The early life of Sir Arthur EvansAuthor(s): Sinclair HoodSource: British School at Athens Studies, Vol. 12, KNOSSOS: PALACE, CITY, STATE (2004), pp.557-559Published by: British School at AthensStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40960814 .

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51 The early life of Sir Arthur Evans

Sinclair Hood

It is a great honour to be invited to say something about the early life of Sir Arthur Evans on this centenary oc- casion.

When Evans came to Crete for the first time in the spring of 1894, he was 43 years old. He had already by then won a reputation as a travel writer and as an in- trepid journalist, but also as an archaeologist and scholar.

He was born in July 1851, the eldest son of John - later Sir John - Evans. John Evans as a young man with a living to earn had gone to work for his uncle - his mother's brother - John Dickinson, who owned a highly successful paper making business. John Evans eventually married a daughter of his uncle and employer, but she died at the end of 1857 when their son, Arthur, was only six years old. Arthur Evans was deeply af- fected by the early death of his mother. Two years later, in the summer of 1859, his father, John Evans, married again - another cousin, Fanny Phelps. She was kind to her stepson, Arthur, who liked her; but she was not his mother.

John Evans, Arthur's father, was a highly successful businessman. He acquired a large fortune, and eventu- ally succeeded his uncle as head of the paper making firm of Dickinsons. But from boyhood he had a strong interest in archaeology. He collected and studied coins, and wrote learned articles about them. He also became a leading authority on early flint implements, and on the tools, weapons and ornaments of the Bronze Age of the British Isles.

When Arthur Evans was 14 years old, his father sent him away to boarding school at Harrow near London. There he showed an early talent for journalism. He helped to found the school's magazine The Harrovian, which continues to exist. Another journalistic enter- prise of his was more ephemeral. He started a satirical newsletter entitled The Pen-Viper, which sold well, but was quickly suppressed by the school authorities: not unreasonably, as by all accounts it was extremely scur- rilous and subversive. But Evans was a good classical scholar and won the school prize for the composition of a Greek epigram on the theme of:

'Avôqcov 87ri(pavc5v naca yrj xácpoç.

Already as a schoolboy Arthur Evans was following in his father's footsteps with an interest in archaeology, becoming Secretary of Harrow School's Scientific So- ciety, and at its meetings exhibiting Roman coins from

St Albans (ancient Verulamium) and Roman glass bot- tles from Cologne in Germany.

In 1 870 Evans went as a student to Oxford as a mem- ber of Brasenose College. Instead of reading Classics, however, he chose to do a degree in Modern History, which had recently been made possible. As a student, Evans used the vacations to travel widely in Europe - to Paris in 1871 in the immediate aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, and later in the Balkans, and in Finland and Russian Lapland.

His first learned article was published while he was still a student at Oxford - in the Numismatic Chronicle for 1 87 1, on a hoard of mediaeval coins, with observa- tions on the coins of the English kings, Edward I, II and III. In 1874 Evans obtained his degree in Modern History, with First Class Honours, in spite of breaking down, it is said, in the oral examination.

After leaving Oxford, Evans spent four months in the summer of 1875 studying at the University of Göttingen in Germany. Later that year he travelled again in the Balkans in the company of his younger brother Lewis. This was the time when the revolt against Turkish rule began in Bosnia, leading two years later in 1877 to declaration of war against Turkey by Russia, followed by the Conference and Treaty of Ber- lin in 1878.

The results of these travels in 1875 were published the following year, 1 876, in a remarkable book - nearly 500 pages long - with the title Through Bosnia and the Herzogovina on Foot during the Insurrection. The book is immensely well informed, both about the background history and the contemporary state ofthat unhappy part of Europe, then suffering from barbaric Turkish op- pression and misrule. It is highly readable, and illus- trated with drawings which range from Roman pottery (with shapes of contemporary Croatian pottery for com- parison) to amulets in current use in the area. The writ- ing is lively, with an eye for the geology, landscape, ani- mals and butterflies, and above all for the trees and flow- ers. As The Times reviewer of the book wrote: Evans was "something of a botanist and entomologist as well as an antiquary and a scholar". The book received other excellent reviews, and in the following year 1877 reached a second edition.

In that same year, 1877, Evans was appointed Balkan correspondent for the Manchester Guardian. This was the crucial year of the revolt in Bosnia, when the inde- pendent Slav states of Serbia and Montenegro declared war on Turkey. Evans was an ardent Liberal, and an

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558 SINCLAIR HOOD

admirer of the great British Liberal statesman and Prime Minister, William Gladstone. The Manchester Guardian was the leading newspaper then supporting the Liberal party in England.

These were stormy times in Bosnia and the neigh- bouring regions of the Balkans, where - as in Crete earlier and later in the 19th century - the oppression of Muslim landowners and Turkish misgovernment had goaded the subject Christian populations into revolt. The sympathies of Evans were wholly on the side of the Christian rebels, whom he visited in their strong- holds. He vividly describes these, together with the massacres and devastation wrought by the Muslims - with the mutilated bodies of their victims and the ruins of burnt villages and destroyed crops.

At the same time, and with great courage, Evans braved the dangers of a visit to the main centre of Mus- lim fanaticism in the region - at Kulen Vakup - where he interviewed Muslim landowners and was able to feel a degree of sympathy for their point of view, while re- maining convinced that Turkish rule must be brought to an end in the best interests of all concerned. Austria, he was convinced, must be invited to occupy Bosnia. This happened as a result of the Treaty of Berlin in 1878.

