by Dilys Powell
The bust, he says, is ‘on a – happily – fairly high pillar’. Next day another ceremony, but in Herakleion and culminating in ‘a laurel crown’. The touch of deprecation does not altogether conceal pleasure. The junketings were exhausting. But observers detected a certain gratification; perhaps surprise as well. Years later I was talking to a Cretan collector of antiquities, Dr Yamalakis. Evans, he said, ‘was much more liked, or at any rate respected, than he himself supposed. When the bust was unveiled ten thousand people turned up. “But I have no sandwiches for all these people,” he said to me, “no drinks for them!” He was quite overcome …’
Evans did in fact entertain what he called the dignitaries at the Villa after the function, and perhaps he was not actually contemplating as large an operation as the feeding of the five thousand. His concern is worth noting all the same.
He was now eighty-four, but the enquiring, exploring mind, perennially practical, still drove on. Back at Youlbury, he was indefatigable. That year was the silver jubilee of George V. Beacons were to be lit in celebration, and the job was entrusted to the Boy Scouts. Observing that one of the traditional sites was on his own land, he wrote in The Times a long article recounting the history of beacons in England and describing an experiment with a model. ‘It consists of a straight oak trunk, cut for the purpose and allowing 20 feet above ground, which supports a capacious “fire cage”, the handiwork of a local smith.’ A fire of tow steeped in pitch and helped out by wood and coke burned, he says, for over two hours. Jarn Mound, the Wild Garden, the Beacon-Chain – increasingly he showed his feeling for the traditions and the landscape of his own countryside.
The following year there was a different kind of jubilee. The British School at Athens had reached its half-century, and an exhibition at Burlington House was organised. Evans made himself responsible for a room illustrating his work at Knossos. Among the exhibits was a reproduction of a fresco, much restored, which he had long maintained depicted a saffron-gatherer. Mercy Money-Coutts, who as a student had worked in Crete, helped with the arrangement. Some time in the 1950s I visited her in Canea where, married to a charming Cretan, Michael Seiradhakis, she was then living. I asked her about the problem of restoration. Yes, she believed the Knossos ‘reconstitutions’ were justified – except for the saffron-gatherer. It was really a blue monkey (an interpretation now generally accepted), and of that Evans himself, she said, was finally persuaded.
There were other matters on which time and the long bitter battles of research would prove the great scholar-adventurer mistaken. Nevertheless the structure of his work, huge, formidable, in some strange fashion poetic, outlasts criticism. An expert once grumbled to me that, since in the early days of excavation field archaeology lacked the precision acquired later, it was sometimes difficult to see what was actually found at Knossos. Reconstruction had often been deliberately carried out in the materials used in antiquity. Sometimes, he added, laughing ruefully, you can’t tell the original from the restoration.
The ordinary visitor bears such complaints with equanimity. For with age the jagged walls, the stairways and corridors and roofs and pillars of the ‘reconstituted’ Palace have taken on a kind of grandeur; from the distance of the hillside opposite you recognise, crumbling but still splendid, the city which Knossos once was. Even my critical informant, admiring in spite of himself, admitted that if the explorer had not been able to indulge his passion for rebuilding the whole vast complex might by now have been fatally blurred. The gypsum which the Minoans employed in constructing the interior of the Palace dissolves slowly in water; rain would have gradually eroded it. ‘The Grand Staircase has been worn down by exposure to the weather. But the cement which Evans had poured in the cracks is not affected. It still keeps its original level – you can see where it juts above the ancient slabs.’
The extraordinary machine of Evans’s physical and intellectual make-up still, by the second half of the 1930s, had a few more years to run. But it was beginning to tire. In any case questions even more urgent than the conservation of Knossos were now exercising people’s minds; a patch of threatened peace, and then a decade would go by before travellers would revisit Greece and archaeologists get back to their rightful jobs. Evans never saw Crete again. Perhaps in his magisterial nineteenth-century fashion he had cared for its past more than for its present; the feeling which survives him in the island may be one of gratitude rather than affection. But gratitude is there.
