavsmuseet archives, Stockholm.

23. Communist Party of Cyprus.

24. Georgios Kazamias, ‘Military recruitment and selection in a British colony: the Cyprus Regiment 1939–1944’, in E. Close, M. Tsianikas & G. Couvalis (eds), Greek Research in Australia: Proceedings of the Sixth Biennial International Conference of Greek Studies, Flinders University June 2005, Flinders University Department of Languages—Modern Greek, Adelaide, pp. 333–42.

25. British Cyprus Expedition, DES archive.

26. Anthony Beevor, Crete: The Battle and the Resistance, John Murray, London, 1991, p. 5.

27. Named after the Greek politician Eleftherios Venizelos (1864–1936), the term refers to liberal nationalists who were opposed to the monarchy and supported the idea of a Greater Greece.

28. Undated letter from JRS to Virginia Grace. This is also mentioned in Appendix G to his proposal, CAARI archive.

29. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

30. Beevor, pp. 3, 4. American archaeologists also joined clandestine organisations. For details, see Susan Heuck Allen, Classical Spies: American Archaeologists with the OSS in World War II Greece, University of Michigan Press, 2011.

31. Undated POW notebook filed under British Council Expedition, DES archive.

32. Stewart papers, CAARI archive.

33. See in particular Beevor.

34. Jack Hamson, ‘Liber in Vinculis’, Trinity College, Cambridge, 1989, p. 61.

35. Undated POW notebook filed under British Council Expedition, DES archive.

36. Hamson, p. 58.

37. Yiannis Cleanthous, pers. comm., Cyprus, 2009.

38. Draft in pencil of a letter from JRS to Virginia Grace (no date), Stewart papers, CAARI archive.

39. Eve Stewart, recorded interview with Dr Laila Haglund, late 1990s.

40. Major A.T. Casdali, diary P436, Imperial War Museum, London.

41. H.C.F. Harwood, ‘On Threats of Hell: The Diary of a Prisoner of War’, Imperial War Museum diary [Lieutenant Harwood 84/33/1].

42. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Qko_e0TLKA. Although Ironside, along with nearly sixty others, escaped in June 1943, all were recaptured and Ironside ended the war in Colditz.

43. Harwood.

44. Harwood.

45. DES to Robert Merrillees, 20 May 1981, DES archive.

46. JRS to Alfirios Westholm, 3 September 1941, Medelhavsmuseet archives, Stockholm.

47. JRS to Alfirios Westholm, 28 December 1943, Medelhavsmuseet archives, Stockholm.

48. Winifred Lamb to JRS, 14 June 1942, DES archive.

49. JRS to Alfirios Westholm, 28 December 1943, Medelhavsmuseet archives, Stockholm.

50. O.G.S. Crawford to JRS, 22 April 1942, DES archive.

51. JRS to Alfirios Westholm, 5 January, 194(? date lost), Medelhavsmuseet archives, Stockholm.

52. JRS to Eleanor Stewart, 10 May 1943, DES archive.

53. This and previous references are from an undated notebook filed as ‘British Council Expedition’, DES archive.

54. Harwood.

CHAPTER 5—England and Cyprus, 1945–47

1. Laila Haglund, pers. comm., 16 October 2011.

2. Bec Moore to DES, 15 June 2004, DES archive.

3. Maureen Walker, London 1945: Life in the Debris of War, John Murray Publishers, London, 2004.

4. Joan Pender and Dorothy Richards, recollections quoted in Walker.

5. Winifred Lamb to JRS, 18 June 1945, Stewart papers, CAARI archive.

6. A.W. Lawrence to JRS, 19 June 1945, Stewart papers, CAARI archive.

7. Donald Harden to JRS 1 July 1945, Stewart papers, CAARI archive.

8. Sir John Myers to JRS, 20 May 1945, Stewart papers, CAARI archive.

9. A.H.S. (Peter) Megaw to Sir Charles Woolley, Government House, Nicosia, 25 July 1945, State Archives, Nicosia, Cyprus, SA1/849/1945_Cyprus regiment and archaeology.

10. Eleven of the seventeen members of AKEL’s Central Committee were former members of the Cyprus Regiment and seven hundred ex-servicemen were also Communists. See T.W. Adams, Akel: The Communist Party of Cyprus, Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University Press, 1971, p. 27.

11. State Archives, Nicosia, Cyprus, 7 July 1945, SA1/849/1945_Cyprus regiment and archaeology.

12. JRS to Eve Dray, 4 October 1945, DES archive.

13. Jack Hamson to JRS, 20 June 1945, DES archive.

14. ibid.

15. Alan Wace to JRS, 20 November 1945, CAARI archive.

16. Winifred Lamb to Jim and Elinor (sic) Stewart, no date.

17. A.H.S. (Peter) Megaw to JRS, 11 June 1946, DES archive.

18. Arne Furumark to JRS, 2 February 1947, Stewart papers, CAARI archive.

19. Einar Gjerstad to JRS, 14 December 1946, Stewart papers, CAARI archive.

20. JRS to Olaf Vessberg, 11 September 1946, Medelhavsmuseet archives, Stockholm.

21. Trendall was a student at the school in 1933–34 and Stewart 1934–35, British School at Athens records.

22. Peter Donovan (School of Mathematics, University of New South Wales) and John Mack (School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Sydney), ‘Sydney University, T.G. room and codebreaking in WWII’, http://www.maths.usyd.edu.au/u/ww2codes/gazette.html, 2002. This is substantially the contents of a two-part article published in the Gazette of the Australian Mathematical Society, 2002.

23. JRS to Dale Trendall, 4 June 1945, Australian Institute of Archaeology archives.

24. The Australian Institute of Archaeology archives contain most relevant correspondence between Beasley, Stewart and Trendall.

25. Winifred Lamb to Dale Trendall, 25 April 1946, Australian Institute of Archaeology archives.

26. Alan Arkell to JRS, 1 February 1946, Stewart papers, CAARI archive.

27. Alan Arkell to JRS, 12 February 1946, Stewart papers, CAARI archive.

28. Alan Arkell to JRS 10 June 1946, Stewart papers, CAARI archive.

29. Chambers Encyclopaedia folder, DES archive.

30. Hetty Goldman to JRS, 8 March 1947, DES archive.

31. Service record (Army number P/142100), Army Personnel Centre, Glasgow.

32. JRS to Eve Dray, 10 June 1947, DES archive.

33. DES archive.

34. For a complete history of this Medieval hoard see Michael Metcalf, ‘The fate of the Stavrokonnou Hoard’, in D.M. Metcalf, Coinage as Evidence for the Changing Prosperity of Cyprus in Byzantine and Medieval Times, Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation, Nicosia, 2003, pp. 25–37.

