by Dilys Powell
The new family responsibility did not interfere with filial feeling. There was a moment of anxiety for his father and stepmother.
By the way – this is rather difficult to put – I have unexpectedly left unused that £1,000 on deposit. I have also a comfortable balance in the bank here (£221) and am getting dr. 500 to the pound. If all this bother is, as it must be, hitting you and Dickie pretty hard mayn’t I offer what I have to help keep up the family home? I won’t say any more, because you know what I mean and what I can’t say. But it really would give me enormous pleasure if I could be of any help. This between ourselves absolutely.
‘I have unexpectedly left unused that £1,000 on deposit,’ – the delicacy of feeling contradicts the casual exterior which he presented to the world.
In 1933 when he came back from his season in Egypt and, joined by Hilda and David (‘he is certainly grown out of recognition and really is a fine young tough’), returned to Knossos he discovered that the foundations of the Taverna had given way. There were large cracks in the walls and the house was uninhabitable; the only satisfactory solution was to rebuild. In theory Evans had handed over to the School the entire estate, but in practice he was still very much in authority, and John wired to him as well as to the Director of the School. From Youlbury came the answer that rebuilding must begin. The opportunity was seized to make improvement, for example to reverse the normal structure of Greek village houses and put the staircase inside instead of outside. The usual local dramas enlivened the job and momentarily swung John back to a mood of English intolerance.
… Today I got fed up with the continual quarrels of the foreman and chief mason and told the workmen that the day after tomorrow I would sack the lot and get new ones. This I fully intend to do if they don’t stop this eternal Hellenic bickering. Quite honest mistakes are reported to me as first-class thefts.
But in a couple of days the trouble had been patched up, and by midsummer the little house was finished. It had cost three hundred and fifty pounds.
Nothing, however, interrupts the flow of work. There are students to be advised. There are visitors (including Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, ‘a very fine-looking old gentleman’). The letters home are full of references to proofs and articles and catalogues, to a lecture planned for an Amarna architectural exhibition and to the problem of funds for the Amarna dig, while from time to time the business of scholarship is interrupted by news of David’s progress. And of course there are the expeditions – spending one night, for example, on a threshing-floor outside a village and another on the shore at Mallia and travelling ‘through practically unknown country’ to Elunda or Spinalonga. Spinalonga, where Evans’s motor-boat adventure had begun, was a seaplane base for Imperial Airways. ‘The Imperial Airways people’, Pendlebury remarks on this occasion, ‘put us up on their yacht and did us proud.’
Up to the summer of 1932 the long exploratory walks had been undertaken partly for study but very largely for pleasure. Pleasure would always be an element. Now there was something else. He decided to write an archaeological guide to the whole island of Crete. It had begun as a bibliography of ancient sites. Rapidly it turned into a plan for ‘a magnum opus, viz a real archaeological guide to Crete which will take some years’. Next, it ‘looks like being about two volumes of the barest details, and these compiled only from our very limited library here’. A year later he had begun writing. ‘It will really be my Index to sites made historical instead of topographical. I ought to be able to get quite a lot of new facts and some’, he adds belligerently, ‘I hope unacceptable ones.’ It would in fact be something which nobody else had the qualifications to undertake.
The extraordinarily precise and detailed notes he had always kept on any expedition were a beginning.
Friday 17th. Leave Sphaka 8.15. Sitia 1.45 (mule of Alexandros 175 dr.) Hotel Athenai 20 dr. a filthy bed. Good restaurant.
Saturday 18th. Leave Sitia 6.50 arrive Palaikastro 10.50. Leave 1.30. Sitia 5.40 (mule 150 dr.)
Sunday 19th. Leave Sitia 7.5 arr. Sphaka 12.5. Leave 1.55. Pachyammos 5.35. Alexandros mule again. 300 dr. (for wait etc).
