A Bournemouth Boy

A Bournemouth Boy

 1965

“I Can Wait! “

The shop was in Lower Charminster in Bournemouth, a suburb on a main road north out of town, amid a parade of other shops which included a bakers, a green grocers, a tobacconists and newspaper shop, car sales forecourt, and refrigerator salesroom. In this domestic parade was “Antiquities “, a small but bright and beautifully laid out shop selling Middle Eastern pottery and artefacts, some of which may have been thousands of years old.

The proprietor of the shop was Michael Ridley, an archaeologist who I had known since I had been 13, perhaps two years before, when I first joined him on one of his excavations with the group of amateur archaeologists that he led, the Bournemouth Archaeological Association.

My home was very close to the shop, just up the hill behind it, and it was not much of a detour to call in there on the way home from school. So that is what I did one day because I had something on my mind, and I wanted to get Michael’s advice.

It was a very small shop, about the size of a large caravan. On display there were glazed and unglazed, patterned and plain, pots of different shapes and sizes, colours and decorations. The walls were painted white and the pots were on glass shelves, each one with a small label on a stand before it, “Sumerian”, “Grecian”, “Roman“ and sometimes a description, a date, a dynasty, and a price. Along the shelf in front of the shop window were perhaps half a dozen pottery lamps, little flat round red pots with two holes in the top, one for filling with oil, the other for a wick.

At the back of the shop Michael sat at a desk, tweed jacket, soft shirt and tie, tousled hair and descending light brown beard but clean shaven cheeks. Jackie, his girlfriend, later to be his wife, slim and elegant, long straight nut brown hair, tight skirt and jumper, sat at a stool beside the desk.

I was a bit uncomfortable going in to the shop because I was afraid that if I moved wrongly some priceless pot would fall off a glass shelf beside me and smash to the ground, in many little pieces. I was only 15 or so after all.

My problem was that I was beginning to want to be an archaeologist when I left school. I didn’t know how to become one and I only knew one person whom I could ask. That person was Michael.

Besides directing the excavations of the amateur archaeology group his current biography says that in 1955 he was present at the opening of the Han tomb at Lei Cheng Uk in China. It also says that he has written many books and has been curator at museums in Rochdale and Bournemouth, a director at the Tutankhamun Exhibition in Dorchester and as of 2008, he was keeper of Oriental Art and Archaeology at the Russell-Cotes Museum in Bournemouth.

So, entering his shop with some care, I took my school bag off my back and put it by my feet, not sure where it would be safe to stand.

I said “Hallo”, and after a few pleasantries, asked him, “How can I become an archaeologist?”

For the time at which I was asking the question, Michael gave me a clear and correct answer. He said that there were a limited number of archaeologist positions in museums in this country and abroad, and the people in those jobs didn’t tend to retire because, why would you want to? He then said that you basically have to wait for one to die, at which point the post becomes available for applications.

I was a bit taken aback by the bleak future for my hopes, and it is possible that my response wasn’t quite appropriate, but in my defence I was young. I said, “Oh! That’s alright, I can wait “, which wasn’t received well. He and Jackie both huffed dismissively towards me, as I smiled winningly, to cover my disappointment.

Had I been waiting for his obituary to appear, I fear I would still be doing so. Years later I would meet Jackie when she was organising Teddy Bear Fairs in the 2000s. Although not necessarily in the best of health he was still going at that time, and as I retired from the world of work in 2016, I wouldn’t be surprised if he was still working in some form or another then.

As I have said, I was 13 years old when I first went on an archaeological excavation with the Bournemouth Archaeological Association. One Sunday morning I went up to St Catherine’s Hill, near Christchurch, where I had been told they were digging. I found the group there and asked if I could dig with them. They were excavating an area that they believed might contain the footings of a medieval Chapel. Somebody gave me a trowel, a hand shovel, a kneeling pad, and a bucket. They then set me to work in a corner of the trench, with some basic instructions, and keeping an eye on me, left me to dig.

St Catherine’s Hill is the 53-metre High endpoint of a ridge of high ground that overlooks Christchurch . It is a Site of Special Scientific Interest with some areas additionally designated as Special Protection Areas and/or Special Areas of Conservation. The hill provides a range of habitats with both wet and dry heathland, coniferous and broadleaf woodland and scrubland; and is home to some rare flora and fauna including the sand lizard, smooth snake, silver-studded blue butterfly and two types of carnivorous plant.