35. JRS to Eve Dray, 17 September 1946, DES archive.

36. JRS to Eve Dray, 28 October 1946, DES archive.

37. JRS to Eve Dray, 22 October 1946, DES archive.

38. JRS to Eve Dray, 17 November 1946, DES archive.

39. JRS to Olaf Vessberg, correspondence between 29 November 1946 and 1 April 1947, Medelhavstmuzeet archives, Stockholm. Also JRS to Gjerstad, 29 November 1946, Lund University archive.

40. Einar Gjerstad to JRS, 14 December 1946, Stewart papers, CAARI archive.

41. Jack Hamson to JRS, 18 December 1946, DES archive

CHAPTER 6—Australia, 1947–50

1. JRS to Eve Dray, 30 May 1947, DES archive.

2. See http://www.ssasturias.net.

3. JRS to Eve Dray, 4 June 1947, DES archive.

4. JRS to Eve Dray, 8 June 1947, DES archive.

5. JRS to Eve Dray, 1 June 1947, DES archive.

6. JRS to Eve Dray, 30 May 1947, DES archive.

7. JRS to Eve Dray, 1 June 1947, DES archive.

8. JRS to Eve Dray, 27 May 1947, DES archive.

9. JRS to Eve Dray, 1 June 1947, DES archive.

10. JRS to Eve Dray, 16 June 1947, DES archive.

11. JRS to Eve Dray, 20 (month missing) 1947, DES archive.

12. JRS to Eve Dray, 4 June 1947, DES archive.

13. JRS to Eve Dray, 4 July 1947, DES archive.

14. JRS to Eve Dray, 13 August 1947, DES archive.

15. JRS to Eve Dray, 20 August 1947, DES archive.

16. JRS to Eve Dray, 4 July 1947, DES archive.

17. JRS to Eve Dray, 26 June 1947, DES archive.

18. JRS to Eve Dray, 15 July 1947, DES archive.

19. JRS to Eve Dray, 21 July 1947, DES archive.

20. JRS to Eve Dray, 4 March (or July) 1947, DES archive.

21. JRS to Eve Dray, 25 September 1947, DES archive.

22. JRS to Eve Dray, 14 September 1947, DES archive.

23. JRS to Eve Dray, 1 September 1947, DES archive.

24. JRS to Eve Dray, 24 October 1947, DES archive.

25. Mary Ann Fishbourne (née Meagher), pers. comm., 2010.

26. JRS to Eve Dray, 20 December 1947, DES archive.

27. JRS to Eve Dray, 5 September 1947, DES archive.

28. Sydney Morning Herald, Monday 8 December 1947, p. 2.

29. JRS to Eve Dray, 12 November 1947, DES archive.

30. Sunday Telegraph, 11 May 1952, p. 2: ‘A Greek “gave” Sydney this vase in 272 B.C.’

31. JRS memo to Dale Trendall, 23 August 1952, Nicholson Museum archives, University of Sydney.

32. JRS to Eve Dray, 15 August 1947, DES archive.

33. JRS to Eve Dray, 20 December 1947, DES archive.

34. J. R. Stewart, ‘The Freshman’s Guide to the University: The Nicholson Museum’, in The Union Recorder, vol. XL, no. 25, Thursday 20 October 1960, pp. 226–7.

35. Suzanne Kelly (née Snelling), pers. comm., 6 February 2010.

36. JRS to G. Hanfmann, 19 January 1950, DES archive.

37. JRS to Eve Dray, 18 July 1947, DES archive.

38. JRS to Eve Dray, 7 August 1947, DES archive.

39. Eve Dray to JRS, 12 September 1947, DES archive.

40. Eve Dray to JRS, 31 October 1947, DES archive.

41. A.H.S. (Peter) Megaw to JRS, 30 November 1947, DES archive.

42. Eve Dray to JRS, 5 November 1947, DES archive.

43. Australian Institute of Archaeology archives.

44. Australian Cyprus Expedition, 8 August 1947, DES archive.

45. George Hill to Clauson, 29 July 1947 and G.L.M.C. to Lord Mersey, 23 April 1947, National Archives, London, CO 927/32/2.

46. JRS to Eve Dray, 15 July 1947, DES archive.

47. JRS to Eve Dray, 6 October 1947, DES archive.

48. Eve Dray to JRS, 19 November 1947, DES archive.

49. Eve Dray to JRS, 25 November 1947, DES archive.

50. JRS to Eve Dray, 19 December 1947, DES archive.

51. JRS to Eve Dray, 20 December 1947, DES archive.

52. Joan du Plat Taylor to Eve Dray, 18 December 1949, DES archive.

53. Joan du Plat Taylor to Eve Dray, 1 December 1949, DES archive.

54. Bec Moore to Eve Dray, 11 March 1950, DES archive.

55. Tom Dray to Eve Dray, 6 July 1948, DES archive.

56. Hans Helback to Eve Dray, 10 December 1948, DES archive.

57. Kurt Bittel to JRS, 10 March 1949, DES archive.

58. Dr Kay Prag, pers. comm., 2009.

59. Winifred Lamb to JRS, 30 July 1948, DES archive.

60. Arne Furumark to JRS, 23 February 1949, DES archive.

61. Suzanne Kelly (née Snelling) pers. comm., 2010.

62. Winifred Lamb to JRS, 7 November 1950, DES archive.

63. Mary Ann Fishbourne (née Meagher), pers. comm., 2010.

64. Professor Basil Hennessy, pers. comm., 2010.

65. Dale Trendall and JRS to the Hon. R.G. Menzies, MLA, 9 January 1951, University of Sydney archives.

66. University of Sydney archives, 6 February 1951.

67. JRS to Eve Dray, 18 June 1947, DES archive.

68. Dr Stephen Bourke, pers. comm., 2010.

69. Arne Furumark to JRS, 11 July 1951, DES archive.

70. JRS to Paul Åström, 22 April 1959, DES archive.

71. JRS to Albert Baldwin, 22 May 1957, A.H. Baldwin & Sons Ltd archives (courtesy of Edward Baldwin).

72. E. Stewart & J. Stewart, Vounous 1937–38: Field Report on the Excavations Sponsored by the British School of Archaeology at Athens, C.W.K. Gleerup, Lund, 1950.

73. Medelhavsmuzeet archives, Stockholm.

74. Arne Furumark to JRS, 11 July 1951, DES archive.

75. Saul S. Weinberg, ‘Review of Vounous 1937–38: Field-Report on the Excavations Sponsored by the British School of Archaeology at Athens by Eleanor Stewart and James Stewart’, American Journal of Archaeology, 1953, p. 29.

76. P. Dikaios, ‘Review of Vounous 1937–38 by E. and J Stewart’, The Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. 72 (1952), pp. 151–2.

