Nobody knows for certain if Max Mallowan had a long-term affair with Barbara Parker, the woman who organised the dig at Nimrud and whom he married less than two years after Agatha’s death. Such a liaison, if it happened, was inevitably conducted with secrecy. It was also surrounded by rumour and gossip, some of which appears to have reached Rosalind’s ears; and, very possibly, Agatha’s also. Was it the case that, despite her best efforts to stay with her second husband and to keep him happy in every way, Max had betrayed her just as Archie had?
Although she was eighteen years younger than Agatha, and obviously far less of a personage, Barbara Parker was an interesting woman in her own right; highly singular, in fact. In Jared Cade’s version of Agatha’s life – which naturally takes the view that Max and Barbara did have an affair – Barbara is portrayed as somewhat pathetic: a hardworking spinster whose ‘compliant nature and dog-like devotion [to Max] masked unfilled sexual needs’. This is presumably the view of Judith Gardner (and her husband Graham), but it is not the way she is generally remembered. ‘Rather magnificent, Barbara,’ says Dr Julian Reade, who was a young archaeologist in the 1960s. ‘She had a reverberating whisper – so that “He’s one of them” would go ringing across the room.’63
‘I adored Barbara,’ says Joan Oates, who shared a tent with her on the Nimrud dig. ‘She was an unusual person. A bit of a character. You could almost put her on a list of extraordinary British women who spent a lot of time in the Near East, going back to people like Lady Hester Stanhope – she was in that mould. She was terrific. A little bit odd, but you had to be to live that sort of life.’64
The way in which Barbara fell into the world of archaeology shows how small it was – yet wide open to those with enthusiasm – in the pre-war years. She saw the announcement of a course in western Asian archaeology on a noticeboard at the Courtauld where she was studying Chinese. Before this she had worked as a mannequin at Worth and gone to RADA; now she decided to enrol upon this course. The only other student was Rachel Maxwell-Hyslop, who says: ‘The course existed on paper only. Nobody had ever asked to do it!’65 But with the encouragement of Stephen Glanville – ‘bless his heart’ – the two women went to see Sidney Smith at the British Museum, with whom they would study cuneiform. ‘He was amazed. In actual fact he was so amazed he was marvellous.’ Smith gave tutorials after hours at the museum, sending his students to sources that were only published in German, which neither of them read, although later they were joined by another female student who was fortuitously bilingual. Rachel Maxwell-Hyslop was a highly educated postgraduate, with a mind attuned to academic study; Barbara was nothing of the kind, but she completed the two-year course and although, according to Henrietta McCall’s biography of Max Mallowan, she was never ‘taken terribly seriously by her colleagues’, she evidently possessed a good and inquisitive brain. ‘Archaeology was so alive at that time,’ says Rachel Maxwell-Hyslop, whose fascination with the subject had been fired by hearing Leonard Woolley lecture. ‘He’d put up slides, say, “This is the Flood!” – very exciting. You never knew what was going to come up. And there were very few people in it. We all knew each other, and everybody had come in in odd ways.’
When Max was appointed to the Institute of Archaeology, Rachel Maxwell-Hyslop became his assistant lecturer and Barbara, who had worked in Palestine just before the war, was ‘shot out to Baghdad’ in 1949, there to run the BSA house. By then Max had known her for some time; a wartime letter to Agatha tells her to ask Barbara – then working for the fire service in London – to ‘send my Herodotus’ out to Tripolitania. When she arrived in Iraq she had very little Arabic, but she learned quickly, and she got on well with Arabs. Her connections within Iraq society were invaluable to Max Mallowan. ‘You couldn’t get anywhere in Baghdad without knowing the right person, and if things were ever difficult then Barbara would know the right person one should ask to dinner.’66 So it was that Max reaped the benefits not just of Agatha’s wealth and status but of Barbara’s insider knowledge.
