Welsh Journals

Reviews and Notices AILEEN A PIONEERING ARCHAEOLOGIST. By Aileen Fox. Pp. 204, 30 illus. Leominster: Gracewing, 2000. £ 12.99. ISBN 0 85244 5237. When someone gets around to producing that unwritten book, the history of British archaeology in the twentieth century, Lady Aileen Fox's fine autobiography will be a prime source. Aileen Henderson was born in 1907. A happy childhood in affluent pre- First World War Kensington, with holidays in her parent's native Scotland, was followed by Cambridge in the 1920s, despite her father's initial reluctance lest his daughter turn into a 'bluestocking'. Botanical expeditions with him in search of Alpine plants led, almost by chance, to her first archaeological work, on the prehistoric rock engravings of Fontanalba in the Maritime Alps, and gave her the taste for upland landscapes which was to prove so fruitful in later years in Glamorgan, on Dartmoor and in New Zealand. Her subsequent apprenticeship in archaeological excavation at Richborough (rather than at the rival Maiden Castle), successively as student volunteer, site supervisor and publication assistant, will recall for many their own similar journeys. In her case, involvement in the London archaeological scene in the early 1930s, when a generation of brilliant young men and women were reshaping British prehistory, led to her marriage to Cyril Fox, Director of the National Museum of Wales, following the tragic death of his first wife in a bathing accident in Gower. Cambrians will particularly enjoy her descriptions of life in Cardiff in the 1930s and 40s, of her pioneering fieldwork on the Glamorgan uplands, largely for the planned Volume 2 of the Glamorgan County History, and of her wartime teaching in University College, Cardiff, after Victor Nash-Williams had volunteered for war service-the beginnings of what was to become the University Department of Archaeology. One photograph shows Cyril Fox addressing the Cambrians from a wall-top amid the scaffolding of Tretower Court in 1949 and older Cambrians will recall many of the people she describes, though it is a testimony to Aileen's gift for friendship that so many much younger people also figure in the book. There is a delightful memento of those Cardiff years on the back cover-a conversation piece painting by their friend Alan Sorrell of the Fox family in the study of their Rhiwbina house, absorbed in their various interests. These were also the years of now classic Welsh fieldwork projects on the platform houses and cairns of Margam and Gelligaer 'mountains', Cyril Fox's barrow excavations and Aileen's rescue work at Myrtle Cottage, Caerleon. After the war, by coincidence, she was to excavate on the Second Augustan Legion's earlier fortress, at the other Isca. Sir Cyril Fox's retirement from the directorship of the National Museum in 1948 coincided with Aileen's appointment to a lectureship at Exeter, where she was to spend many happy and fruitful years, though efforts to establish a department of archaeology there were not initially successful in the face of university politics and the hostility of a 'tyrannical' head of department. The 'Baedeker blitz' of 1942 had destroyed large areas of central Exeter and Lady Fox set to work recovering the early history of Roman Isca, ironically with labour provided by Italian prisoners of war. One minor by-product was a classic archaeological cartoon, duly reproduced alongside more formal excavation photographs. On Sir Cyril's death and her own retirement, feeling 'in need of a change, not a rest', she looked for new fields of work, and, after briefly considering native American archaeology, managed to obtain an academic post in New Zealand. The Maori paa is strikingly reminiscent of the hill-forts of southern England, and her