77. R.M. Cook review in The Classical Review, vol 2, issue 2, 1952, p. 115.

78. JRS to Prof. K. Setton, 22 November 1951, DES archive.

79. Winifred Lamb to JRS, 6 March 1949, DES archive.

CHAPTER 7—Mount Pleasant, 1951–54

1. JRS to Eve Dray, 18 June 1947, DES archive.

2. Alex Diamantis, pers. comm., 2010.

3. Peter Stewart, pers. comm., 2012.

4. The entry on J.R.B. Stewart for the Australian Dictionary of Biography says A.A. Stewart was a marine engineer. The heritage entry for Lymdale, the house in Wentworth Falls, gives his background as electrical engineer with the English Electric Co. of King Street, Sydney, and director of building suppliers, the Nepean Sand and Grave Co and Kandos Cement (Ian Jack, Blue Mountains Historical Society, Heritage citation, SHI 1170318).

5. The Leys School archives.

6. DES to Christopher Blunt, 2 July 1982, DES archive.

7. The entry for J.R.B. Stewart in the Australian Dictionary of Biography says that she was English, as does the Sydney Morning Herald, 25 February 1899. On JRS’s military application he says she was South African.

8. Laila Haglund and Basil Hennessy both tell this story, which was one that Jim obviously relished.

9. DES to Christopher Blunt, 11 July 1982, DES archive.

10. Mary Nicholson to DES, 20 May 1962, DES archive.

11. Letter from Helen Heney, whose parents lived in Lymdale, to Nancy Douglas, 1984, Blue Mountains Historical Society.

12. In 1938 the editor of England’s premier modelling magazine devoted editorial space to the Stewart collection and the cover of the magazine featured the test pond in its 1941 edition. The collection was ultimately sold to the Museum of Arts and Sciences, and many of the large static models remain on display in what is now the Powerhouse Museum, in Sydney, Powerhouse Museum archive.

13. JRS to Eve Dray, 4 July 1947, DES archive.

14. Minutes of the Technological Museum Advisory Committee, 6 December 1934, Powerhouse Museum archive.

15. His application to Trinity Hall, Cambridge, lists Egerton House, London (1923), Hayfield School, Carlingford, NSW (1924), and Pembroke House, Middlesex, England (1925–27), Trinity Hall archives.

16. The Kings School Newsletter; a complete set of newsletters is available on CD Rom from the school archives. All quotes are from these newsletters.

17. The Kings School Newsletter, May 1929, pp. 15,16.

18. The Kings School Newsletter, September 1939, p. 38.

19. See Christopher Morgan, Castle, Kit Bag and Cattle Truck: The Australian Women’s Land Army at Abercrombie House, Bathurst, Runciman Press, 2001.

20. JRS to Judith Stylianou, 10 October 1952, DES archive.

21. Tom Dray to DES, 11 March 1953, DES archive.

22. Tom Dray to DES, 8 August 1952, DES archive.

23. DES to JRS, 16 November 1957, DES archive.

24. JRS to DES, 21 April 1959, DES archive.

25. Suzanne Kelly (née Snelling), pers. comm., 2010.

26. Laila Haglund, pers. comm., 16 October 2011.

27. Judy Birmingham, pers. comm., 2010.

28. DES to Robert Merrillees, 17 July 1981, DES archive.

29. Basil Hennessy, pers. comm., 2010.

30. Ruth Hennessy, pers. comm., 24 October 2011.

31. Dr Judy Birmingham, pers. comm., 2010.

32. Paul Hockings, pers. comm., 2010.

33. Eve Stewart, taped interview with Dr Laila Haglund, late 1990s.

34. James R. Stewart, ‘The Early Cypriote Bronze Age’, in Swedish Cyprus Expedition Vol. IV, Pt A, The Stone Age and Early Bronze Age, eds Porphyrios Dikaios and James R. Stewart, Swedish Cyprus Expedition, Lund, 1962, p. 207.

35. Winifred Lamb to JRS, 6 March 1950, DES archive.

36. JRS to Basil Hennessy, 11 December 1950, DES archive.

37. Basil Hennessy to JRS, 27 February 1951, DES archive.

38. Basil Hennessy to JRS, 30 March 1951, DES archive.

39. Basil Hennessy to JRS, 7 April 1951, DES archive.

40. Basil Hennessy to DES, 15 September 1951, DES archive.

41. Basil Hennessy to JRS, 6 June 1951, DES archive.

42. Basil Hennessy to JRS, 3 October 1951, DES archive.

43. Basil Hennessy to JRS, 19 April 1951, DES archive.

44. JRS to Basil Hennessy, 9 July 1952, DES archive.

45. JRS to Christopher Blunt, 1 October 1952, DES archive.

46. Report of Senate Committee concerning Mount Pleasant, Bathurst, University of Sydney archives (7473), 14 March 1953.

47. ibid.

48. Denman Chambers to Bruce Stevenson, University of Sydney archives (7473), 8 September 1953.

49. Judy Webb, Bathurst, pers. comm.. 2010.

50. JRS to Joan du Plat Taylor, 2 March 1955, DES archive.

CHAPTER 8—Travels, 1955–56

1. DES diary letter to Margery Dray, 19 September 1955, DES archive.

2. DES to Margery Dray, 30 August 1955, DES archive.

3. JRS to Basil Hennessy, 8 September 1955, DES archive.

4. JRS to A.A. Stewart, 30 August 1955, DES archive.

5. JRS to Basil Hennessy, 2 September 1956, DES archive.

6. JRS to Basil Hennessy, 28 August 1955, DES archive.

7. ibid.

8. DES to Margery Dray, 3 September 1955, DES archive.

9. JRS to Basil Hennessy, 8 September 1955, DES archive.

10. ibid.

11. JRS to Basil Hennessy, 11 August 1955, DES archive.

12. DES to Margery Dray, 19 September 1955, DES archive.

13. Eve’s diary letter to her mother 1955; JRS to Basil Hennessy, 20, 25 September 1955, DES archive.

14. Correspondence file in A.H. Baldwin & Sons Ltd’s archive, courtesy Edward Baldwin, 2012.

15. JRS to Basil Hennessy, 20 September 1955, DES archive.

16. JRS to A.A. Stewart, 22–24 September 1955, DES archive.

17. JRS to Basil Hennessy, 20 September 1955, DES archive.

18. ibid.

19. ibid.

20. DES to Margery Dray, 19 September 1955, DES archive.

21. JRS to A.A. Stewart, 8 November 1955, DES archive.

22. JRS to Basil Hennessy, diary letter begun 11 October, University of New England (UNE) archives.

23. Lawrence Durrell, Bitter Lemons, Faber and Faber, London, 1959 edition, p. 35.

24. JRS to Basil Hennessy, 17 September 1955, DES archive.

25. JRS to Basil Hennessy, diary letter, UNE archives.

26. JRS to A.A. Stewart, 20 October 1955, DES archive.

27. JRS to A.A. Stewart, 8 November 1955, DES archive.

28. JRS to A.A. Stewart, 26 November 1955, DES archive.

29. JRS to Basil Hennessy, 3 December 1955, DES archive.

30. JRS to A.A. Stewart, 26 November 1955, DES archive.

31. JRS to A.A. Stewart, 28 March 1956, DES archive.

32. DES diary letter to mother, DES archive.

33. JRS to Basil Hennessy, diary letter, UNE archives.

34. JRS to A.A. Stewart, 8 November 1955, DES archive.

35. J.R. Stewart, ‘The Melbourne Cyprus Expedition, 1955’, University of Melbourne Gazette, vol. XIII, no. 1, pp. 1–3.

36. DES Introduction in J.B. Hennessy, K.O. Eriksson, I.C. Kehrberg, Ayia Paraskevi and Vasilia: Excavations by J.R.B. Stewart, Paul Åström Forlag, Göteburg, 1988, p. 41.