A selection from the reports which Evans made to the Manchester Guardian was published in 1 878 as a book with the title Illyrian Letters. It is interesting that in the preface Evans pays tribute to William James Stillman, the American artist and former US Consul at Chania, who had served as correspondent for The Times (of London) in the region of Bosnia. Evans had gone to see Stillman, who was then living in Clapham in London, in 1876. A few years later, in 188 1, Stillman was to visit the scene of the excavations of Minos Kalokairinos on the site of the Palace at Knossos, and wrote a report on them to the American Institute of Archaeology with a view to possible excavation. Evans knew Stillman later, when he became The Times corre- spondent for Greece and Italy based on Rome. Possibly he first heard about the discoveries of Kalokairinos at Knossos from Stillman.

The Illyrian Letters are vivid and most readable. Evans is scathing about the British Consul, Mr Holmes, based in the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo. Holmes was strongly pro-Turkish and denied the truth of the atroci- ties about which Evans had collected evidence with scholarly care and thoroughness.

In September of 1878 Evans married Margaret, daughter of E. A. Freeman, the Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford. He took her to live in Ragusa (modern Dubrovnik), which had become his favourite haunt. Ragusa, once subject to Venice, had been under Austrian rule since 1808. Four years after his marriage, in March 1882, Evans got into trouble with the Aus- trian authorities, who accused him of intriguing with anti-Austrian rebels. He was kept in prison in Ragusa

for over six weeks. When released, he was expelled from Austrian territory and forbidden to return.

But the fruits of his archaeological researches in Bosnia were not lost. They were the subject of a series of four lectures which he gave to the Society of Anti- quaries of London, and were published in two succes- sive volumes, for the years 1885 and 1886, of the Soci- ety's monumental periodical Archaeologia. The texts together cover nearly 400 large pages, the size of a sub- stantial book. What Evans writes is based upon acute personal observation against a background of a thor- ough knowledge of the published sources, ancient and more recent. He ends with a long disquisition on the birthplace of the Emperor Justinian, which he thought he might have identified. A few years ago these Bosnian researches of Evans were used in his inaugural lecture by the present Professor of Roman Archaeology in the University of London, John Wilkes, who paid the high- est tribute to the continuing value of the archaeological work done by Evans in this region.

In January of 1883 Evans and his wife settled in Ox- ford. Later that year Evans travelled in the eastern Bal- kans and in Greece, where for the first time he met Schliemann.

In June of the following year, 1884, Evans, now in his early thirties, was elected Keeper (that is to say, Director) of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. His inaugural lecture as Keeper, entitled The Ashmolean Museum as a Home of Archaeology in Oxford, was a land- mark in its history. The Ashmolean, which opened in 1683, was the world's first public museum. Until the time of Evans, it occupied a small, although beautiful, 17th century building next to the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford. Evans successfully fought to have the Ashmolean collections moved under the same roof as the University's art collection of pictures and sculp- tures of all periods, housed in the magnificent build- ing designed by the architect Charles Cockerell, of Greek fame, in the 1840s. This meant a great expan- sion of Cockerell's building to contain the archaeologi- cal collections. The archaeological collections them- selves were vastly increased in due course by gifts of his acquisitions from Sir John Evans, either directly or through his son Arthur. At the same time the art col- lections of the Museum were enriched by gifts from a wealthy collector, C. D. E. Fortnum, member of the family which founded the famous London store, Fortnum and Mason. Evans has not unjustly been called the second founder of the Ashmolean Museum.

Evans was a man of great energy and strong will. But in one of his objectives as Keeper of the Ashmolean he was thwarted at the time. Like his father, John, Evans was a collector of coins, and among other things a lead- ing authority on the fine coins of Syracuse and other Greek cities of Sicily and South Italy. The University's collection of ancient coins then formed part of the Bodleian Library in Oxford: not unreasonably, as coins

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THE EARLY LIFE OF SIR ARTHUR EVANS 559

often bear inscriptions, and the inscriptions on coins of the Roman Empire for instance are important for the study of its history. Evans, however, wanted the Uni- versity's coins moved from the Bodleian to the enlarged Ashmolean Museum. Eventually he was to see this done, but not until 1922, nearly 50 years after he had first proposed the move, and some 12 years after he had re- signed the Keepership of the Ashmolean Museum (in 1909). It is interesting to remember that Evans was Keeper of the Ashmolean throughout the years of the main excavations in the Palace at Knossos from 1900 to 1906.

During the 10 years that elapsed between his appoint- ment as Keeper of the Ashmolean and his first visit to Crete in 1894, Evans continued to travel and to publish learned articles. He even found time for excavations - a small Roman villa at Frilford near Oxford, and part of a Belgic cemetery at Aylesford in Kent with rich

Celtic burials dating from the eve of the Roman con- quest of Britain. These excavations were published in an exemplary fashion, with a characteristic display of background knowledge. Thus for Frilford Evans de- scribes comparable small Roman villas in France, and aptly quotes from the late Roman poet Ausonius for the kind of life style in such villas. For the objects from the Belgic cemetery he cites wide-ranging parallels from northern Italy and other parts of Europe. In 189 1 Evans was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Oxford college, Brasenose, where he had lived as a student some 20 years earlier.

In March of 1893 after a long decline his wife, Margaret, sadly died. In the following spring, however, Evans came here to Crete for the first time. It is my great pleasure now to hand over the continuation of his story to Professor Stylianos Alexiou, who can actu- ally remember seeing Evans at Knossos many years ago.

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