‘After all,’ a Cretan said to me a few years ago, ‘after all he made Crete what it is now.’
i
‘IT WAS the night after Mackenzie died.’ Piet de Jong’s voice with its flat tones and barely perceptible changes of pace always had a compelling narrative quality; as the eyes glinted under the whiskery eyebrows and the mouth under the enquiring nose drew in for a pause I felt a shiver of expectation.
I was in bed in one of the rooms downstairs at the Villa. And I heard footsteps, very slow, coming to the top of the stairs. And they hesitated. And slowly, very slowly, they came downstairs. And the door opened. And I looked up, and there was Mackenzie, standing there with a woman. And next thing I changed places, I was standing looking down at Mackenzie in bed. And once more I changed places, I was lying in bed, and there was Mackenzie again looking down at me. I woke up in a cold sweat.
Mackenzie died in Italy a year before Evans’s last visit to Crete. Since the end of his Curatorship he had been suffering from severe mental disturbance. The trouble had begun earlier. Humfry, when as newly appointed Director of the School he visited Crete, was alarmed by what he saw of affairs at Knossos; and in Time and Chance Joan Evans says that her brother had found Mackenzie in his latter years with ‘the gradual onset of his illness … exceedingly difficult to work with’. Nevertheless in the preface to the last volume of The Palace of Minos the author paid tribute to his dead lieutenant, to his loyalty and his understanding of the Cretans. Evans could be generous. He made amends for the asperity of his private comments on Mackenzie’s ‘hypochondria’.
One or two people, among them Piet and his wife Effie, would have said that he was making amends for something else. When Mackenzie moved out of Knossos three years had gone by since the Villa and the site had been handed over to the British School. Theoretically the job he left was a School appointment. All the same it is difficult to believe that Evans had no say in the matter. Certainly Piet and Effie had their own ideas on the subject. ‘Sir Arthur came in one evening and found Mackenzie with his head on the table. Next day he sacked him.’ Both the de Jongs were unshakeable in one thing: Mackenzie, they said, did not drink. ‘He would sit for hours in a café with a small glass untouched in front of him.’ Perhaps Evans did not share their belief, and to be honest there were other doubters among the fascinated observers of what was still the exotic, immured life of the Villa. But the de Jongs defended their dead friend: ‘Yes, he had an unsteady sort of walk, but that was after he had a fall. He was riding his donkey and he fell, perhaps it was a stroke. After that he was never the same.’ And Effie added a final word. Sir Arthur, she said (the de Jongs always referred to him as Sir Arthur), confessed to her later that he was sorry about the removal of Mackenzie. ‘I think’, he told her, ‘it broke his heart.’ It is all long ago now, and the name of the first Curator of Knossos might, except to a handful of archaeologists, have disappeared under the dust which covers memories of so many romantic, adventurous, pioneering figures once connected with the Villa Ariadne, had it not been revived years later by one of the controversies which from time to time erupt in learned society. The controversy was over the Evans system of Minoan dating; dramatically enough those clay tablets with their linear scripts which in the very first days had seemed to the explorer to justify his whole enterprise were called to testify against him. And suddenly from the grave Mackenzie, the careful field archaeologist, the right-hand man, intermediary between Evans and the Cretan workmen, by virtue of his daily records of excavation became a key witness. It is an
episode to examine which needs not reminiscence but a Minoan expert. Nevertheless I think I can say that the reputation which Mackenzie won in his prime has stoutly survived. Nobody has questioned it.
That fragment fits much later into the story, and anyhow I dare say the chapter is not finished yet. In 1930, however, when John Pendlebury succeeded Mackenzie, a new and a different era began.
After the interruption of the First War a young generation of archaeologists were beginning by the late 1920s to make themselves felt. They were sometimes distrustful of the work of their predecessors. In particular they questioned the conclusions of the great nineteenth- and early twentieth-century pioneers, whom they were inclined to regard as unscientific in sifting the evidence. Field archaeology had been an adventure, the unearthing of treasure, the confirmation of legend as historical fact. Schliemann had shown that Troy was a solid truth. Evans, following the clue of a myth, had recovered a splendid civilisation. Of course field archaeology would remain an adventure and of course the newcomers would build on the work of their elders. But the first major discoveries, having startled the scholars and the historians, had themselves settled down into history. Now a more deliberate and, it was suggested, a more scientific approach was the thing.
