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Walter Abel Heurtley

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Walter Abel Heurtley
OBE FSA
Born(1882-10-24)24 October 1882
Ashington, Sussex
Died2 January 1955(1955-01-02) (aged 72)
Dublin
OccupationClassical archaeologist
Spouse
Eileen Mary O'Connell
​
​
(m. 1914)​
FamilyCharles Abel Heurtley (grandfather)
Academic background
Education
Academic work
Institutions
Military career
AllegianceUnited Kingdom
Service / branchBritish Army
RankTemporary Major
Unit
WarsFirst World War

Walter Abel Heurtley OBE FSA (24 October 1882 – 2 January 1955) was a British classical archaeologist.

Early life and education

Walter Abel Heurtley was born on 24 October 1882,[1] in Ashington in Sussex. His mother was Mary Elizabeth Heurtley (née Brown). His father was Charles Abel Heurtley, a Church of England vicar at Ashington, a descendant of French Heugenots and the son of the theologian and Oxford professor Charles Abel Heurtley.[2]

Heurtley was educated at Uppingham School, a public school in Rutland, and won a scholarship from there to read classics at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.[3] He matriculated on 1 October 1902, and graduated with a second in 1905.[4] He joined the part-time Volunteer Force of the British Army in 1906, as a second lieutenant in the Royal Engineers.[5] From 1907, Heurtley taught at The Oratory School, a Roman Catholic boarding school then based in Birmingham.[6]

During the First World War, Heurtley joined the East Lancashire Regiment of the British Army and served in Macedonia.[7] On 21 November 1914, he was made a temporary lieutenant in the regiment's ninth battalion.[8] He rose to the rank of temporary major, was Mentioned in Dispatches three times, and was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1919 for his service, from May 1917, as deputy governor of the British military prison at Salonika in Greece.[9] According to A. W. Lawrence, who later knew Heurtley at the British School at Athens (BSA), he first acquired an interest in archaeology during his time in Salonika.[3] He relinquished the post of deputy governor in February 1919.[10]

Archaeological career

After the war, Heurtley moved to the University of Oxford to take a diploma in classical archaeology, studying under Stanley Casson, the assistant director of the BSA and another former officer of the East Lancashire Regiment.[11] Heurtley joined the BSA in 1921 on an Oxford studentship.[7] He excavated in Macedonia with Casson in the spring of that year, and later in 1921 joined the excavations of the BSA's director, Alan Wace, at the Bronze Age site of Mycenae. At Mycenae, Heurtley worked alongside Winifred Lamb, a curator from Cambridge's Fitzwilliam Museum. Heurtley was tasked with preparing the initial scholarly publication of the stelai found in the prehistoric cemetery designated Grave Circle A.[7]

Oxford University's Craven Committee awarded Heurtley a grant to carry out excavations in Macedonia during the 1922–1923 digging season. Casson resigned as assistant director in 1922;[12] Heurtley was the favoured choice of Wace, who felt that his experience as a schoolmaster and prison governor would be helpful in managing the school's hostel, and that Heurtley's wife Eileen would also be a "great help" in the administration of the school. Heurtley was accordingly given, in 1923, the assistant directorship and the role of librarian, on an annual salary of £200 (equivalent to £14,408 in 2023) and with free accommodation in the BSA's hostel.[6] His work at the BSA included organising the school's collection of potsherds and responsibility for the building of a monument to the poet Rupert Brooke on the island of Skyros, where Brooke had died in 1915.[13]

Heurtley carried out a survey in 1923 with his fellow Craven student William Lindsell Cuttle to find possible excavation sites in western Macedonia and the Chalkidiki peninsula.[7] He continued to excavate in Macedonia until 1931, working at sites including Servia, Kritsana and Amenochori.[14] Winifred Lamb joined Heurtley's excavations at the tell site of Vardaroftsa near Thessaloniki in March 1925,[15] where the excavation team lived in tents, supported by Heurtley's wife Eileen and her sister, who cooked for them.[3] The excavation team included Greek-speaking refugees from Ionia, resettled in Greece following the Turkish invasion of their homeland in 1922.[16] Heurtley also excavated, again with Lamb, at Sarátse in 1929.[15] In 1930, he excavated tholos tombs at Marmariani in Thessaly, alongside Theodore Cressy Skeat, then a student at the BSA. In the same year, he worked at Vinča-Belo Brdo in Yugoslavia, under the site's discoverer, Miloje Vasić, and on his own excavations at Ithaca, which he conducted from August to October with funding from the diplomat, poet and politician Rennell Rodd.[13] He continued to dig at Ithaca until 1932.[1]