This from his first visit to Crete in 1928. The mule, of course, was for the women in the party. Only twice in his life, according to the letters, once when he twisted his ankle – an incident which he reports with exasperation – did he break his ‘record of never having ridden’. As time went on the notes grew fuller and the timetables more strenuous – and more and more taken up with the search for unrecognised ancient sites, the material for his archaeological guide. In 1934 Hilda was not with him. She was expecting her second baby and spending the last months of waiting in London in a flat which Humfry and I lived in but which was free while we were both in Greece. In her absence John describes one of his more back-breaking excursions, this time with as companions the Seton Lloyds (Professor Lloyd is an authority on Western Asiatic archaeology) and another friend; the plan was to follow the tracks of Evans in the 1890s. ‘I am going to look over all the sites which he found before he ever began digging and to try and date them in the light of recent knowledge.’ The trip, a great if tiring success, as he comments in his tiny scholarly hand, began with a day in the mountains, whence the party descended to ‘a clean hotel’ in Sitia.
… The next day I got a boat to take us to various islands, round the NE corner of Crete and to Eremopolis (Itanos), where the mules had been sent. Unfortunately the boatman was a rogue. The motor broke, he couldn’t mend it, didn’t want to sail, couldn’t row and it eventually came down to using horrible language and threats of violence to make them row us into a bay by the lighthouse on Cape Sidero on the extreme NE promontory of Crete. Here we luckily found the lighthouse keeper had a mule to carry Joan Lloyd and the lunch while I proceeded to get our animals to come and meet them. 10 miles in 1 1/2 hrs over really rough country isn’t bad going! I got to Eremopolis in time to look over the ruins and to go on, still ahead to Toplu Monastery to prepare for them. There we had true monastery hospitality and a chicken to take on with us. Next day Palaikastro where I searched the surrounding mountains in vain for unknown sites. Next day Zakro where we slept on the beach, next day I went alone to the SE corner of Crete and up a fantastic gorge back to Upper Zakro where we spent the night in a school. On the way I found a few sites and a wild shepherd boy who thought that all the world talked Greek and had been greatly put out by hearing animal noises (?German) coming from someone who couldn’t do so last year. Thence over the hills to Zyro and down to the coast to Makrygialo by Palialimata. In this completely desolate place we slept in the telegraph office and for a joke asked if we could ring up London. To our horror the man said certainly! and began to do so. Luckily the director of the nearest exchange was having dinner and couldn’t be got hold of.
Thence to Hierapetra and so to Pachyammos where I left them and returned partly by foot to Knossos. Last night I slept c. 14 hours …
The description is illustrated by a minuscule, spidery map; he often drew maps in his letters. But nothing save experience of a Greek journey of the sort can give any idea of the terrain, the distances, the exhaustion and the painful joy involved. Not even normal experience is enough. ‘10 miles in 1 1/2 hrs over really rough country’ – it takes an athlete’s physique to do that.
And John was combining exploration with an exacting job at Knossos. With the help of Mercy Money-Coutts and Edith Eccles the cataloguing of the Palace sherds was in its final stages. Meanwhile the property and the site needed attention. The Palace was being fenced with barbed wire to keep out animals as well as people. The cultivation of the vineyard, which this year was not being let out to a tenant, had to be supervised; the result was an unusually good crop and hopes of a profit of over ninety pounds, more than had been coming in for years. There were the customary crowds of visitors, including ‘a perfect spate’ of German tourists. ‘Where’, John wrote with irritation, ‘all these Germans get their money to go cruising round I don’t know.’
The irrit
ation was perhaps aggravated by the scarcity of British cruises which might well have boosted the sales of the Knossos Guide. What was more, when the English did appear there was trouble. That year when the Hellenic Travellers reached Herakleion the captain decided to anchor outside the harbour, and only about eighty people managed to get ashore. The passengers, inflamed by a mischievous rumour about reluctance to pay harbour dues and resentful of the number of free passages for lecturers, cut up rough, the more so since John, who seems to have made a practice of speaking his mind on these occasions, insisted that big ships could perfectly well enter the harbour.