Naturally few archaeologists possessed the personal fortunes which had made possible Schliemann’s work at Troy, Mycenae and Tiryns and Evans’s work at Knossos. The post-Schliemann and post-Evans explorers operated with university grants, with funds raised by public subscription. A dig could no longer be a private venture. In Greece a British excavation would be undertaken under the auspices of the British School of Archaeology. Each national archaeological body in Athens – the German Institute, the French and the Italian and the British Schools – was rationed in the number of explorations conducted. For the Greeks, naturally enough, were jealous of their own history and their own honour. The whole system under which excavation was carried out was being tightened.
A new generation of archaeologists openly disapproving of what they regarded as the amateurish policies of the past and operating under considerable restriction on the freedom of the explorer – goodbye, one might have thought, to the good old traditions of obstinate individualism. Not a bit of it. Iconoclastic but devout in allegiance to the science they pursued, the new generation were to produce individualists of their own; outstanding among them, John Pendlebury.
John Devitt Stringfellow Pendlebury was a schoolboy when he first saw the Aegean. He was born in 1904, only son of H. S. Pendlebury, Consulting Surgeon to St George’s Hospital in London. In 1918 he went to Winchester College. His earliest interest in the ancient world was in Egypt; in fact he was once taken by his father to the British Museum to see the orientalist Wallis Budge, who advised, however, that the boy should read classics before making up his mind. By 1923 he had definitely decided to be an archaeologist; and his last Easter holidays from school were spent travelling in Greece with a Winchester master. At Mycenae the travellers encountered Alan Wace, at that time Director of the School at Athens; the distinguished scholar was impressed by the boy’s ‘anxiety to see things for himself, so as to be able to form a fresh, independent, first-hand idea of them’.
That autumn John Pendlebury went up to Pembroke College, Cambridge, as an exhibitioner. He was a classical scholar but not, according to a contemporary, a conventional one.
He did not work, like the ordinary run of undergraduates, in a litter of texts, lexicons, papers and notebooks, and he was always manifestly in training. My portrait of Pendlebury at nineteen is of a friendly athlete sitting on a hard chair with one book open, the book he was reading. It might be the Iliad or the latest volume of The Palace of Minos, or it might be Maurice Hewlett’s Forest Lovers.
‘A friendly athlete’ – physical prowess was as important to him as scholarship. Fitness, stamina, endurance – it is a theme which runs through a lifelong correspondence with his father. Determination to excel in games and athletics marked him out as a boy. ‘It was his close application to detail’, his housemaster wrote, ‘that enabled him, for instance, to take catches on the boundary with the same certainty with which he cleared hurdles or the high jump bar.’ And from the same observer: ‘Watching him with others in all normal activities, nobody would have guessed that he had lost the sight of an eye.’ He had lost it in infancy, and all his life he wore a glass eye. True, nobody would have guessed. Spirited games of tennis played at the British School on blazing spring afternoons, long ankle-breaking walks through a Greek countryside not yet tamed, mornings spent in museums, intent on the minutiae of the wreckage of the past – on all the occasions which I best remember nobody, watching him, would have guessed. A fantastic tenacity, a heroic resolve insisted that he should be not simply the equal but the superior of the normally equipped. The disability gave a kind of impetus to his life.
At Cambridge he was able happily to indulge his two passions. ‘Never shall I forget’, Lord Burghley wrote two decades later, ‘John’s and my two most exciting races in the Freshmen’s Sports and the Senior v. Freshmen’s Match, before he concentrated on the High Jump. We each won one!’ Presently John was running against Oxford in the relay race and the hurdles. Twice he won the High Jump for Cambridge. In his second victory he cleared six feet; it was half a century since anybody in the University Sports had done that. Parallel with success in sport there was success in work. When he left Pembroke he had achieved, after a Second in Part I of the Classical Tripos, a First in Part II with distinction in archaeology. Fine athlete, gifted scholar – the hero, you might say, of a romantic novel, a golden boy chosen by Fortune for her own.
