Waddington, Amarna and the (EES) Nefertiti Bust

Page 1 I first encountered Hilary Waddington during the Festival of Archaeology in July 2015, when the Director of the Egypt Exploration Society (EES), Chris Naunton, gave a talk on the Amarna film footage from the 1930s.  Amarna was the city built by Akhenaten and his queen Nefertiti about 1350 BC, on the east bank of the Nile in Middle Egypt (see map on slide 2), roughly midway between Luxor and Saqqara, for the worship of the sole god, the Aten.  The site was first excavated in the 1890s.  By the 1930s the EES had taken over excavation at Amarna from the Germans and – as now – fund raising was a key concern.  The EES excavation team was led by John Pendlebury, who was something of a showman (see slide 3, showing him on the left at an EES exhibition in London, and on the right in Egypt, bare-chested and wearing an ancient Egyptian floral collar). Pendlebury was very aware of the need to give people an idea of what life on a dig was really like: the process of archaeology, as well as the results.  He arranged for events on site during the 1930-33 seasons to be filmed – and his camera man was generally another member of the excavation team, Hilary Waddington (see slide 4, showing Waddington with a “clapper board” from one of the Amarna films). The original clapper board is in the EES archive – you can make an appointment to come and see it and the other delights of the archive. Many of the films they made are now available on YouTube via the EES website and I thoroughly recommend them – they record not only the process of archaeology but also some wonderful asides about the personalities of the dig team and their life on site – such as the Christmas Day sports activities for all the workers including a wheelbarrow race, an obstacle race, and a completely manic hockey dribbling race.  More seriously: the films also show pay day, the discovery and moving of the massive stone lintel from the house of Hatiay (see slide 5), the division of the finds with the Cairo Museum, and finally Cairo traffic (not much different from now). I realised that whilst I knew a little about Pendlebury and his work both in Egypt and at Knossos, I knew absolutely nothing about the camera man, Hilary Waddington.  And when I looked for him later in that well-known research work, Wikipedia, there was nothing about him there either … so I decided to dig a bit further. The Amarna excavations from the early 1930s are generally well documented – not only do we have the formal published reports of the excavations (all available in the EES library), we also have a wonderful account written by Mary Chubb, the assistant secretary of the EES, who was sent out from a wet and gloomy London to Egypt to help sort out the team’s accounting practices, type up reports and generally deal with the administration required from the field team by the EES back in the UK.  She wrote a terrific account of the 1930-31 and 1931-32 seasons (which she rather merged into one), in her book “Nefertiti lived here” (1) (see the right half of slide 6, showing a paperback edition of her book, usually available second hand at a reasonable price via Amazon etc) – a reference to the fact that the team lived in a house built on the foundations of one of the houses from the time of Akhenaten 3000 years before.  (1) Chubb, Mary (1954, 1998), Nefertiti lived here, London: Libri Publications Limited. Page 2 My interest in Waddington grew further when I heard how some of the material Chris Naunton showed us had come into the archive.  Earlier in the summer of 2015 the EES received a telephone call from an Edward Waddington who told them that in a house-clearance auction after the death of his step-mother he had purchased a mixed collection of papers which seemed to be relevant to family history.  When he examined them, Edward found that a lot of the papers were to do with his grand-father Hilary and the EES excavations at Amarna, including some of Hilary’s original architectural drawings as well as the “clapper board” from their film making, and a draft for an Underground poster advertising the 1931 exhibition of some of the finds (another fund-raising venture).  When Edward googled Waddington and the EES, what came up was the YouTube films of the 1930s excavations at Amarna, and a link to the EES website  … which led to Edward’s calling the EES to say, very generously, “would you like these?”.  Of course, the EES did like, and they were kindly donated to the EES archive. Who was Who in Egyptology (2) told me the broad outline of Waddington’s professional life.  James Hilary Sheffield Waddington was born in 1903, and died in 1989.  His father Quintin was assistant curator at the Guildhall Museum, London.  Hilary was educated at Westminster School and trained as an architect.  He worked with Pendlebury at Amarna from 1930 to 1933, and was an inspector in the Palestine Antiquities Service from 1932 to 1936, and then was assistant superintendent in the Archaeological Survey of India from 1937 and superintendent from 1946 until 1955.  He then lectured at Bristol University, and excavated at Nimrud and Balawat in Iraq in 1956 and was awarded an MBE in 1947. I wanted to see if I could put some flesh on these bones with information I could find in the EES archive and elsewhere. As someone who has no formal training in archaeology, I found it interesting that the 1930s dig team were not necessarily formally trained Egyptologists or even archaeologists.  