Fortunately he had Canon Wigram on his side. Canon Wigram, annually the indomitable bear-leader of the party, it was who would arrive at the School in Athens with forty exhausted travellers panting for tea – or with equal sangfroid would telephone at the last minute to cancel the arrangement; the women passengers in particular were happily ruled by him, and he was indeed well-informed about the ancient sites included in the trip. At this juncture he wrote to Lunn, originator of the Hellenic cruises, to insist that Pendlebury was justified and ‘evidently knew more about the coast than the captain’. Meanwhile the British Consul discovered that the port pilot had in fact advised entering the harbour, and the affair brought John a number of appreciative letters. There was even an invitation from the Duchess of Devonshire for the Pendleburys to stay at Chatsworth.
It is ironic that this period of achievement – the estate recovered from neglect, the Taverna rebuilt, the Palace put in order, the archaeological relics reorganised, the Knossos Handbook published and admired (Evans himself had expressed pleasure) – should have brought the Pendlebury curatorship to an end.
I have just had a letter from the Committee of the BSA saying that they are making more explicit the rules under which the Curator is appointed. The new clauses are that the Curator is to be responsible whether in residence or not for supervision and necessary action in emergencies and that therefore he is not expected to undertake direct responsibility for independent archaeological work out of reach of Knossos.
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Obviously for John the altered rules made the position untenable. He would have had to give up his season in Egypt. He would have been tied to administrative work. The freedom on which he had always insisted would have vanished. ‘I feel very much that as a matter of courtesy they should have talked it over with me.’ Nevertheless behaving, in spite of his hot temper and natural anger, with dignity, he enquired privately of the Chairman of the Committee (it was Sir John Myres) whether it would be easier for the School were he to resign at once or to stay on for his final term in office and advise his successor. Hilda away in London expecting a baby, his project for the archaeological Guide just beginning to look like a reality – at such short notice the loss of his job must have been an ugly shock. He took it philosophically enough.
Sooner or later I should have had to leave and this gives us a chance of leaving gracefully for a particular reason. I have now got Knossos into order and my only regret is that we shall be leaving the Taverna so soon after we have made it look so nice … Anyhow it will leave my hands free to do my own work and to travel about without always having to get back to pay the men on Saturday!
Five seasons in the post had brought out his essential toughness. He was less than thirty. But he was financially independent; there was ambition in his way of looking to the future; and when just before leaving Knossos to be with Hilda for the birth of the baby he wrote home he made it clear that he was not to be put upon by any Committee.
I am pointing out in my report at the end of the season … that things are happening agriculturally here from October to August and that there is no close season for antiquities to be found. If they hope to get someone who while nominally here for 3 months and paid for that period will either stay here for 10 months (and go barmy) or be permanently on tap in Athens they will be pretty lucky.
Actually I think they are trying to crack the whip – they don’t realise a) that I have cracked too many whips myself to be impressed b) that it may serve with a lazy horse but that with a lively one that’s doing its job they will be thrown!
Next time he saw the Villa he was no longer Curator. The Committee had appointed as successor a tall, pacific, unworldly Cambridge archaeologist and prehistorian, R. W. Hutchinson, whose domestic circumstances as well, perhaps, as his temperament were more amenable to the conditions of the job. By the spring of 1935 he was installed with his elderly mother at Knossos. Evans had not been in Crete since 1931, but he came out this year for the celebrations in his honour – the speeches, the festivities, the unveiling of the bronze bust in the Palace grounds; and John and Hilda arrived in time to see him ‘crowned with bays’.
They felt in their new situation an embarrassment which was probably needless. They were in Crete to work, to travel; their position at Knossos, where they shared the Taverna with the Hutchinsons, was that of visiting students. But the Cretan servants could not immediately grasp the change of employers (the foreigner returning in Greece to the scene of a former happy relationship is always liable to be hailed as one of the understanding ‘old ones’), and John and Hilda could not at first dissuade the staff from coming to them for orders. They refused, of course, to respond, and anyway it is unlikely that Hutchinson, affectionately known to his friends as the Squire, would have minded; as for Mrs Hutchinson, she had not yet learned any Greek. Probably the second Pendlebury anxiety was needless too. Evans was in the Villa Ariadne. The monarch might have abdicated but any spring he might want his throne back for a couple of months; and as a precaution John had ‘told Hutchinson all the ways and traditions’. Nevertheless he could not quite overcome his fears of a regal explosion; and suddenly one has the impression, comic after the grumblings of a few years earlier, that the Evans–Pendlebury relationship had been idyllic.