Barbara was lean and fine-boned, with an angular face and large eloquent eyes. She was the physical model for Valerie Hobhouse in Hickory Dickory Dock: ‘Valerie rather like Barbara!’ Agatha wrote in one of her notebooks. It has been said that Barbara was very alluring, although the general impression is that – unlike the rakishly attractive Valerie – she was not quite assured enough to be a femme fatale. John Mallowan remembers that at Greenway ‘you’d try and keep her away from plates and glasses because she was a bit clumsy’. But a photograph taken on site at Nimrud shows a stark difference in the silhouettes of Barbara and Agatha; the one with the slightly drooping, heron-like stance of the former mannequin, the other massive as an ageing bull. ‘Barbara wasn’t really elegant,’ says Joan Oates, ‘she was a bit bizarre, she wore Kurdish trousers. But she was tall and very slim.’ And she clearly had some attraction for the eminent Arabs with whom she mixed so easily. On one occasion in the 1950s she was taken to court in Baghdad, accused of flouting a new law, which said that sewage could no longer be dumped in the Tigris (although with houses like the BSA residence, whose drains ran into the river, there was no simple alternative). ‘And then she was summonsed,’ says Joan Oates, ‘she had no lawyer, so she decided to defend the case herself. In her Arabic, which was quite good by then. And she defended herself in court, and she was found not guilty, and the judge took her out to lunch.’ Similarly, Agatha wrote to Rosalind in 1951 of‘our Barbara, now on great terms of intimacy with Sheikh Abdullah, from whom she had collected twelve turkeys, a set of divan pillows with variegated satin ends and a prism . . .’
Joan Oates met Barbara for the first time in 1952, when they were both staying in the BSA house, awaiting the arrival of Max and Agatha. ‘The previous year Max had told her to go and build a dig house. And she had gone up and built a house [in fact she extended what was already there]. Impressive. Back of beyond, she was on her own, she had to hire the labour – Max just told her to do these things. And anything difficult, she did beautifully. The simple things were always getting her sacked.’67 This was the joke with Barbara: Max sacked her every day. She was, wrote Robert Hamilton, a classical scholar who worked on the dig, ‘the good-natured butt of Max’s occasional satirical humour’. She was also the target of his volatile temper. Although a capable epigraphist she was not a naturally concentrated worker – ‘Her notebooks of the period have a harried look about them,’ wrote Henrietta McCall68 – and Max, for whatever reason, constantly blew off steam in her direction. In 1955 Agatha wrote to Rosalind that ‘lots of imposing tablets’ were turning up on the dig, and that Barbara was consequently ‘very busy and full of gloom. “I knew this would happen if you had no epigraphist but me”, actually doing very well with constant goading by Max.’
So she was capable of the hard scholarly work of deciphering cuneiform; but her real talents lay in her ability to understand and penetrate Iraqi society. Even after the 1958 revolution, the contacts Barbara had made held good: ‘The BSA owe her for that,’ says Rachel Maxwell-Hyslop. ‘It was a difficult job, starting off with being a woman in the first place.’ But she did a good deal else beside, almost to the point of masochism. Max, it was said, knew the extent of her devotion (whether to the work or to himself) and used it. For example she would pay the workmen on the dig; once, it was said, she had forgotten to go to the bank, paid the first man then asked him if she could borrow the money to pay the second, borrowed again and so on to the end of the line. ‘She was ingenious,’ says Joan Oates. She would also do the accounts, although they never came out right, and would put in her own money (of which she had little) to make the totals fit. ‘Whereas Max would come along and say, I need some money for the trip up to Kirkuk, to take some money off this oil company, about £200 will do . . .’69
It was in the winter of 1952 that Barbara took Joan on a trip from Baghdad to Mosul in order to get fruit trees for the terrace on the dig house. ‘And then it starts to pour with rain. Really dumping rain. And once it sta
rts to rain like this the roads were just impassable. But she had to do this, because Agatha wanted trees.’ In the end Barbara persuaded two policemen to take her to Nimrud, about thirty kilometres from Mosul. ‘And we get to Nimrud and Barbara gets the policemen to dig the holes for the trees.’