The main lines of his career were already marked out. He would, as he had decided when he met Wace at Mycenae, be an archaeologist; he had begun to train for it. But what kind of archaeologist? There was his education in the classics and there was his inclination towards Egyptology. A first step was taken when he came down from Pembroke in 1927. Cambridge had a prize to offer and he won it; he was awarded the Cambridge University Studentship at the British School at Athens. But he did not relinquish Egyptology. Astutely he decided to combine two interests. He would travel in Greece. But the object of his studies would be not Greek antiquities but Egyptian artefacts found in Greece.
He arrived in Athens in November 1927. He was twenty-three years old. A photograph taken in the following year shows a young man in a grey pin-stripe suit and the stiff white collar proper to formal occasions; the brown hair crisp, very English-looking; the upper part of the face with its short, straight, blunt nose solid, resolute, but about the set of the mouth, about the slight forward thrust of the lower lip something mutinous. In 1927, however, stubbornness was overlaid by excitement. He was a little overcome, as well he might have been, by the company in the British School Students’ Hostel, where a year earlier I had made my first acquaintance with archaeological society. I was newly married at the time. Humfry was still a post-graduate student; and for three months we dined at a table where nobody, to the best of my recollection, ever spoke of any subject outside the range of the antiquarian.
The phrase ‘Students’ Hostel’ may mislead. The house was intended to afford board and lodging not only to young men and women just down from the University but to established scholars doing a stretch of work in Greece. John found himself mixing with some pretty formidable characters. ‘I only wish’, he wrote to his father, ‘everybody wouldn’t be so obviously learned to the eyebrows. It makes me feel such an impostor being here at all. Most of them feel I think that a blue has put me beyond the pale!’
A Miss White made a comparatively favourable impression on him: ‘The rest are definitely sub-human.’ The schoolboy style of the letters marks the young graduate of the 1920s. It was before the days of drugs, political demonstrations and worrying about one’s identity, and the products of the elder universities were often unquenchably cheerful. Perhaps John Pendlebury went on being youthful longer than most. A week or two later he was making a typical joke
. He had gone with the favoured Miss White to explore the north side of the Acropolis, and there, like the Persian invaders twenty-four centuries earlier, had found a passage which led to a point high up under the walls.
Well, there was only one thing to do. I scaled the walls, put my head over the top and said to the astonished custodian ‘Πέρσηѕ εíμαι’ [I am a Persian.] He was quite annoyed and only prevented from rushing at me by a yawning drain between us. I called him Themistocles, asked after Aristides and climbed down again.
He soon forgot the unnerving aspects of archaeological society. On an expedition to Phyle, an ancient fortress on the mountainous northern borders of Attica, he and Sylvia Benton, excavator of Ithaca and tough heroine of many tales and perhaps some myths in the annals of the School, vied with one another in accusations of fast walking; she said she had almost to run to keep up with him. He lost no time before getting out of Athens and into the country. Among his companions on a trip to Meteora and Tempe that winter was the Cambridge contemporary who was to describe him as ‘a friendly athlete’ – P. J. Dixon, later Sir Pierson Dixon, British Ambassador in Paris. In the later 1920s he too was a student at the British School, and he it was who first prospected the site in Crete at Eleutherna which Humfry dug in the summer of 1929.
It was not long before Pierson Dixon abandoned archaeology for diplomacy. In the early 1940s he was at the Foreign Office and dealing with Aegean affairs. Sometimes I saw him there, for I was entangled in British propaganda to Greece and it was my lot each week to shuttle, bearing a few typewritten sheets grandiloquently described as a directive, between a Government department and the Office, as it was called. And again he came into the Cretan story, for it was a time when tragic news was coming out of the island, news in which Pendlebury was a major figure.