37. Donald Harden to JRS, 18 January 1956, DES archive.

38. JRS to Basil Hennessy, diary letter, UNE archives.

39. JR to A.A. Stewart, 8 November 1955, DES archive.

40. Hennessy, Eriksson & Kehrberg, p. 40.

41. Basil Hennessy to JRS, 24 November 1955, DES archive.

42. Quoted in Hennessy, Eriksson & Kehrberg, pp. 38, 39.

43. JRS to Basil Hennessy, 6 December 1955, DES archive.

44. ibid.

45. DES diary letter to Margery Dray, DES archive.

46. JRS to A.A. Stewart, 14 January 1956, DES archive.

47. JRS to Basil Hennessy, 6 December 1955, DES archive.

48. DES to Margery Dray, 1–13 January 1956, DES archive.

49. JRS to A.A. Stewart, 14 January 1956, DES archive.

50. JRS to Basil Hennessy, 16 June 1956, DES archive.

51. JRS to A.A. Stewart, 18 January 1956, DES archive.

52. JRS to Basil Hennessy, 16 January 1956, DES archive.

53. ibid.

54. ibid.

55. Basil Hennessy to JRS, 15 May 1956, DES archive.

56. JRS to Basil Hennessy, 20 January 1956, DES archive.

57. JRS to Basil Hennessy, 16 January 1956, DES archive.

58. Basil Hennessy to JRS, 15 September 1955, DES archive.

59. JRS to Paul Åström, 5 December 1957, DES archive.

60. Basil Hennessy to JRS, 15 January, 15 February, 4 March, 20 March 1956, DES archive.

61. JRS to A.A. Stewart, 28 March 1956, DES archive.

62. JRS to Hector Catling, 25 June 1956, DES archive.

63. Hector Catling, pers. comm., 2010.

64. JRS to Basil Hennessy, 20 January 1956, DES archive.

65. DES diary letter to Margery Dray, covering the period of travel in 1955 and 1956.

66. Major-General Giles Mills, pers. comm., 2010.

67. Andreas Stylianou to JRS, 31 March 1956, DES archive.

68. JRS to DES, 6 August 1956, DES archive.

69. JRS to A.A. Stewart, 24 March 1956, 28 March 1956, DES archive.

70. JRS to A.A. Stewart, 24 March 1956, DES archive.

71. JRS to Basil Hennessy, 24 March 1956, DES archive.

72. JRS to Basil Hennessy, 16 January 1956, DES archive.

73. JRS to Basil Hennessy, 8 April 1956, DES archive.

CHAPTER 9—Mount Pleasant and Sydney, 1957–60

1. Paul Åström, nd., DES archive.

2. JRS to Olaf Vessberg, 16 October 1956, Medelhavsmuseet archives, Stockholm.

3. Basil Hennessy to JRS, 21 August 1956, 19 January 1957, DES archive.

4. Aunt Ethel to DES, 8 October 1956, DES archive.

5. Tom Dray to DES, 5 October 1956, DES archive.

6. Gordon Childe to O.G.S. Crawford, 9 August 1957, quoted in Tom Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 90.

7. Letter from Gordon Childe to W.F. Grimes, 20 October 1957, published in the editorial, Antiquity, 54, 1980.

8. O.G.S. Crawford to JRS, 14 November 1957, DES archive.

9. JRS to Hector Catling, 24 October 1958, DES archive.

10. JRS to Paul Åström, 4 April 1957, personal papers, Göteburg, Sweden.

11. ibid.

12. JRS to Paul Åström, 6 April 1957, personal papers, Göteburg, Sweden.

13. Paul Åström to JRS, 24 March 1958, personal papers, Göteburg, Sweden.

14. JRS to Paul Åström, 4 April 1957, personal papers, Göteburg, Sweden.

15. JRS to Paul Åström, 6 April 1957, personal papers, Göteburg, Sweden.

16. JRS to Paul Åström, 29 April 1957, personal papers, Göteburg, Sweden.

17. JRS to Paul Åström, 6 April 1957, personal papers, Göteburg, Sweden.

18. JRS to Paul Åström, 29 April 1957, personal papers, Göteburg, Sweden..

19. JRS to Paul Åström, 5 January 1957, personal papers, Göteburg, Sweden.

20. JRS to Paul Åström, 4 April 1957, personal papers, Göteburg, Sweden. Jim thinks Vessberg knows nothing of Near Eastern archaeology.

21. JRS to Paul Åström, 25 May 1959, DES archive.

22. JRS to Porphyrios Dikaios, 20 February 1958, DES archive.

23. JRS to Basil Hennessy, 9 March 1958, DES archive.

24. Basil Hennessy to JRS, 25 November 1958, DES archive.

25. R.S. Merrillees, Diplomatic Digs, Echo Books, West Geelong, 2012, pp. 39, 42.

26. JRS to A.H.S. (Peter) Megaw, 25 May 1959, DES archive.

27. ibid.

28. ibid.

29. JRS to Professor McRae, 7 August 1958, University of Sydney archives.

30. JRS to A.A. Stewart, 22 May 1958, DES archive.

31. JRS to Hector Catling, 7 May 1958, DES archive.

32. A.H.S. (Peter) Megaw to JRS, 19 August 1958, DES archive.

33. JRS to Hector Catling, 24 October 1958, DES archive.

34. JRS to Paul Åström, 28 September 1958, DES archive.

35. JRS to Paul Åström, 25 October 1958, DES archive.

36. Commissioner’s Office, Kyrenia, 11 June 1958, DES archive.

37. The Times, 22 July 1958.

38. Gordon Childe to O.G.S. Crawford, 9 August 1957, quoted in Griffiths, p. 90.

39. Professor John Mulvaney, pers. comm., 2011.

40. Donald Harden to JRS, 18 January 1957, DES archive.

41. JRS to Hector Catling, 7 May 1958, DES archive.

42. JRS telegram, 3 November 1958, DES archive.

43. Basil Hennessy to JRS, 6 November 1958, DES archive.

44. Tom Dray to DES, 8 December 1958, DES archive.

45. Tom Dray to DES, 20 May 1958, DES archive.

46. Robert Merrillees, ‘A model curator and a terracotta model dagger and sheath from Early Bronze Age Cyprus in the British Museum’, Ancient Cyprus in the British Museum: Essays in Honour of Veronica Tatton-Brown, edited by Thomas Kiely, British Museum, 2009, p. 49.