Nothing, of course, happened. Sir Arthur expressed concern about Mrs Hutchinson’s rheumatism, Sir Arthur duly left for Youlbury. Or perhaps something did happen. The grand, the royal days of the Villa came to an end. For John, at any rate, it seemed that there had been ‘a sad break in the continuity of splendour’. And yet, if one looks back, it is hard to accept the idea of the falling curtain. It is still the trail of the great Evans which must be followed in that superhuman Pendlebury walk in 1934 through East Crete. John had once been expressing fervent though self-interested wishes for the durability of his employer, who had written that his fourth volume was going to take longer than he had thought and would be in two parts like the second: ‘I only hope’, John commented, ‘he does finish it and that I’m not left with it expected by the learned world to finish it off.’ Now the book is written and only its publication is awaited.
We got a wire just before he left to say that an important letter in connection with it was awaiting him, and he was wondering whether he had contravened the blasphemy libel and indecency clause in his contract!
And John, no longer responsible for the Knossos site, no longer in the employ of the insatiable discoverer, forgets his old disagreements and enjoys the joke. Next time he mentions Evans it is with recognition of kindness. ‘I had a very charming letter … thanking me for Tell el-Amarna, which he found most readable, and for bits of information about sites.’ In the long run few of us found the old giant resistible.
Perhaps in making 1935 the date of his last visit to Crete Evans chose the right moment to bid farewell. There was already disquiet in the air. He had spoken in one of his letters of the disturbances that year. The revolt petered out. But it left a bitter aftermath. There were arrests and trials; a number of officers, among them Sarafis, who was to be one of the left-wing leaders in the Civil War of the 1940s, were marched round the Athens barracks-ground and stripped of their insignia. In Crete, traditionally Venizelist, the feeling was violent. A trial was held at the naval base of Souda, and from a hotel in Canea, the nearby capital of the island, John reported the presence of ‘rascally attorneys suborning witness
es for the court-martial’.
West Crete is full of the cry Τουφεκίζουνε τὰ κουπέλια (they are shooting the boys) quite a sort of Irish They’re hanging men and women for the wearing of the green … Many rumours here as to Royalist return backed by Venizelos of all people but not the old George of Greece but the Duke of Kent and η Πριγκεπήσσα Μαρίvα [Princess Marina]. Their health has been drunk a lot in West Crete.
A Royalist return there indeed would be, though not by the Duke of Kent and not immediately. Greece settled down again in an uneasy fashion, and John returned to his normal preoccupations.
There were enormous walks, including a trip with the Squire (whom he greatly liked) up Mount Ida and on to Yerakari. Evans’s foreman Manolaki Akoumianakis, who was still working for the School at Knossos, accompanied the party. Yerakari, a village in the Amari district west of Ida, was his birthplace, but he had not visited it for twenty-three years: now ‘the round of visits was amazing’. John was still searching for ancient remains. ‘Two more sites will make 100 in two years – not bad going for the hundred cities of Crete’ (to which Homer had referred). Able to give his whole mind to the quest, by midsummer of 1935 he had found a total of sixty-one in that year alone. He was still the resolute athlete, given to skipping for a quarter of an hour in the early morning before breakfast (‘I find it quickens up the muscles which walking is apt to increase but slow down …’). He was still the joker, full of repetitive family jests about drinking capacity, or delighted to relieve some social occasion by a juvenile secret game which involved inducing his companions to use some particular word (‘My greatest triumph was getting him [the Squire] to say “bimetallist” and her [Mrs Hutchinson] “bivalve”’).