Flint-hearts and arrowheads
John Jolliffe
PITT RIVERS by Mark Bowden CUP, £24.95, pp. 198 Besides reaching the rank of Lieutenant-General, Augustus Lane Fox Pitt Rivers (1827-1900) created unique archaeological and anthropological collec- tions, organised excavations at over 40 sites and founded museums both at Farnham in Dorset and at Oxford. They were to be instruments of public education, but with the added purpose of taking rural minds off the issues of radical politics. His many disciples, including Sir Mortimer Wheeler, regarded him as 'the father of scientific archaeology', and he inherited from his principal mentor, Canon Greenwell (the inventor of the trout fly Greenwell's Glory), a hatred of the 'ignorant and greedy spirit of curiosity-hunting', and shared his view that
the urn, the arrowhead and the dagger pos- sess a very trifling interest unless we know the circumstances of their deposit . ..
The General learned habits of meticulous study and a love of classification in the cir- cle of Darwin, T. H. Huxley and Herbert Spencer in which he was fully at home.
As a young man he had followed his father and uncle into the Grenadiers. The family name was Lane Fox, to which he added Pitt Rivers on inheriting no less than 27,000 acres in Dorset, Somerset and Wilt- shire in 1880, when he left the army to devote himself to his researches.
He only played a minor part in the local activities that would normally be expected of a landowner on such a large scale (though he applied to both Gladstone and Salisbury for a peerage on the grounds of the size of his estates). On one occasion it was alleged that having invited his neigh- bours, Lords Pembroke and Shaftesbury, to shoot in Cranborne Chase, he suddenly stopped the shoot and made all the party hunt for flint arrowheads for the rest of the day. In about 1851 he had joined the com- mittee set up to report on which of the var- ious types of rifle should be adopted by the army and, having studied musketry training in France, Belgium and Piedmont, became principal instructor at the new School of Musketry at Hythe. When the Brigade of Guards stopped at Malta on its way to the Crimea, he supervised their training and even called his second son St George after the rifle range on the island. St George developed great scientific gifts of his own, as well as a distinctly uncertain temper. He was once fined for an assault on a fellow member of the Theosophical Society, but his invention of the carbon filament was acknowledged as a key factor in the devel- opment of electric light.
Apart from his excavations in Cranborne Chase, Sussex, Yorkshire and North Wales, the General's chief theoretical achieve- ments were the development of `typologies', that is to say the study of sequences of all aspects of material culture, and his pioneering work in linking archaeology and anthropology. It must sadly be admitted, however, that in spite of his great qualities and achievements he was often capable of remarkably unpleasant behaviour. His wife, Alice Stanley, was an elder sister of the tyrannical and self- centred Rosalind Countess of Carlisle, who among other intolerable pieces of inter- ference succeeded in depriving her eldest son of his rightful inheritance at Castle Howard. Another sister was the short-lived mother of Bertrand Russell, who recorded after a visit:
My Aunt Alice practised petty economies to an almost incredible degree: if any of the bacon or eggs remained on a visitor's plate at breakfast it was put back into the dish for the next corner . . I saw one of her sons have a tug of war with a lady visitor for the last plate of pudding; he won, and ate it up under her eyes ...
Thomas Hardy described a visit to Pitt Rivers's house at Rushmore as 'pleasant, notwithstanding the trying temper of the hostess'. Quarrelsome, possessive and mis- erly though she was, it was hardly reason- able of her husband to write to her:
Your temper is the cause of all the misery between us . . . more stony-hearted woman never existed ... I assure you that for the last four years now you have made my life a per- fect curse to me.
He also behaved badly to tradesmen and tenants. He ejected from the manor house at Hinton St Mary a man of 86 who suffered from bronchitis, with a wife crippled by rheumatism, falsely pretending that he or his son needed to occupy the house in order to manage the estate, and that he was only acting from a sense of duty. In all the annals of Victorian hypocrisy there can hardly be a more cruel example.
Mark Bowden is himself an archaeologist and an officer of the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments. He has written a wonderfully authoritative as well as read- able book, in spite of being hindered by the destruction of much important material. He sensibly follows a thematic rather than a strictly chronological approach, his refer- ences and bibliography are models of their kind, and no trouble has been too much for him in this record of a truly astonishing life.
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