47. DES diary entry, 13 January 1959, DES archive.

48. Robert Merrillees, ‘An Archaeological Student Abroad’, The Union Recorder, Melbourne University, 18 June 1959, p. 88.

49. Robert Merrillees to JRS, 26 July 1959, DES archive.

50. Merrillees, ‘An Archaeological Student’, p. 88.

51. Vassos Karageorghis to JRS, 30 December 1958, DES archive.

52. Vassos Karageorghis to JRS, 12 March 1959, DES archive.

53. Vassos Karageorghis to JRS, 16 February 1959, DES archive.

54. Paul Åström to JRS, 19 February 1959, DES archive.

55. Vassos Karageorghis, A Lifetime in the Archaeology of Cyprus, Medelhavsmuseet, Stockholm, 2007, p. 58.

56. Vassos Karageorghis to JRS, 12 March 1959, DES archive.

57. JRS to A.H.S. (Peter) Megaw, 22 April 1959, DES archive.

58. A.H.S. (Peter) Megaw to JRS, 2 June 1959, DES archive.

59. JRS to A.H.S. (Peter) Megaw, 17 June 1959, DES archive.

60. JRS to A.H.S. (Peter) Megaw, 6 April 1960, DES archive.

61. Vassos Karageorghis to JRS, 9 June 1960, DES archive.

62. W.F. Connell, G.E. Sherington, B.H. Fletcher, C. Turney & U. Bygott, Australia’s First: A History of the University of Sydney, vol. II 1940–1990, 1995, p. 138.

63. DES annotation on letter, 12 June 1960, DES archive.

64. JRS to DES, 21 April 1959, DES archive.

65. JRS to A.H.S. (Peter) Megaw, 7 October 1959, DES archive.

66. JRS to Christopher Blunt, 21 October 1959, DES archive.

67. JRS to Christopher Blunt, 4 January 1960, DES archive.

68. DES to JRS, 15 August 1959, DES archive.

69. DES to JRS, 14 July 1959, DES archive.

70. JRS to DES, 22 June 1960, DES archive.

71. JRS to DES, 5 July 1960, DES archive.

72. JRS to Ron Byatt, 8 June 1960, DES archive.

CHAPTER 10—Australia and Cyprus, 1960–62

1. DES to JRS, 6 September 1960, DES archive.

2. J.M. Mills to DES, 22 September 1960, DES archive.

3. JRS to DES, 7 September 1960, DES archive.

4. DES to JRS, 6 June 1960, DES archive.

5. DES to JRS, 25 April 1960, DES archive.

6. JRS to DES, 8 August, 9 August 1959, DES archive.

7. JRS to DES, 9 September 1959, DES archive.

8. JRS to A.H.S. (Peter) Megaw, 7 October 1959, DES archive.

9. JRS to A.H.S. (Peter) Megaw, 24 September 1960, DES archive.

10. JRS to A.H.S. (Peter) Megaw, 24 September 1960, DES archive.

11. Eve Stewart, taped interview with Dr Laila Haglund, late 1990s.

12. Basil Hennessy, pers. comm., 2010.

13. DES to JRS, 2 May 1960, DES archive.

14. Arthur Reade to DES, 18 January 1960, DES archive.

15. Liatsos, Reade and Thompson, 18 January 1980, DES archive.

16. JRS to A.H.S. (Peter) Megaw, 6 April 1960, DES archive.

17. JRS to Paul Åström, 1 September 1960, DES archive.

18. Daily Telegraph, Thursday 4 August 1960.

19. DES to JRS, 2 August 1960, DES archive.

20. Pat Hutchison to JRS, 12 October 1951, DES archive.

21. JRS to Professor McRae. 6 August 1960, DES archive.

22. JRS to Hector Catling, 3 June 1959, DES archive.

23. JRS to Vassos Karageorghis, 20 June 1960, DES archive.

24. Letter of appointment, 6 January 1960, DES archive.

25. JRS to Robert Merrillees, 11 January 1960, DES archive.

26. JRS to Vassos Karageorghis, 5 October 1960, DES archive.

27. JRS to Porphyrios Dikaios, 28 July 1960, DES archive.

28. JRS to A.H.S. (Peter) Megaw, 25 May 1959, DES archive.

29. JRS to Christopher Blunt, 23 March 1960, DES archive.

30. JRS to Basil Hennessy, 22 February 1961, DES archive.

31. JRS to Christopher Blunt, 31 May 1960, DES archive.

32. JRS to Vassos Karageorghis, 20 June 1960, DES archive.

33. JRS to Porphyrios Dikaios, 10 March 1960, DES archive.

34. Porphyrios Dikaios to JRS, 9 July 1960, DES archive.

35. JRS to A.H.S. (Peter) Megaw, 5 February 1961, DES archive.

36. JRS to Basil Hennessy, 18 August 1960, DES archive.

37. JRS to Basil Hennessy, 12 November 1960, DES archive.

38. Basil Hennessy to JRS, 9 August 1960, DES archive.

39. JRS to Margaret Chambers, 15 November 1960, DES archive.

40. JRS to Vassos Karageorghis, 9 February 1960, DES archive.

41. JRS to Vassos Karageorghis, 25 February 1960, DES archive.

42. JRS to Vassos Karageorghis, 10 December 1960, DES archive.

43. JRS to Einar Gjerstad quoted by Robert Merrillees in ‘The ordeal of shaving in a frozen lake’, in Paul Åström, Einar Gjerstad, Robert S. Merrillees and Alfred Westholm, The Fantastic Years on Cyprus: The Swedish Cyprus Expedition and its members, Paul Åström Forlag, Jonsered, 1994, p. 50.

44. JRS to Einar Gjerstad, 28 January 1960, Lund University archives, Sweden.

45. JRS to A.H.S. (Peter) Megaw, 5 February 1961, DES archive.

46. JRS to Vassos Karageorghis, 10 December 1960, DES archive.

47. Jennifer Webb, David Frankel & Kathryn O. Eriksson et al., Karmi: The Bronze Age Cemeteries at Palealona and Lapatsa in Cyprus. Excavations by J.R.B. Stewart. Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology, Sävedalen, 2009, p. 4.

48. JRS to A.H.S (Peter) Megaw, 5 February 1961, DES archive.

49. JRS to Porphyrios Dikaios, 14 February 1961, DES archive.

50. JRS to Hector Catling, 28 February 1961, DES archive.

51. Mary Ann Fishbourne (née Meagher), pers. comm., 2010.

52. Derek Howlett, pers. comm., 2010.

53. Cyprus Excavation accounts, Cyprus Base, 1961, DES archive.

54. Webb, Frankel & Eriksson et al., p. 8.

55. Yiannis Cleanthous, pers. comm., 2009, 2010.

56. ibid.

57. ibid.