There is evidence of historical use of the hilltop, perhaps as an observation point, but also for military training, right from Iron Age and Roman times up to the second World War.

There were about ten people in the archaeology group that day, with ages between twenty and late fifties. They were both men and women, members of an organisation whose stated purpose was to “To promote the study of archaeology for the benefit of the general public”.

For me, growing up in the 50s, Sunday had always been the day when nothing happened. Most kids my age kicked around at home, and any that regularly did something went to church or faith based activities. My family didn’t approve of anything like that so they stayed at home, but were happy enough to provide me with a packed lunch for a day of digging.

The excavation on St Catherine’s Hill was in the middle of a rectangular bank and ditch earthwork. In some places there was quite a high bank with a slight ditch and in others both bank and ditch were almost absent. The earthwork enclosed a rectangular area of gorse, brush and ferns, and in the middle of that area was a small clearing where the bracken and gorse that grew elsewhere did not grow but was replaced by a fine short growing turf of grass. Michael Ridley, directing the excavation, had laid out a trench to explore that grassy area expecting to find the footings of a demolished structure close to the surface.

Our excavations found nothing definite but when we returned to the site after a particularly torrential rainstorm we found differential puddling and silting that seemed, according to Michael, to mark out the plan of a small building that could have been a little chapel from which any significant structural timber or stonework had been removed.

I was the youngest person to work with the group, and as far as I know I continued to be the youngest attender at the groups events for many years.

It may have been the following summer after I joined the group that a family came to it who had a massive influence on the course of events for us all. They were Richard and Sophie Pryor with their three daughters.

The first significant change was that Richard drove the 1950s Royal Blue coach which he owned up onto St Catherine’s Hill on our Sundays, so that we could all have a civilised cup of tea at lunch break.

Richard was, in the best possible interpretation, a bit of an Indiana Jones in character. He was tall, lean and physical, he wore his hair in a crew cut, had strong eyebrows, a strong square chin, and was clean shaven with a seemingly permanent five o’clock shadow. Sophie, his wife, was French, smaller and darker, with olive skin and a bob of charcoal black hair. She wore strong eye glasses for shortness of sight, and she spoke good English with a strong deliciously husky accent. They were both comfortably stylish, and oozed enthusiasm and positivity.

Richard and Sophie would invite a small group of us to join them in day trips out to sites of archaeological interest within driving distance from Bournemouth. Richard would be driving us, in his short wheelbase Land Rover along country roads and rough dirt tracks to explore something somebody had seen on an ordnance survey map. I don’t think we ever found the “pillow mounds” we were looking for, but I wasn’t particularly bothered by that because I was in good company, and it was just a great day out.

Michael would go on, many years later, to bring the discoveries in the tomb of Tutankhamun to Dorset. This was a re-creation of Tutankhamun’s tomb, as it was found, and of the treasures within it, using wherever possible, the same materials and methods, making the treasures shown in this exhibition as near identical as possible to the originals now in Egypt. It was the first exhibition of its kind in the world, opening in Dorchester, as the “The Tutankhamun Exhibition” in April 1987, and it has given birth and inspiration to many other exhibitions on the same theme that have been seen all over the world.

The idea was conceived following the success of the ‘Treasures of Tutankhamun Exhibition’ at the British Museum London in 1972. On that occasion, as a result of transporting the artefacts, damage to Tutankhamun’s Gold Mask amongst other treasures caused the Egyptian Government to decide that they were not to leave Egypt again.

In about 1966 the new road from Ringwood through to Bournemouth (A338) was built cutting through agricultural land north of the town . There was no archaeological assessment carried out before or during the work, but we were there, the members of the amateur archaeology group crawling over the new cut ground looking for anything that even smelt like archaeology. This was Bournemouth, though, and we found nothing, but as the enormous earth moving machines stripped the ground they found a massive rock, several tons in weight, and there was great speculation as to what this might be. Was it a megalith, a sarsen stone, a glacial dump? It may have been anything or nothing, but Richard Prior wasn’t taking any chances, he hired a truck and moved it from the path of the new road and installed it in his front garden beside his Land Rover and his coach. My recollection is that the garden is no great size, so putting a rock in it was no insignificant thing. It is probably still there now, indeed it would take a stick of dynamite to shift it!

The next excavation that the thriving South Wessex Archaeological Association were to undertake was in the grounds of Christchurch Priory.