John Pendlebury, the field director, was trained in archaeology and had worked at Amarna the previous season as field assistant; when he was appointed director for the 1930 season he was just 26, and it was the first time he’d led a team.  Waddington was just 28 – and according to Mary Chubb, he was initially a little sceptical about working for someone 2 years his junior. (3) There was a second architect on the team, an Australian called Ralph Lavers (who provided the illustrations for Mary’s book); Herbert Fairman, known as Tommy, was the epigraphist, responsible for the inscriptions.  Lavers went on to design the torch holder for the London Olympics in 1948.  Fairman did have archaeological training – the only person on the team who did, apart from Pendlebury; he ended up as a professor at Liverpool University after working at the British Embassy in Cairo during World War II. As well as Mary Chubb, the team also included Pendlebury’s wife Hilda. The film footage, and Mary Chubbs’ book, both suggest that the team generally got on well together and had a lot of fun – they certainly had some eccentricities in dress code.  Pendlebury was very fond of a dramatic hooded Cretan cloak, frequently combined with a cricket jumper and, according to Mary Chubb, bright pink, green or blue shirts.  She described Tommy Fairman as looking “exactly like an embryo professor” – which of course he was - and Ralph Laver “looked uncompromisingly like any Englishman anywhere in (2) Bierbrier, Morris L (2012), Who was Who in Egyptology (4th edition), London: Egypt Exploration Society. (3) Chubb, Mary (1954, 1998), Nefertiti lived here, London: Libri Publications Limited, p25. Page 3 England” with “a sleeveless black cardigan over a white shirt, and grey flannel bags”.  (4)  However, Waddington preferred full tropical kit including a solar topi (as shown in slide 7).  Even at the time this was considered a little peculiar – quoting Mary Chubb again, on the first morning on site, Hilary “came in to breakfast last, looking as if he had just discovered Livingstone”. (5) While I was working in the EES library (and even before I knew who she was), I was always very aware of a bust of Nefertiti, which sits at one end of the table, “supervising” those working there (see the left half of slide 6, and the right half of slide 16, for photos of this bust). The EES image is less well-known than the iconic painted bust in the Neues Museum in Berlin (see slide 8), which was discovered by the German team at Amarna in the workshop of the sculptor Thutmose, during the 1912 season.  But for me at least the deceptively simple bust in the EES library has a real presence – I found myself wishing her good morning as I came into the library! When I asked the EES archivist, Carl Graves, about her, he told me that this was a cast of an original in the Cairo Museum … which had been found in a sculptor’s workshop discovered at Amarna by Waddington’s wife in 1933: now I had a focus for my further investigations – what could I find out about this discovery? I sat down in front of the bust with the box file of Waddington papers in the EES archive (see slide 9) and various books from the library.  The Waddington archive includes photos, some still mounted from the exhibition where they’d been shown (not at the EES exhibition but at the inaugural exhibition of the RIBA Camera Club in 1936) including some photos of a model Amarna house which had been created for the Oriental Institute in Chicago and lent to the EES for one of its summer exhibitions, a couple of draft articles, occasional invoices and contracts, and lots of letters.  Some were typed, some hand-written, with varying degrees of formality.  There was a photo of Waddington with a camera in front of a rockface (see the right half of slide 10) captioned “in front of a cave full of bats” which shed some interesting light on working conditions … . Waddington seems to have got on well with Pendlebury from the first season at Amarna.  Hilary, Mary Chubb and the Pendleburys had a walking trip in Greece at the end of that season, recounted at the start of Mary’s second book (City in the Sand, about a subsequent dig in Mesopotamia). (6)   Waddington and Pendlebury stayed in touch and in the autumn of 1932 Waddington was invited back – in the archive I found, amidst numerous letters about the practicalities of getting the films from the previous season out of Egypt and a report on Egyptian quarrying operations which were straying south and endangering unexcavated parts of Akhetaten, the correspondence between them.  This revealed some of the practicalities of arranging a dig then and the relationships between the team members, and filled in some gaps in the published accounts of the dig and its finds and the biographies of the participants. On 21 February 1932 Pendlebury wrote to Waddington saying he couldn’t see any real hope for a dig the following year, but still hoped to get “Griffith’s stuff” in order and asked if Waddington could possibly come.  