Agatha and Barbara were friends, although not intimates. They seem to have liked each other well enough: ‘A Barbara type! – good company’ read another note in one of Agatha’s books. The two women travelled together each year from Baghdad to Nimrud – ‘we go up like ladies’ – a few days after the men. But as the story of the fruit trees shows, Barbara also worked for Agatha; and Agatha was always in the position to command. Back in England Barbara had a fairly solitary life, living as she did in her nephew’s flat in Kensington. The visitors’ book at Greenway shows that every year, almost without fail, she spent two or three weeks at the house from August to September. If she was there for Max she was also there at Agatha’s invitation, beholden to Agatha’s hospitality; rather as Nancy Neele had once been on her visit to Styles.
But was Barbara there for Max? Joan Oates says categorically not. ‘I don’t believe the story of the affair at all. I lived in the house at Baghdad, and it was a house where all the bedrooms opened into the inner courtyard. I shared a tent with her at Nimrud, I really knew her quite well. The story actually originated with somebody who stayed in the house at Baghdad. It was a mischievous story.’
Joan Oates was married (to the subsequent dig director) in 1956, after which she would not, of course, have shared a tent with Barbara; nonetheless she is adamant in her belief that there was no affair, and so, too, is John Mailowan, who is clear and calm on the subject. ‘I remember Judy and Graham [Gardner], and I think they just got it totally wrong. I don’t think there was anything between Barbara and Uncle Max. They were good friends, and they shared an interest, so getting married after Agatha died was a logical thing to do. And Barbara helped Uncle Max with Agatha towards the end, and rendered genuine assistance. Barbara was always – she was a very faithful person. I think Uncle Max always tried to do his best for her workwise. I think he may have had some influence in what jobs she got. But I think that’s as far as it went.’70
Other people who knew Barbara and Max are of this opinion, that they were friends and no more, and that they married in November 1977 to assuage each other’s loneliness. A photograph of the two together does have a marital look, although it was taken in the 1960s; they are on a sofa in an unidentified sitting room (possibly out east), Max reading comfortably in his slippers, Barbara close to him, smiling at the camera, with a bottle of Gordon’s gin on a cushion at her side. They look not exactly blissful, but familiar with each other. And there are those who say that this familiarity was born of a longstanding love affair, which after thirty years or so was finally regularised in marriage. One friend does not state that there was definitely an affair, but comes close to asserting his own belief in it. ‘What people say [meaning those who deny the affair] may be the truth in their eyes. Which may have involved a certain amount of turning a blind eye.’
Judith and Graham Gardner did not go in for blind-eye turning. In the course of their collaboration with Jared Cade they regaled him with tales of Max’s infidelity; and not just with Barbara. They say, for example, that Max conducted affairs with the young female students at the Institute of Archaeology after he was appointed lecturer-teacher in 1947. There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever of this. According to Julian Reade, Max hardly had any students anyway (he remembers just one of note, a talented young Iraqi whose PhD was published with Max’s help), so the idea that a cluster of young girls was fluttering around him is entirely misleading. According to the Gardners, however, Judith’s mother Nan discovered that Max was conducting casual liaisons and ‘broke the news to Agatha . . . Nan had approached Max for advice after a friend’s daughter was uncertain how to pursue an interest in archaeology. Max had offered to help by giving the girl a place in his class and, although he formed no relationship with her, reports of his friendships with other female students got back to the girl’s mother, who in turn told Nan.’71
The omnipresence of Nan in Agatha’s life – which Cade’s book requires the reader to accept, as Nan is the source of almost every one of its stories – is simply not borne out by facts. The two women were good friends, certainly. Nan’s name is the first entry in the visitors’ book at Greenway (‘Good luck to Greenway and Agatha and Max, lots of love Nanski’), but also there at the time was Dorothy North, and Nan features no more than she in Agatha’s correspondence. Max refers to her during the war, saying that he owes her a letter; Agatha mentions her as an entertaining dinner guest who amused Allen Lane into the small hours; but although Agatha wrote to Judith ‘I shall miss her very much’ after Nan’s death in 1959, there is no sense that she was an intimate friend of the kind that Jared Cade implies. Agatha was simply not the type to have confiding relationships. For all her dependency on Max she was in many ways a proud, grand, self-contained creature, and it is impossible to imagine her having hushed little female discussions about her husband’s infidelity over the teacups in Chelsea.