The Priory is the most significant church in the town, right on the waterfront, it dominates the town and harbour. It is a survival from the Augustinian priory established in 1150 by Baldwin de Redvers, and one of the longest parish churches in the country.

The other buildings of the priory were pulled down soon after the dissolution, in 1539, but in response to a plea from the townspeople, the church was allowed to remain standing together with the churchyard, and given to the churchwardens and inhabitants of Christchurch to be used as their parish church in perpetuity on 23 October 1540.

The boundary around the Priory is marked on its East side by a stream that runs through the town of Christchurch, and into the harbour.

Projecting into the stream is a stone structure, perhaps 4 or 5 metres square, and 4 metres tall. This was, we were told, a “Necessarium”, a communal monastic latrine. It had arches through the walls at water level, on the upstream and downstream sides so that monks carrying out their basic functions from a room above the water level would have their effluent washed away immediately.

Time and disuse had silted up the interior of this, and Michael had secured permission to excavate it.

At the south side of the priory the edge of its grounds is marked by a high revetment wall beyond which is a pleasure garden that is used by visitors to, and the population of, Christchurch. This is a pretty walk on a grassed area between the stream and the Priory, with flower beds and seats. At the end of the wall, where it meets the stream, is an iron barred gate through it which gives access to the interior of the remains of the necessarium. When closed this gate allowed the curious to look through to see what was going on within, and to call out, asking questions like, “have you found anything yet? “ and “digging to Australia, are yer? “

There must have been as many as ten of us working there on those Sundays, but the place we were excavating, the interior of the building, cannot have been much more than 3 metres square. Consequently there was generally only ever room for one or two people down in the hole.

While those people were digging though, three or four more were forming a bucket chain to remove spoil up the slope and away from the site. Also, as we dug deeper we inevitably reached deposits on a level with the river on the other side of the building’s wall. Water started seeping in and we had to bring in a pump to remove it to enable us to go deeper. The pump required the services of at least one minder to keep it going.

As we were now excavating waterlogged deposits we found things that would not otherwise be preserved, like leather shoes, and oak leaves that had been washed down river and accumulated in the disused toilet. When it was my turn to go down the hole I found a late medieval token made of brass that had been well preserved by the presence of tanic acid in the oak leaves of the fill. The token was in excellent condition and gleamed a dull gold colour. It probably came out of the ground looking better than it did going in.

I picked it up, looked at it while cleaning off the mud, and in a slightly bemused voice, said “it’s gold! “ at which several voices hissed back at me to hush. The implication being that if we had found gold in the Necessarium, and news of it got out, we would have a rush of public interest in what we were doing that nobody really wanted. Not only that, but we risked people coming into the hole while we weren’t there and trying their luck. It was a disappointment to me that the coin was only a brass token, but even at that stage I was beginning to realise the search for archaeology was more interesting than finding stuff.

It was at about this time that I was working towards my Certificate of Secondary Education exams, and I had to choose things to make for my metalwork practical examples. I chose a trowel and a pick axe for my hoped for career in archaeology. Neither of them lasted long, but they asserted my direction of travel, and it was about this same time that I had an interview with the school’s career advisor regarding my life beyond school.

I sat in a little side office with him, in the school administration area, and when he asked me what I wanted to do for a living, I told him I wanted to be an archaeologist. I don’t remember what he said, but as there was no positive response to that I said I would like to be an electronics engineer, if I couldn’t be an archaeologist.

He suggested I join the army

1968

The Bulb of Percussion

Part way through my last school holiday I was asked if I would like to help a young archaeologist on an excavation on the headland that protected Christchurch Harbour from the sea, Hengistbury Head.

I jumped at the chance.

The archaeologist was John B Campbell, I thought he was American, but I may have been mistaken, and he been Australian. He was a bit older than me, and it was just him and me doing the excavation.

He was staying with Richard and Sophie Pryor for the duration of his work, so every day I would cycle to their place, not far from my home. There I would be taken, by John, up to the headland in his long wheelbase Land Rover with the words “The British Upper Palaeolithic Expedition “ printed on both sides. I have to say that I was slightly sceptical about this self promotion on the side of the vehicle, especially when related to the modest excavation we were undertaking. He apparently went on to do work at Cresswell Crags in the same season, so maybe all in all, that was nearly an expedition.