He did hope so as “we must have a real Amarna nuptial on the job” – Carl Graves had told me the sculptor’s workshop was found by Hilary’s wife, (4) Chubb, Mary (1954, 1998), Nefertiti lived here, London: Libri Publications Limited, p51-52. (5) Chubb, Mary (1954, 1998), Nefertiti lived here, London: Libri Publications Limited, p52. (6) Chubb, Mary (1957, 1999), City in the Sand, London: Libri Publications Limited. Page 4 and this was the first reference to Waddington’s recent engagement to Ruth, and a nice indication that Ruth – like Pendlebury’s wife Hilda - would be welcome on the dig team. A letter dated 20 April 1932 from Mary Chubb to Waddington – addressing him as “dear old Wolery” - congratulating him on his engagement and his good sense in “fixing up with a topping girl like Ruth” compared with others whom Mary had met.  Mary also mentions Pendlebury’s new baby in rather unflattering terms: “The Pendle walid (7) is as ugly as sin at present but then most babes are”.  However she says she had “duly admired it and now it and the Sitt (ie Hilda Pendlebury) have rushed off to Crete” – at which time baby David was 8 weeks old. Over that summer, the EES had its summer exhibition at Wigmore Street, London.  According to Pendlebury’s biography by Imogen Grundon – The Rash Adventurer (2007) (8) (out of print, but available from the EES library) - the exhibition was organised late when money was short, but the films shot by Waddington that first season were a great success at the lectures Pendlebury delivered at the Royal Society.  The archives include some of the art work for the exhibition posters. On 24 August 1932 Pendlebury wrote to Waddington in Palestine, where he was by then an inspector with the Antiquities Service, asking if Waddington could get to Amarna for Christmas and whether £20 would cover return expenses.  Pendlebury could not offer a regular salary, and warned that Ruth Waddington would be the only woman in camp since the EES had, without telling Pendlebury, sacked Mary Chubb, and Hilda and their baby son would not join Pendlebury until Crete.  He wanted Waddington to “deal with Griffith’s muck” and asked if Waddington would bring his own “measuring boy” or should Pendlebury get Kassar and another?  Griffith was Francis Llewellyn Griffith, an eminent Egyptologist, who had worked at Amarna during the 1920s.  Finance was obviously challenging – this was after all soon after the 1929 crash and during the Great Depression.  The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology Vol 18 No 3/4 for November 1932 reports that the committee had feared no fieldwork would be possible as a result of “general financial difficulties” but fortunately contributions had been made by a Mrs Hubbard and the Brooklyn Museum. On 10 September 1932 Waddington sent a telegram to Pendlebury reporting that he had applied for 6 weeks’ leave from 10 December.  This explained a point which had puzzled me: how could Waddington have worked with Pendlebury during the 1932-33 season if he had been working as an inspector in Palestine at the time?  On 16 September 1932 Waddington wrote to Pendlebury reporting that a letter approving 42 days’ leave “for study in Egypt” had arrived, so Waddington could start for Amarna on 10 December.  Waddington explained that he was not allowed to be paid a salary whilst on leave, but the regulations did not prevent payment of travelling expenses; he reported that train fares from Palestine to Cairo would cost £6-7 each way and there would also be accommodation costs in Cairo where Hilary wanted to show Ruth the museum – including in particular a smiling hippo found the previous season (Hilary obviously liked this as there are a couple of images of it in the archive: see slide 11), so he’d be glad if Pendlebury could increase the travel allowance.  Alternatively, he suggests he could come by car.  Waddington also mentions the wedding presents he had received from Kassar - 2 fans for making air and a thing hung with cowrie shells “to bring luck in connection with certain events”.  The archive also includes Kassar’s letter to Hilary saying they had begged “their Lord God to give you nice and strong (7) Arabic for newborn baby. (8) Grundon, Imogen (2007), The Rash Adventurer: A life of John Pendlebury, London: Libri Publications Limited. Page 5 children”, and asking him for work in Palestine.  As Hilary and Ruth had children, the cowrie shells seem to have worked. On 26 September Pendlebury replied to Waddington, saying Waddington was “the only person who knows the site well enough to be deal with all Griffith’s stuff”, apologising that he couldn’t offer more than £10 each way for travel, and saying there were no cars at Amarna.  Pendlebury wasn’t very flattering about Griffith’s work – in another undated letter, he asked Waddington to bring out all the Griffith’s plans he could find, and asks “was the festering mess you found at the South House left at Amarna?”.  