It is said that Max ‘had an eye for a pretty girl’. In Baghdad, for example, he apparently became quite smitten with the glamorous wife of an ambassador. But this is quite usual behaviour among men, not necessarily meaningful, and certainly out east the shrewd eye of Joan Oates saw nothing untoward.
Yet the very nature of the Mallowan marriage might well have led Max towards other women. It was not just that Agatha was growing old while he was merely middle-aged; it was something more subtle. The money was Agatha’s, the houses were Agatha’s, the patronage was Agatha’s, and everybody knew it. In such circumstances – which, in less exaggerated form, are quite familiar – it is not uncommon for a man to take something that is definitively his own. That is to say, a mistress.
There were hints in Agatha’s earlier letters that Max might want to look elsewhere from time to time, and that she would accept him doing so. Agatha knew the nature of her marriage. It was not a great romance, the age difference was very considerable and she was a woman without physical allure (although Max was not abundant in this quality). The truth was that Max simply did not have the power to hurt her as Archie had done. A dalliance or two, she could take. The only pain she could not endure was to be left alone again, and she did not ever really believe that that would happen.
Even if she were Max’s mistress, Barbara was not a threat. She could offer nothing to compare with the life Max had with Agatha. ‘Nevertheless,’ writes Jared Cade, ‘[Agatha] still grieved over the loss of Max’s love for her’: a statement without a shred of supporting evidence, although the assumption must be that Agatha spoke of her grief to that all-knowing confidante, Nan Kon.
More concrete evidence (albeit uncorroborated) comes from Graham Gardner, who visited Baghdad with his wife in 1962; although the Mallowans were not there at the time, the couple stayed at the BSA house and Graham photographed some of the Nimrud treasures. According to his account, he went to Swan Court before leaving for Baghdad, to receive instructions from Max as to the photographs he was to take. At the flat he found that his arrival was unexpected, and that Max and Barbara were ‘furtively ensconced’ in a ‘lovers’ tryst’. The precise meaning of this is unclear. Barbara lived not far away in Kensington, and unless Graham Gardner caught her and Max in flagrante – which he would surely have mentioned – it is entirely possible that she was visiting Max as a friend and colleague.
Nor is there any evidence for the statement, made by the Gardners, that Max was ‘keeping Barbara’ (presumably with Agatha’s money): as Henrietta McCall writes, she was ‘Max’s slave’, his secretary and generally indispensable aide, so if he helped her in return this would be in the nature of things. The Gardners also say that the affair was conducted at Winterbrook House. This, again, is hard to prove. It was said – not by the Gardners – that on Barbara’s visits to Greenway she and Max wou
ld shut themselves away for long periods in the library, leaving Barbara’s plimsolls outside the door as a sign that they should not be disturbed. But the truth is that nobody knows what went on between Max and Barbara. As with the disappearance, so with the affair: Jared Cade’s book presents a weight of unsubstantiated claims as if they were undisputed facts.
That said, Max’s behaviour after Agatha’s death was not quite that of a grief-stricken widower. It was said by the Gardners that he ‘was impatient for Agatha to die so that he could marry Barbara’;72 in fact he had an eye elsewhere, notably on the wildly glamorous Baroness Camoys, who lived close to Winterbrook at the magnificent Stonor Park, near Henley, one of the great Catholic houses.73 Jeanne Camoys Stonor was born in 1913, the product of an illegitimate mating between the daughter of an Irish viscount and a Spanish grandee. She was a genuine thoroughbred beauty, capable of dazzling men with her charm, but she had a lethal streak. She swore like a stevedore (‘and you can eff orf out of it’), supported the Nazis unashamedly during the war (‘Olé and Heil Hitler!’) and treated her kindly husband with something close to contempt. She cultivated Agatha and Max – her rich and famous neighbours – and, when her husband died in March 1976, she saw in the recently bereaved Max a suitable replacement. Her calculation was that Agatha would have left him millions. The situation was, of course, rather more complex; but it seems that for a short time in 1976 Max did see himself as the likely husband of this lurid and exotic man-eater. Then, for whatever reason – perhaps his friends advised him that it would not look entirely suitable, perhaps Jeanne learned that Max was not so cash-rich as she had believed – Max quit the Stonor scene.
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