Love's Obsession

by Judy Powell

  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 w
as 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 reviewer77 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?’