Pendlebury told Waddington that the season would run from 1 December to 15 January, and asked Waddington to come up to Amarna immediately he arrived at Cairo and to leave sight-seeing until his return journey. The team was going to comprise Pendlebury, Fairman and Lavers as before, plus Sherman and “a man called Brasch” whom Pendlebury described as “quite nice, no salary or experience”, and a couple of others: a Philip Chubb and Last though there seems to have been some doubt about just how useful either of these two would be: Pendlebury puts 3 unexplained exclamation marks after Last’s name and in a subsequent letter Waddington says it will be a joke having him on site, and also asking whether Philip Chubb was any good at anything - he thought not. (9) An undated letter from Pendlebury to Waddington records that Pendlebury was over-joyed Waddington could get away by 10 December, and that the second volume of the “City of Akhetaten” was ready for publication, using Waddington’s block plan of the North Suburb (see slide 12, showing Hilary’s plan which was one of the papers which came into the EES archive from his grandson in summer 2015). On 17 October Waddington wrote to Pendlebury, saying he’d been on sick leave with jaundice, and asking if Pendlebury could suggest a replacement for Waddington’s librarian.  The job description was pretty demanding – Waddington wanted someone who, besides being a scholar (ironically, a word which Waddington himself couldn’t spell here), also had to be a practical librarian and to speak English, Arabic, Latin, German and French well and to have a good knowledge of Hebrew and Greek, and a smattering of Assyrian, Egyptian and Aramaic.  I don’t imagine there would have been a huge number of candidates who fulfilled all these requirements. Waddington also suggests he might bring Kassar back to Athlit as a “gent’s personal gent”, but was concerned because Kassar was “rather too good looking”.  Waddington said he “did not want to spend too much of his time pacifying irate fathers of deflowered daughters”; however he said Kassar’s uncle was working at the museum so could keep Kassar in order - I was delighted to find a photo of Kassar in the archive so I could just for myself – in slide 13, he’s the man on the left and I think he is quite good looking. In October 1932 the EES in London sent Waddington a contract for signature, engaging him for 6 weeks during the 1932/33 season; he was to work full time, and as before all notes belonged to the EES and he was not allowed to publish independently.  For the 1931-32 season, Waddington had been employed full time on a salary of £100 plus a £80 return travel allowance and reasonable subsistence.  In 1932/33, he received no salary and £20 (9) Presumably this was Hugh Last, the Honorary Treasurer and Secretary of the Egypt Exploration Society 1931-1948; I have found nothing else to suggest that he was in fact a member of the dig team.  According to Imogen Grundon’s biography of Pendlebury (Grundon, Imogen (2007), The Rash Adventurer: A life of John Pendlebury, London: Libri Publications Limited, p161) Philip Chubb turned out to be a first-class photographer whatever his other failings may have been. Page 6 return travel from Jerusalem, reflecting the earlier correspondence about the fact Waddington was not allowed to be paid and £20 was the most the EES could pay towards his expenses.  (See slide 14, showing Waddington’s contract.) Hilary signed the contract (see slide 14) “subject to the right of the Government of Palestine to recall him to Palestine if required” – in his covering letter returning the agreement to the EES, he explained that this reservation was very unlikely to become operative as it would only be relevant if all his seniors were to get ill or die at the same time. The correspondence obviously dries up whilst they were all on site together but there were a couple of documents shedding light on Hilary and Ruth’s journey back to Palestine.  The archive included Hilary’s temporary membership card for the Cairo Turf Club (see slide 15), and a note from 18 January 1933 proposing him as visiting member.  He was proposed by Reginald Engelbach (1888 – 1946) a British Egyptologist and engineer who became interested in Egyptology when convalescing in Egypt, studied at UCL, dug with Petrie and by 1931 was Chief Keeper at the Cairo Museum, and seconded by Guy Brunton.  Guy Brunton (1878 – 1948) became interested in archaeology through Amelia Edwards’ book A Thousand Miles up the Nile (1877), (10) studied at UCL, dug with Petrie at Lahun and by 1931 was assistant Keeper at the Cairo museum.  Visiting membership gave Waddington free admission for a few days, once in 12 months; he could become a member for up to 3 months if he paid a monthly subscription of one Egyptian pound.  I hope that Hilary and Ruth did find some time for sight-seeing and fun on their return through Cairo, and that Ruth got to see the hippo. But to revert to the discovery of the bust itself … The bust is recorded on one of the 1932-33 object cards from Amarna (see the left half of slide 16) – the Amarna object cards are available on the EES website via flickr.  When I first saw object cards, I was amazed at how much information could be contained in such a small space (the original is postcard sized): as well as the drawing, which is itself beautiful, the card tells us where the bust was found – house O.47.2: that is, building #47.2 in square O of the grid which covers the Amarna site, that it is made of sandstone, was found on 9 January 1933, and the original is in the Cairo museum. There’s no reference to this in Pendlebury’s diary notebook for the season, which is pretty short form.  The bust does feature in a house sheet for O.47.20, but just as a reference to object 205 in the list of important objects.  