The BSA announced in November 1931 that Heurtley's position as Assistant Director would be abolished, owing to financial constraints brought on by the Greek economic crisis of the early 1930s.[17] His employment continued until the end of the summer excavation season in 1932; Heurtley worked that season at Troy, under the American archaeologist Carl Blegen.[13] In 1933, he was appointed as librarian of the Department of Antiquities of the Mandate for Palestine, a position he held until 1939.[1] His assistant in the library was the Palestinian intellectual Stephan Hanna Stephan.[18] Heurtley also edited the journal of the Department of Antiquities..[19]

Heurtley was bursar of The Oratory School, by then based in Oxfordshire, during the Second World War.[13] He retired in 1945, and moved to his wife's ancestral home of Derrynane House in County Kerry, Ireland. Derrynane had been the home of Daniel O'Connell, the nineteenth-century Irish Catholic leader known as "the Liberator", who was Eileen Heurtley's great-grandfather.[20]

Personal life, honours and death

Heurtley's elder brother, Archibald Charles, was born in 1872 and went up to Christ Church, Oxford, to read classics in 1890; another brother, Claud, was born in 1874.[21] Shortly before the First World War, Heurtley travelled to County Kerry to study the Irish language, where he met Eileen Mary O'Connell; the two married in 1914.[22] They had no children.[13] Heurtley converted to Catholicism, his wife's religion: he was later accused of doing so in order to marry her, but explained his decision as a result of being impressed by the beauty of the Baroque churches of Austria, where he had holidayed before the First World War. When publishing the results of his excavations at Ithaca, Heurtley insisted that the word "Madonna" be removed from the description of a small ivory figurine of a monkey found at the site.[23]

Heurtley travelled widely, both with Eileen and alone, and generally spent his summer holidays visiting museums and archaeological sites in Eastern Europe. These journeys provided material for his 1939 monograph Prehistoric Macedonia, still considered current by Heurtley's biographer, Rachel Hood, in 1998.[24]. Eileen went with her husband on one journey through the Erymanthos Valley to Sparta, mostly without the aid of modern roads, though he ascended Mount Olympus and Mount Smolikas without her.[3]

Heurtley was elected as a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in 1936.[19] He suffered from bouts of malaria, the first in 1924,[13] and died of cancer on 2 January 1955, in Dublin.[25]

Selected works

  • Heurtley, Walter Abel (1939). Prehistoric Macedonia: An Archaeological Reconnaissance of Greek Macedonia (West of the Struma) in the Neolithic, Bronze, and Early Iron Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. OCLC 459304061.

References

  1. ^ a b c Israel Exploration Journal 1956, p. 268.
  2. ^ Roberts 1912, p. 31; Hood 1998, p. 147.
  3. ^ a b c d Hood 1998, p. 147.
  4. ^ Roberts 1912, p. 31.
  5. ^ The London Gazette, 21 December 1906, p. 8974.
  6. ^ a b Hood 1998, p. 147; Gill 2018, p. 123.
  7. ^ a b c d Gill 2018, p. 123.
  8. ^ Supplement to the London Gazette, 3 December 1914, p. 1136.
  9. ^ Hood 1998, p. 147. For the date of Heurtley's appointment, see Supplement to the London Gazette, 23 July 1917, p. 7470; for that of his OBE, see Supplement to the London Gazette, 3 June 1919, p. 6949.
  10. ^ Supplement to the London Gazette, 11 August 1919, p. 10205.
  11. ^ Gill 2018, p. 123. For Casson's wartime service, see Myres 1945, p. 1.
  12. ^ Gill 2018, p. 123. For the date, see Myres 1944, p. 613.
  13. ^ a b c d e f Hood 1998, p. 148.
  14. ^ Israel Exploration Journal 1956, p. 268; Lamb 1940, pp. 28–29
  15. ^ a b Gill 2018, pp. 124–128.
  16. ^ Gill 2018, p. 125.
  17. ^ Hood 1998, p. 148; Gill 2013, p. 231.
  18. ^ Irving 2021, p. 165.
  19. ^ a b The Antiquaries Journal 1955, p. 285.
  20. ^ Hood 1998, pp. 145–148.
  21. ^ Foster 1893, col. 288.
  22. ^ Hood 1998, pp. 145–147.
  23. ^ Hood 1998, pp. 148–149.
  24. ^ Heurtley 1939; Hood 1998, p. 147.
  25. ^ The London Gazette, 15 February 1955, p. 984; Hood 1998, p. 148.

Works cited

Further reading

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