58. Deidre Guthrie, pers. comm., Bellapais, 2010.

59. Yiannis Cleanthous, pers. comm., 2009.

60. Webb, Frankel & Eriksson et al., p. 5.

61. Porphyrios Dikaios to Einar Gjerstad, 27 June 1961, Lund University archives, Sweden.

62. Porphyrios Dikaios to Einar Gjerstad, 30 June 1961, Lund University archives, Sweden.

63. JRS to A. Dougan, 16 March 1961, quoted in Webb, Frankel & Eriksson et al., p. 7.

64. JRS to Porphyrios Dikaios, 1 March 1961, DES archive.

65. Derek Howlett, pers. comm., 2010.

66. Webb, Frankel & Eriksson et al., p. 131.

67. ibid., pp. 4–5.

68. James Stewart, ‘The Tomb of the Seafarer in Karmi, Cyprus’, Opuscula Atheniensia, vol. IV, 1963, pp. 197–204.

69. JRS to A. Dougan, 27 April 1961; Webb, Frankel & Eriksson et al., p. 5.

70. Yiannis Cleanthous, pers. comm., 2009.

71. Mr Bongers to JRS, 9 November 1961, University of Sydney archives.

72. DES to Paul Åström, 25 July 1961, DES archive.

73. Basil Hennessy, pers. comm., 2010.

74. ibid.

75. Robert Merrilles file, DES archive.

76. Judy Birmingham, pers. comm., 2010.

77. John Ouvrier to JRS, 10 January 1962, DES archive.

78. Glyn Daniel to JRS, 14 November 1961, DES archive.

79. JRS to Einar Gjerstad, 8 August 1961, Lund University archives, Sweden.

80. JRS to Einar Gjerstad, 8 January 1962, Lund University archives, Sweden.

81. Einar Gjerstad to JRS, 9 January 1961, Lund University archives, Sweden.

82. Letter, 4 July 1961, DES archive.

83. DES to Anne Baldwin, 18 December 1962, DES archive.

84. Judy Birmingham, pers. comm., Sydney, 2010.

85. Sonja Howlett, pers. comm., 2010.

86. Registrar to Mr Deane, MLA, 7 February 1962, University of Sydney archives.

87. DES to Paul Åström, 31 March 1962, personal papers, Göteburg, Sweden.

88. Virginia Grace to DES, 19 February 1962, DES archive.

89. Reynold Higgins to DES, 22 February1962, DES archive.

90. DES to Launcelot Flemming, 19 November 1962, DES archive.

CHAPTER 11—Australia, 1962–90

1. James R. Stewart, ‘The Early Cypriote Bronze Age’, in Swedish Cyprus Expedition Vol. IV, Pt A, The Stone Age and Early Bronze Age, eds Porphyrios Dikaios and James R. Stewart, Swedish Cyprus Expedition, Lund, 1962.

2. R.S. Merrillees, ‘James Rivers Barrington Stewart (1913–1962)’ in Australian Dictionary of Biography, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/stewart-james-rivers-barrington-11769.

3. DES to Joan du Plat Taylor, 5 May 1962, DES archive.

4. DES to Philip Grierson, 20 November 1962, DES archive.

5. DES to Alexander Cambitoglou, 10 March 1962, DES archive.

6. Alexander Cambitoglou to DES, 7 March 1962, DES archive.

7. Alexander Cambitoglou to Vice-Chancellor, 12 March 1962, University of Sydney archives.

8. Alexander Cambitoglou to Vice-Chancellor, 22 February 1962, University of Sydney archives.

9. Paul Åström to DES, 3 June 1962, DES archive.

10. University of Sydney archives, File 33025.

11. Alexander Cambitoglou, pers. comm., 2010.

12. Judy Birmingham, pers. comm., 2010.

13. Accountant to Vice-Chancellor, 1 March 1962, University of Sydney archives.

14. JRS to Robert Merrillees, 11 January 1960, DES archive.

15. Alexander Cambitoglou to Bruce Stephenson, 20 June 1962, DES archive.

16. Harrison Bryan to DES, 28 May 1963, DES archive.

17. Harrison Bryan to Acting Vice-Chancellor, 25 June 1963, DES archive.

18. DES to Harrison Bryan, 5 July 1963, DES archive.

19. DES to Harrison Bryan, 5 August 1964, DES archive.

20. ibid.

21. DES to Christopher Blunt, 30 April 1962, DES archive.

22. Christopher Blunt to DES, 11 February 1962, DES archive.

23. Albert Baldwin to DES, 16 March 1962, DES archive.

24. Philip Whittington to DES, 18 March 1962, DES archive.

25. Paul Donnelly, Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, pers. comm., 2010.

26. Powerhouse Museum archive.

27. Mr Willis to DES, 13 September 1965, Powerhouse Museum archive.

28. DES to Mr Willis, 16 October 1965, Powerhouse Museum archive.

29. Pat Boland to Mr Willis, 23 October 1965, Powerhouse Museum archive.

30. DES to Mr Willis, 8 June 1966, Powerhouse Museum archive.

31. Albert Baldwin to DES, 21 April 1967, DES archive.

32. DES to Alexander Cambitoglou, 21 March 1963, DES archive.

33. DES to Alexander Cambitoglou, 31 October 1963, 16 December 1963, DES archive.

34. DES to Alexander Cambitoglou, 7 December 1964, DES archive.

35. Alexander Cambitoglou to DES, 7 March 1963, DES archive.

36. Alexander Cambitoglou, 13 June 1963, DES archive.

37. DES diary, DES archive.

38. Alexander Cambitoglou, 7 March 1963, DES archive.

39. Alexander Cambitoglou, 23 April 1963, DES archive.

40. DES to Sir Stephen Roberts, 21 January 1965, University of Sydney archives.

41. Vassos Karageorghis to JRS, 22 January 1962, DES archive.

42. Alexander Cambitoglou to Vice-Chancellor, 19 February 1965, University of Sydney archive, File 373.

43. DES to Alexander Cambitoglou, 9 March 1965, DES archive.

44. Michael Quinnell, pers. comm., 2010.

45. DES to Alexander Cambitoglou, 20 March 1965, DES archive.

46. Richard Green to Vice-Chancellor, 15 September 1965, DES archive.

47. DES to Professor O’Neill, 14 December 1965, DES archive.

48. Professor Hunt to Alexander Cambitoglou, 19 March 1966, University of Sydney archives, File 373.

49. 29 March 1966, University of Sydney archives.