Pendlebury wrote a preliminary report on the season for The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology (JEA Vol 19, 1933, p113-118), starting with a list of the team.  I was pleased to see this included not only “Mr JHS Waddington, now with the Antiquities Department of Palestine, [who] very generously spent his leave in doing the much needed tying up of the plans of the 1924 season” (a slightly more polite reference to what he had informally described as “Griffith’s mess”), but also “Mrs Waddington [who] was directly responsible for the discovery of the sculptor’s workshop”. The Waddingtons were staying in the south dig house, which Pendlebury had suggested as more convenient for their work surveying the area excavated in 1924.  While Hilary and Ruth were walking across a small area which had been left unexcavated, Ruth’s foot dislodged a mud brick, and revealed a plaster head … and when they looked closer, they found other fragments of worked stone.  This plaster head was not the Nefertiti bust; what Ruth had found was the plaster head numbered 4 in slide 17, a collection of plates illustrating the JEA article.  However, in uncovering this she had discovered the workshop (10) Edwards, Amelia (1888, 1993), A Thousand Miles up the Nile (2nd edition), London: Parkway Publishing. Page 7 which led to the discovery of the bust, which Pendlebury described as the most impressive of their finds in this area.  He said of the bust “This is unfinished, the ink marks are still there for guiding lines and part of the left-hand side of the face is still rough.  The sculptor, however, was unable to resist painting the lips, even before he had finished … The head-dress was evidently intended to cover the ears, for there is no room left to sculpture these.”  (11) The site had to be excavated at once so it was not looted – this work was done by Charles Brasch and “the workmen”: it is regrettable that the Egyptian workers are often not named.  In all, they found two or three small houses, apparently related to the house Petrie had excavated in 1892 (O.47.21).  In the eastern part of the area, only a metre or so away from where the German excavations had stopped, they found the Nefertiti bust – a life-size unfinished head along with various other fragments.  The head was intended to be part of a composite statue – at the base of the neck was a dowel for fitting the head to a body of another material. Pendlebury’s biographer, Grundon, gives what I think is a very good description of the bust (12) (slide 18): There is a rare haunting beauty in this piece of sculpture which, though unfinished, has a gentle sensitive quality which makes it now one of the finest Amarna pieces in the Cairo museum.  The slightly upturned face is still marked with the setting-out lines for the features and, though the eyes are blank, only lined with black, the exquisitely carved mouth had already been touched with red.  There is a passion in this simple act of the sculptor’s, colouring the lips before the head was finished. She says that Pendlebury claimed it was the “most human” face he had ever seen on a sculpture. (13)  It became an iconic image of the Pendlebury years at Amarna, and once you know it, you find it is used repeatedly in illustration.  Grundon says that Pendlebury even wrote a short love story based around a woman who resembled this piece (14) – apparently this is in the archive of the British School in Athens, but uncatalogued and undated so I haven’t yet tracked this down. I wondered what Charles Brasch had thought of his involvement – an unpaid work-experience volunteer – in this find of the season.  In the EES library, I found Brasch’s autobiography: Indirections – a memoir 1909-1947. (15)   In chapter 9, on Egypt, he explains how he came to be at Amarna for Pendlebury’s 3 rd  season, saying that he joined Pendlebury “informally as a kind of unpaid cadet, to learn and make myself useful”. (16)  Extraordinarily, he makes absolutely no mention of his role in the excavation of the workshop; of the dig itself, he just says “there were many hours and whole days of monotony when routine digging (11) Pendlebury, John (1933), The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology Vol 19, p117. (12) Grundon, Imogen (2007), The Rash Adventurer: A life of John Pendlebury, London: Libri Publications Limited, p161. (13) Grundon, Imogen (2007), The Rash Adventurer: A life of John Pendlebury, London: Libri Publications Limited, p161. (14) Grundon, Imogen (2007), The Rash Adventurer: A life of John Pendlebury, London: Libri Publications Limited, p161. (15) Brasch, Charles (1980), Indirections: A Memoir 1909-1947, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (16) Brasch, Charles (1980), Indirections: A Memoir 1909-1947, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p193. Page 8 went on and virtually nothing of interest turned up” (17) : from which I concluded that he was perhaps not a natural archaeologist.  