In those days the Head was still a little bit wild. It had always since the Iron Age, and probably before, been occupied, and as a peninsular was well defended by a linear earthwork call the Double Dykes. There was a building close by these banks, a farm perhaps, and I would always imagine that it was a smugglers haunt. Today with a cafe, a regular bus service, and a tow along train taking visitors to the beach huts at Mudeford, the most expensive beach huts in the country, it has lost some of its wild and atmospheric appeal.

There was a gate by the Double Dykes for me to get out of the Land Rover and open. When we were through that we drove along the landward side of the headland, Christchurch Harbour on our left, and beyond that the town of Christchurch itself with its Priory prominently visible. Part way along the road beside the headland we turned right up a steep track onto its top, then going left to its’ furthest point where the trenches he was excavating were laid out.

John’s excavation was right next to the cliff edge. I could be trowelling soil for our excavation, and have my hand out in the updraught of warm air from the sea at the same time.

We could see the beach, and the big groynes projecting out to sea beneath us. Waves were breaking on the sand and the sea was stretching off out to the horizon. To my left, as I looked out to sea, was the Solent, Barton on Sea and the Hampshire coast West of Southampton Water, before me the Needles on the Isle of Wight, while to my right was Bournemouth Bay and way off on the distant horizon Old Harry Rocks by Swanage and the Purbeck Hills.

John had marked out where we were to excavate, with wooden pegs and string, on an area which any guide book to the headland at that time would call “The Reindeer People’s Valley “. Here flint artefacts were commonly found that are recognisably from what is called the Upper Palaeolithic period . The people who made these artefacts were hunter-gatherers following the seasonal migration of animals, chiefly horses and reindeer, that were moving north and south across Europe as the glaciation of the last Ice Age retreated, but before the English Channel separated Britain from the continent. They would set up temporary camps as bases from which to hunt the animals they preyed on, possibly returning to the same site year after year. They are likely to have lived in bivouacs of bent sticks, forming a domed shelter, tied with strips of hide and covered with skins.

Our excavation consisted of up to ten one metre squares starting at the cliff edge and extending inland, for perhaps three metres. The soil was quite clean sand, tightly compacted. In it John was hoping to find stake holes that could have been left by the bivouac of the migrants.

John instructed me that we were to work in those one metre squares, sometimes two or three together, skimming off just two or three millimetres of the hard packed sand at a time, very carefully with the blade of the trowel. He told me that we could expect to find struck flints, and that anything else would be a bonus. To recognise when I had found flint here I was to listen. The sound of the sand against my trowel made a singing noise. I was to listen to that sound, and more than that for the lightest click as the trowel touched even the smallest flake of flint. This might be tiny, much smaller than my smallest finger nail, and using that technique we found many tiny flakes. I was to work with a slow and steady stroke, cutting the ground and leaving a smooth level surface behind my Trowel.

When we found the flakes of flint he explained to me how to tell whether a piece of flint has been knapped. He showed me the bulb of percussion and the scar where the hammer blow had landed and the rippled lines of percussion where the stone fractured. He described the tools we might find and how they might be used. The backed blade was like a small pen knife and would be used for cutting to shape the skins of animals. The scraper might be used to clean the blood and gore from the inside surface of the skins they stripped from animals to cover their bivouacs, and the burin point pierced holes in the skins so that they could bind them together with thongs, strips of hide.

Every flake we found like this we left on a little island of sand, so that we could carry on working, scraping down around it, and recording the position of each one later. At the end of the day we used tape measures and a plumbob to triangulate the positions of each flint, and a line level and tape to fix the depth below a known datum level. These measurements were written on the little plastic zip top plastic bags the flints were to be stored in.

This experience was amazing, me not yet 17 years of age doing real scientific archaeology. I was the assistant to a proper archaeologist, doing proper archaeology, on a proper archaeological site. I soaked up the learning and techniques I was using here, and even more I wanted to be a digger. One day.

John reported later that “ a concentration of 1,747 flints (95 implements including backed blades, scrapers and burins) were found in 1968, along with faint traces of `stoke-holes’ (?Stake-holes) in a `1.5m. ovoid alignment’, near the surface and probably later than the flints.”

Larger scale excavations took place in 1981-4 in which dateable material was found that gave a timescale for these deposits as around 12500 BC.

I worked with John for two weeks, just him and me. He may have continued with the excavation after I had to quit. I don’t remember finding that many flints, perhaps hundreds, but not over a thousand. However within days of finishing there I was on a train heading for London to start my apprenticeship, to become an electronics engineer.