50. Confidential memo to the Vice-Chancellor, 16 August 1966, University of Sydney archives, File 373.

51. S.A.L. Thompson to DES, 19 November 1961, DES archive.

52. Betty Hunter-Cowan to DES, 5 February 1964, DES archive.

53. Liatsos, Reade and Thompson to DES, 9 March 1964, DES archive.

54. Liatsos, Reade and Thompson to DES, 21 April 1965, DES archive.

55. DES to Vassos Karageorghis, 20 March 1967, DES archive.

56. Vassos Karageorghis replied on 18 February 1967 to say that he would be away in Egypt.

57. DES diary, 1 May 1967, DES archive.

58. DES 1967 diary, DES archive.

59. DES to A.H.S. (Peter) Megaw, 2 March 1970, DES archive.

60. Australian Women’s Weekly, Wednesday 21 November 1973, pp. 55, 57.

61. Basil Hennessy to DES, 20 June 1974, DES archive.

62. Alison South, pers. comm., 2010.

63. Hector Catling to DES, 8 December 1975, DES archive.

64. Engin Turker, Consulate General of the Republic of Turkey Sydney to DES, 16 June 1976, CAARI archive.

65. DES diary entry, 14 August 1977, DES archive.

CHAPTER 12—Wentworth Falls, 1990

1. Eve Stewart, taped interview with Dr Laila Haglund, late 1990s.

2. Annotation on letter from Paul Åström to DES, 24 October 1972, DES archive.

3. DES to Paul Åström, 13 October 1977, DES archive.

4. Stewart, ‘The Early Cypriot Bronze Age’.

5. DES to Professor Brein, 29 April 1980, DES archive.

6. DES to Dr Chehab, 5 October 1979, DES archive.

7. DES to Dr Hayes, 29 December 1989, DES archive.

8. DES to Curator, Musees Royaux du Copenhagen, 11 May 1984, DES archive.

9. DES to Mary Cra’ster, 22 October 1979, DES archive.

10. Christopher Blunt to DES, 9 June 1962, DES archive.

11. DES to Paul Åström, 24 February 1980, DES archive.

12. DES to Bec Moore 24 July 1978, DES archive.

13. DES to Basil Hennessy, 14 April 1978, DES archive.

14. DES to Bec Moore, 24 July 1978, DES archive.

15. Andreas Pitsillides, pers. comm., 2010.

16. DES to Elias Markou, 13 May 1984, DES archive.

17. DES to Elias Markou, 21 August 1984, DES archive.

18. DES to Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 11 December 1989, DES archive.

19. DES to Mr Chippindale, 11 August 1992, DES archive.

20. DES to Basil Hennessy, 18 January 1979, DES archive.

21. Corpus correspondence, Nicholson Museum, DES archive.

22. DES to Basil Hennessy, 26 October 1989, DES archive.

23. Hennessy, Eriksson, & Kehrberg p. 8.

24. DES to Paul Åström, 16 March 1989, DES archive.

25. DES to Veronica Tatton-Brown, 19 April 1990, DES archive.

26. DES to Robert Merrillees, 8 January 1991, DES archive.

EPILOGUE—Legacies

1. Karin and Kerstin Calley, memorial service for Dorothy Evelyn Stewart, 25 June 1914 − 8 December 2005.

2. DES to Robert Merrillees, 21 October 1991, DES archive.

3. DES to The Manager 2GB, 19 May 1984, DES archive.

4. D.M. Metcalf, Coinage as Evidence for the Changing Prosperity of Cyprus in Byzantine and Medieval Times, Bank of Cyprus Cultural Foundation, Nicosia, 2003, pp. 18–19.

5. Sydney University Museums News, issue 14, February 2008, p. 3.

6. Professor Jim Allen, pers. comm., 2010.

7. Vincent Megaw, ‘Review of Treasures of the Nicholson Museum the University of Sydney by D.T. Potts and K.N. Sowada (eds)’, in Australian Archaeology, vol. 59, 2004, pp. 72–3.

8. O’Hea, pp. 75–80.

9. Basil Hennessy to DES, 20 June 1974; Vassos Karageorghis to Basil Hennessy, 1 June 1974, DES archive.

10. Hector Catling, ‘Review of The Swedish Cyprus Expedition, Vol IV, Part 1A by P. Dikaios and J.R. Stewart’, Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. LXXXVI, 1966, p. 258.

11. Dr Ted Robinson, quoted in the Australian, 29 June 2011.

References

Personal papers and archives

Personal papers:

Dorothy Evelyn Stewart (DES archive)

Professor Paul Åström, Göteburg, Sweden

Professor Einar Gjerstad, Lund University, Sweden

Professor Basil Hennessy, Bungendore, New South Wales

Mills family, Bisterne, Hampshire, England

Professor Alan Wace, Cambridge, England

Dr Rita Severis, Nicosia, Cyprus

Institutional archives:

American School of Classical Studies, Athens

Australian Institute of Archaeology, Melbourne

Blue Mountains Historical Society, Wentworth Falls, NSW

British Ministry of Defence, Glasgow, Scotland

British School at Athens

Cyprus American Archaeological Institute, Nicosia (CAARI)

Cyprus Veterans Group, Nicosia, Cyprus

Imperial War Museum, London

Medelshavsmuseet archives, Stockholm

National Archives, London

Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, University College, London

Powerhouse Museum, Sydney

State Archives, Nicosia, Cyprus

The Kings School, Parramatta, NSW

The Leys School, Cambridge, England

Trinity Hall, Cambridge, England

University College, London, special collections

University of New England, Armidale, NSW

University of Sydney

Stewart Publications

Eve Stewart (née Dray)

Dray, Eve & Myers, Oliver H., ‘Glazed Quartz Beads of the Romano-Arab Period’, The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, vol. 32, December 1946, pp. 65–8.

Dray, E. & du Plat Taylor, Joan, ‘Tsambres and Aphendika: two classical and Hellenistic cemeteries in Cyprus’, Report of the Department of Antiquities Cyprus 1937–1939, vol. 4, Department of Antiquities, Nicosia, Cyprus, 1951.

James and Eleanor Stewart

Stewart, E. & Stewart, J., Vounous 1937–38: Field Report on the Excavations Sponsored by the British School of Archaeology at Athens, C.W.K. Gleerup, Lund, 1950.

James R.B. Stewart

‘Excavations at Kusura near Afyon Karahisar: The Cemetery’, in Archaeologia, LXXXVI, 1936.

‘Excavations at Vounous, Cyprus’, Antiquity, vol. XI, 1937, p. 356.

‘A Turkish Wine Bottle’, Antiquity, Vol XI, 1937.

‘An Imported Pot from Cyprus’, Palestine Exploration Quarterly 1939, pp. 162–8.

‘Decorated Tomb Facades, Cyprus’, Antiquity, 1939.

‘Ein Graberfeld der Yortan-Kultur bei Babakoy’ (with Professor K. Bittel) in Archiv fur Orientforschung, XIII, 1940.

‘Toggle Pins in Cyprus’, Antiquity, vol. XIV, 1940, pp. 204–9.

‘Three Jugs of the Cypriot Iron Age in the Biblical Museum, Melbourne’, Man, vol. 40, October 1940, p. 145.

Handbook to the Nicholson Museum Parts 1 and 2 (with Dale Trendall), Sydney, 1948.

‘Kazaphani’, Annals of Archaeology and Anthropology issued by the Institute of Archaeology University of Liverpool, vol. XXVIII, 1948, pp. 5–7.

‘The Dorchester Hoard’, in The Report of the Numismatic Society of New South Wales, vol. X, 1948, pp. 46–7.