However he did concede that “to be alive in the freedom of the open air under that great sky was good”. (18)  The attractions of the open air must have overcome the boredom as he worked at Amarna for two more seasons. Three weeks after the first discovery, when Waddington must have been back in Palestine, on 30 January, 1933 Pendlebury sent Waddington a note (see slide 19) saying “I feel very guilty at not having written before to thank you and your wife for all you did and particularly for your “honeymoon luck” in her turning over an odd brick”. Despite his love story, John Pendlebury didn’t write much about the bust in his book on Tell el-Amarna. (19)  He mentioned the Germans’ discovery of the house of Thutmose the sculptor and that the English had found another studio, and says that all the best works are portraits.  Some had proved impossible to identify, but he wanted to collect the portraits together to be assessed by sculptors and doctors and believed that most could then be identified.  He did talk about how finding the sculptor’s workshop showed them most of the stages of production, from the practically round lump of stone to the all but finished work with the guiding lines still un-erased or with the correcting lines of the master showing where alteration was needed, and the head in its final state, coloured and gilded. On 20 March 1933 Ralph Lavers wrote to Waddington reporting on the rest of the season after the Waddingtons left – it had “wound up quietly” with “no more very sensational finds”.  He reported that the division “wasn’t very favourable to the EES but he supposed that this was the penalty for finding first class stuff” – at that time, excavation teams were allowed to take some finds out of Egypt, but the finds had to be shared with the Egyptian Antiquities Service which had first choice.  It was no surprise that the bust was allocated to the Cairo museum where it was displayed on the ground floor with other material relating to the Amarna period, including the other fragmentary finds from the 1932-33 season, and it remains there today.  Unfortunately the Cairo museum doesn’t have an online collection, so she has to be visited in person: JE 59286. When I visited in October 2016, she was - like the bust in the Berlin museum - exhibited on her own in a glass case, but she doesn’t get the entire room to herself in Cairo, as she does in Berlin. The bust proved challenging to identify.  Initially it was thought to be Akhenaten, but (like a number of other busts also identified as Akhenaten) it was subsequently re-attributed to Nefertiti.  In his 1933 preliminary report in the JEA, (20) Pendlebury though it was too soft to be Nefertiti and it was more like some of the heads in Berlin which had been reasonably ascribed to the older daughters.  When it was registered by the Cairo Museum, however, it was labelled as a head of Nefertiti, and the museum still describes it as such. On 15 June 1933 Waddington was back at Athlit castle in Palestine from where he wrote to Pendlebury sending him a 1:100 plan of “the Nefertiti head area”, and said he hoped the imminent exhibition would be a success.  This was the annual summer exhibition of finds which the EES held, to show off finds in the last season and raise funds for the next.  The archive includes a catalogue of the 1933 exhibition, which was held at the Architectural Association in Bedford Square from 26 June to 15 July 1933 and included the plaster cast of (17) Brasch, Charles (1980), Indirections: A Memoir 1909-1947, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p199. (18) Brasch, Charles (1980), Indirections: A Memoir 1909-1947, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p200. (19) Pendlebury, John (1935), Tell el-Amarna, London: Lovat, Dickson & Thompson Ltd. (20) Pendlebury, John (1933), The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology Vol 19, p117. Page 9 the Nefertiti bust which now resides in the EES.  The copy was made for this exhibition, and was displayed in case 2 and described in the exhibition catalogue (in the EES archive) as one of the “plaster casts of objects from the Sculptor’s House, retained by the Cairo Museum” (see the left half of slide 3 for a photo of Pendlebury with the bust at the exhibition).  You can still buy copies of the cast from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo today – and they are made from the same mould as the original EES cast.  It’s a complete copy including the tenon which would have joined the head to a body, probably of another material.  On 8 November 1933, Pendlebury wrote to Waddington hoping he would go out to Amarna again during the winter; the next season would start on 1 December and he hoped the report of their finds in the next volume of the “City of Akhenaten” would be published soon.  This report is of course in the EES library.  Unfortunately, there’s not much about the sculptor’s workshop or the bust in the “City of Akhenaten” reports – the 1932-33 season is in volume III, which was not published until 1951, by Fairman, as Pendlebury was by then dead, shot by the Germans in Crete in 1941.  I was pleased to see that the dig team list again included not just Hilary but also Mrs Waddington.  The distribution list for 1933-34 includes objects from the sculptor’s workshop O.47.16a and 20 “excavated in that season but not yet published”.  