‘The Dream of Sulla on a Denarius of L. Aemilius Buca’, The Report of the Numismatic Society of New South Wales, Vol X, 1949, pp. 46–7.

‘Recent Coin Hoards’, Report of the Numismatic Society of New South Wales, vol. X, 1949, pp. 5–8.

‘Review of Gustave Schlumberger, F. Chalander, A. Blanchet, Sigillographie de l’Orient Latin (Paris, 1943)’, Report of the Numismatic Society of New South Wales, vol. XI, 1949, pp. 5–8.

‘Review of Sir George Hill, A History of Cyprus, vols II and III (Cambridge, 1948)’, Report of the Numismatic Society of New South Wales, vol. XI, 1949, pp. 10–12.

‘Review of Kenneth M. Sutton’s Catalan Domination of Athens 1311–1388’, The American Journal of Philology, vol. 71, no. 4, 1950, pp. 438–40.

‘A Latin-Byzantine hybrid coin’, in Studies presented to David Moore Robinson, II, 1953.

‘When Did Base-Ring Ware First Occur in Palestine?’, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, no. 138, April 1955, pp. 47–9.

‘The Melbourne Cyprus Expedition, 1955’, University of Melbourne Gazette, vol. XIII, no. 1, 11 April 1957, pp. 1–3.

‘The Department of Archaeology and Research in the Near East’, The Gazette, University of Sydney, May 1958, pp. 216–17.

‘Review Myrtou-Pighades. A Late Bronze Age sanctuary in Cyprus by Joan du Plat Taylor’, American Journal of Archaeology, vol. 64, no. 3, July 1960, pp. 290–2.

‘The Freshman’s Guide to the Nicholson Museum’, in The Union Recorder, vol. XL, no. 25, Thursday 20 October 1960, pp. 226–7.

‘The centenary of the Nicholson Museum’, The Gazette, University of Sydney, vol. 1, no. 20, November 1960, pp. 294–5.

Posthumous publications:

Stewart, James R., ‘The Early Cypriote Bronze Age’, in Swedish Cyprus Expedition Vol. IV, Part IA, The Stone Age and Early Bronze Age, eds Porphyrios Dikaios and James R. Stewart, Lund, 1962, pp. 205–401.

Stewart, James R., ‘The Tomb of the Seafarer in Karmi, Cyprus’, Opuscula Atheniensia, vol. IV, 1963, pp. 197–204.

Stewart, James R., ‘Tell el-’Ajjul: The Middle Bronze Age Remains’, Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology, M38, Göteborg, 1974.

Hennessy, J.B. Eriksson, K.O. & Kehrberg, I.C., Ayia Paraskevi and Vasilia. Excavations by J.R.B. Stewart, Paul Åström Forlag, Göteburg, 1988.

Stewart, James R., ‘Corpus of Cypriot Antiquities of the Early Bronze Age Part 1’, Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology M3.1, Göteborg, 1988.

Stewart, James R., ‘Corpus of Cypriot Antiquities of the Early Bronze Age, Part 2’, Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology M3.2, Jonsered, 1992.

Stewart, James R., ‘Corpus of Cypriot Antiquities of the Early Bronze Age, Part 3.1’, Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology M3.3, Jonsered, 1999.

Stewart, James R. (edited Professor D.M. Metcalf), Lusignan Cyprus and its coinage, 2 vols, Bank of Cyprus, 2002.

Webb, Jennifer, Frankel, David & Eriksson, Kathryn O. et al., ‘Karmi: The Bronze Age Cemeteries at Palealona and Lapatsa in Cyprus: Excavations by J.R.B Stewart’, Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology, Sävedalen, 2009.

Plates

Eve Dray and Miss Mewkins (DES archive)

Grannie Mills, Margery Dray and Eve Dray (DES archive)

Eve Dray—Redmoor lacrosse team (middle row, far left) (DES archive)

Jim with his father, A.A. Stewart, 1916(?) (DES archive)

Saint Hilarion (Judy Powell)

Kyrenia, 1930s (DES archive)

Tom Dray, Eski house, Kyrenia 1934 (DES archive)

Bellapais Abbey (Judy Powell)

Workroom, Bellapais Abbey—Eleanor Stewart in background, and, in the foreground drawing, Adamantios Diamantis. (Alex Diamantis)

Eve Dray on excavations in Northern France 1938 (DES archive)

POW dog tag—JRB Stewart (DES archive—Judy Powell)

Selection of Jim Stewart’s POW notebooks (DES archive—Judy Powell)

Eve Dray, Cyprus 1947 (DES archive)

Another picture of Eve Dray, Cyprus 1947 (DES archive)

Jim Stewart, Cyprus 1947 (DES archive)

Another picture of Jim Stewart, Cyprus 1947 (DES archive)

Edgecliff house, Sydney—c. 1952 (DES archive)

Jim Stewart with Scatty and kittens—Edgecliff, c. 1951 (DES archive)

Mount Pleasant c. 1952; exterior (DES archive)

Mount Pleasant c. 1952; library (DES archive)

Left to right: Eve Stewart, Jim Stewart, Malcolm Calley, Basil Hennessy, Mount Pleasant c. 1954 (Basil Hennessy archives)

Jim and Eve Stewart, Mount Pleasant c. 1954 (DES archive)

Eve Stewart and Derek Howlett with pottery—Lymdale 1960s (DES archive)

Karmi 1961: end of season party, with (at left) Jim Stewart drinking (UNE archive—Stewart collection)

Another picture of Karmi 1961 (UNE archive—Stewart collection)

Jim Stewart at excavations, Karmi 1961

Site of Karmi today (Judy Powell)

Eve Stewart, 1990s, Wentworth Falls (DES archive)

Another picture of Eve Stewart, 1990s, Wentworth Falls (DES archive)

Eve Stewart’s kitchen at The Dower House, Wentworth Falls, 1990s (Laila Haglund)

Eve Stewart’s notes for the Corpus (UNE archive—Judy Powell)

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Table of Contents

About the author

Frontispiece

Title page

Imprint

Dedication

Epigraph

Foreword

Acknowledgements

A note on terms

Maps

Prologue

PART 1: The Old World, 1914–47

Chapter 1: England, Egypt and Cyprus, 1914–36

Chapter 2: England and Cyprus, 1936–39

Chapter 3: England, Cyprus and the Near East, 1930–38

Chapter 4: War, 1940–45

Chapter 5: England and Cyprus, 1945−47

PART 2: A New World, 1947–62

Chapter 6: Australia, 1947–50

Chapter 7: Mount Pleasant, 1951–54

Chapter 8: Travels, 1955–56

Chapter 9: Mount Pleasant and Sydney, 1957–60

Chapter 10: Australia and Cyprus, 1960–62

PART 3: Wentworth Falls

Chapter 11: Australia, 1962–90

Chapter 12: Wentworth Falls, 1990

Epilogue: Legacies

Appendix: The D.E. (Eve) Stewart archive—in praise of handwriting

Timeline

Notes

References

Plates

Wakefield Press