The report itself refers only to a sculptor’s area which included a number of trial pieces and unfinished shawabtis, (21) which Pendlebury had listed in his JEA article. Andrew Bednarski wrote an article “Life after Amarna: the post excavation history of JE 59286” (22) which discusses the attribution of the bust and its display in the Cairo museum. In 2011 the 62 nd  annual meeting of the American Research Center in Egypt (held in Chicago) included a presentation by Kristin Thompson, one of the team working on the Amarna Project, on “The “Waddington Workshop at Amarna: its layout and products”.  The full talk isn’t available online but according to an abstract of her talk, (23) she explained that the Waddington workshop was roughly the same size as the Thutmose one, but the buildings were laid out differently, and described the bust as comparable in quality to the statuary in Thutmose’s workshop.  She suggested that the reason why relatively few fragments of statues were found and instead the team found lots of smaller objects, such as stelae of Akhenaten, limestone ape figurines, gaming pieces and kohl sticks, was because this sculptor received fewer royal commissions than Thutmose, and she suggested that this workshop’s emphasis on private devotional and practical objects may make it more typical. So that’s what happened to the bust and the cast … what did Hilary and Ruth Waddington do next?  This part of my research introduced me to some more archives.  Knowing that Waddington had been an architect, and had worked for the Antiquities Service in Palestine, my next stops were the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) archive in Portland Place, London and the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) in Marylebone, London.  Amongst other things, the PEF holds the archive of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem.  I also (21) Shawabti were standardised mummiform models, usually holding agricultural tools, which represented and “answered for” the deceased, acting as his or her substitute when the deceased was required to do something in the afterlife.  As representations of the deceased, they could also provide an additional home for the deceased’s ka spirit, where it could reside and through which it could receive nourishment. (22) Ikram, S and Dodson, A (2009), Beyond the Horizon: Studies in Egyptian Art, Archaeology and History in Honour of Barry J Kemp (Cairo, 2009), see:  https://www.academia.edu/272590/Life_After_Amarna_the_post-excavation_history_of_JE_59286. (23) See https://www.arce.org/files/user/page157/2011_AM_booklet_.pdf, p86-87. Page 10 looked at the online records of the Middle East Centre archive at St Anthony’s College, Oxford, which houses the official Sir Hilary Waddington Collection, and found a couple of references to Waddington in the Jstor online archive available through University membership. According to its online catalogue, the archive at St Antony’s has one box of documents about Waddington, which includes photos and papers relating to the survey of Athlit castle (1930 – 1936), including photos of the ruins, a map, financial accounts and temperature charts, and photographs of Ramleh.  The online summary about the collection also had a very brief biography which, in addition to what I already knew, told me that Waddington had done archaeological work in the City of London between 1922 and 1930- I wondered if this was perhaps early work experience with his father at the Guildhall Museum where Quintin was assistant curator. I was made very welcome at both RIBA (where no appointment was required) and the PEF (where I made an appointment through the curator, Felicity Cobbing).  RIBA’s archive included several published articles; the PEF had several box files of correspondence, mostly between Hilary Waddington and C N Johns, who excavated in Jerusalem during the 1930s and 1940s.  The PEF archive letters included letters dated 8 August and 23 October 1935 to Johns from Waddington who by this time was at Mount Tabor in Palestine.  Waddington compared Tabor with Athlit, which was where he had been working when he went on leave to dig at Amarna.  Again, as well as the serious archaeological or architectural content, there were some intriguing glimpses of life at that time.  In his letter of 23 October 1935, Waddington said, “Things seem to go on in the same old way here.  A large consignment of Belgian pistols and ammunition concealed in barrels of cement addressed to a Tel Aviv gentleman who cannot be found is causing a certain amount of excitement”.  A later letter (15 March 1940) in the PEF archive, from Waddington’s father Quintin to Johns, principally relates to twelfth century Cheapside in the City of London, but finishes by giving Hilary’s address in Delhi and saying that he seems very happy in his work there; Hilary was in camp, excavating at Muttra, the traditional birthplace of Krishna, accompanied by Ruth and his baby son Richard (then just a year old: Kassar’s cowrie shells had worked!). The RIBA online catalogue told me the RIBA archive held 4 items – a note on four Turkish renaissance buildings in Ramleh, Jerusalem, which appeared in a pamphlet published in 1935 by the Palestine Oriental Society, two articles about Delhi and one about classical architecture in Calcutta.  Clearly Waddington had been first and foremost an architect, but had maintained his interest in history and archaeology. The pamphlet on the four Turkish buildings had been printed by the Syrian Orphanage Press in Jerusalem which reprinted several articles published by the Palestine Oriental Society, as well as publishing a book on the spoken Arabic of Palestine, for use in beginners’ classes, which sounded useful.  Waddington’s article was a fairly straight-forward description of four houses in Ramleh, with some very neat hand-written plans of the house and sketch plans of the rooms, and some black and white plates (see slide 20). The Indian articles were all published in the Magazine of Architecture and Art which was first published in 1946 (annual subscription 16/-, single copy 4/8 in India, 30/- in England, and $6 in the USA).  Waddington’s first contribution was to the second volume (Vol I, no 2) in January 1947; this was an article called “The continuation of a city”, about Delhi’s development from 1500 BC, written jointly by Waddington and S Naqvi.  It was illustrated with black and white photos, all but one of which were reproduced courtesy of the Page 11 Architectural Survey of India who would have been Waddington’s employer at this point.  The buildings he selected included the earliest Muslim tomb in India, the Lodi Gardens which represent the start of the era of big domed tombs in square compounds which ultimately developed into the Taj Mahal, and finally the tomb of Nawab Abulmansur Khan, called Safdar Jang, the last great Moghul tomb from 1754.  He described this last tomb as of “a thoroughly debased design”, but he liked the gardens which were a great asset to this part of Delhi and hoped that it would be possible to get the fountains working again.  I was intrigued and wondered what this “debased design” was like, and found a modern photo (see slide 21): it looks okay to me, but I agree about the nice gardens - and sadly the fountains still aren’t working. The second Waddington contribution was an article on “John Company Architecture in Calcutta” by Hilary and Ruth Waddington, published in Vol 2, No. 2 – I was pleased to see that Ruth had continued to work with him and to be recognised for her contribution.  This was published in a special edition with a black and white cover in respect to the memory of Mahatma Gandhi.  The article talks about how the East India Company traders both adapted to Indian customs and remained conservatively attached to the “correct” English usages of the day - their architecture was the outcome of a compromise between the Moghul tent plan (which was suitable for the climate) and contemporary English classical Palladian style.  There were lots of nice pencil drawings, at least one of which was initialled HW (see slide 22 showing two pages of this article). I found a later part of Waddington’s story in the PEF archive, which included a letter from CN Johns to Waddington much later (11 – 29 February 1968).  Johns (who was about to retire from the Royal Commission on Ancient Monuments in Wales for whom he was working on a guide to Cricieth Castle) was sending Waddington a copy of a guide to Athlit.  I thought these two sites, one in Palestine and the other in Wales, would have little in common, but this was my mistake: Johns noted that it had been possible to date the Athlit buildings more precisely thanks to what had been learned about the rate of operations at Edward I’s castles in North Wales at the end of the same century.  Johns apologised for the fact that Hilary’s labours were not acknowledged in the Athlit guide, but explained that there was a rule only to acknowledge exceptional contributions; he sweetened the pill by saying he wanted to republish the guide in a larger format adequate for all Hilary’s drawings and with due acknowledgment – but then asked if Waddington could spare time to help with this project.  Another of the reasons Johns wanted to republish the Athlit guide was that it had not been reprinted in Israel, whose navy still occupied the site and refused access to tourists.  When he replied to the letter in June 1968, Waddington was at Uppsala in Sweden with Ruth, staying with their daughter Georgina and her family; he says it was blazing hot, like Athlit at its best, and that though there were mosquitoes they were not quite as vicious as the sea-breeding ones round the castle rocks.  In his reply, he said that the guide was “just what he wanted” (was he just being polite?) and that he hoped to get the plans and a short note ready for the Antiquaries Journal as soon as he got back, but old age was beginning to make its presence felt - he’d been delayed by Ruth’s ill health and pulling a muscle in his own leg.  Despite this slightly gloomy note, Waddington lived another 19 years. I have found researching Waddington fascinating.  There’s a wealth of information at the EES, and also at the PEF and RIBA, not just about the sites and the finds, but also about the people who excavated the sites and the process of archaeology.  The interests and attitudes of the excavators, and the financial and other constraints on their activities, of course Page 12 impact what is excavated and how it is interpreted, so all these surrounding circumstances are also part of the story.  My researches have made Hilary and Ruth Waddington live again for me. It only remains for me to thank all those at the EES, PEF and RIBA who have been so generous with their time and resources, and also of course to thank in particular the Waddingtons who have made more material available.