Love's Obsession (21 page)

It is not surprising that Jim and Eve were grateful for the quiet presence of Laila, who calmly helped Eve and who was a comfort to them both. Perhaps, they thought, a child would enrich their lives and for once they seriously considered the prospect. Might it be too late?

In the new year Basil took up an appointment as lecturer at Sydney University. Finally able to concentrate on archaeology, Basil gave Jim someone to lean on. When St Andrews, the college where Jim usually stayed during the teaching week, was unable to accommodate him, he asked Basil if he might stay with him in Sydney in exchange for housekeeping expenses. The only other option seemed to be to roll up his blanket in the museum, which he would do if travel outside the university became too exhausting.
23

Jim hoped to expand the Department of Archaeology and sounded out both Hector Catling and Vassos Karageorghis, a Cypriot archaeologist now working as Assistant Curator at the Cyprus Museum. Neither was interested, whether because they knew the offer was only speculative, or they did not want to work with Jim, or simply that life in a remote part of the world did not attract them. Staffing issues began slowly to improve. A lectureship in classical archaeology, a technical assistant and a secretary were all promised. Their Bathurst friend Betty Cameron was recommended for the position of secretary. Recently widowed, she had moved to a house in Double Bay, Sydney.
24
Jim hoped to lure Chrysostomas Paraskeva, from the Cyprus Museum, to the technical position.

One of Jim's most promising students was Robert Merrillees, who would enter his Honours year in 1959. A graduate of the Sydney Church of England Grammar, he enrolled at Sydney University in 1956 to study ancient history and Latin and came under the sway of Jim Stewart and the ‘highly personalised way' in which he ran the department.
25

In 1958 Paul Åström assumed the Directorship of the Swedish Institute in Athens. Jim and Paul had hoped to collaborate on excavations but could never agree on details. Paul's preference was for the careful and stratigraphic excavation of a settlement site. Jim disagreed with Paul's costings, arguing that the kind of excavation work Paul envisaged would involve more people and resources than either could raise. Kalopsidha was one possible site, Hala Sultan Tekke another. Coordinating across different hemispheres would prove difficult, if only because the best times of the year for each would not suit the other. The academic year in Australia begins in March, as the European academic year moves toward summer holidays.

While planning the collaboration, Jim thought nothing of criticising Paul's approach to settlement excavations to Peter Megaw. Paul wanted a permit to undertake a ‘peripatetic sondage', which Jim now declared an ‘abomination in the sight of the Lord', conveniently forgetting that this was almost exactly what he himself had asked Megaw to grant him before the war.
26
As he explained to Megaw:

I am sorry to write this letter to you, but I do not want to see Cypriot sites messed about … Our good Cypriot sites have already been messed about quite sufficiently and I do not think that they should be interfered with again until one can get a proper expedition working on them.
27

Either Jim had come to his senses about the idea of a roving permit or he was simply annoyed to find someone getting what he himself had previously failed to achieve. On the same day, he wrote a cheerful letter to Paul repeating his criticism: ‘I think it would be wisest to confine yourself to Kalopsidha and not go digging holes over other sites in the island.
'
28

Jim applied for leave from October 1958 to April 1959 to return to Cyprus. In his leave application he stressed that the excavations he planned to conduct on Cyprus involved collaboration with the Swedes but admitted that as yet no site had been chosen.
29
The university gave its backing to the expedition, which again would be under the auspices of the Melbourne Cyprus Expedition. This time Jim proposed to take postgraduate students and introduce them to the basics of field archaeology. His plans involved a large group: Jim and Eve would be in Kyrenia of course, together with two students from the university; Jim expected Professor Hunt from Melbourne University to visit with his wife; and Marion Stevens, long a supporter of their work, would join from New Zealand. Jim even wondered if his father might visit.
30
Sydney Vice-Chancellor Professor McCrae supported his plans and allocated £835 from the Research Fund for Cyprus.

The hoped-for collaboration with Paul Åström failed to eventuate. Everything depended on the political situation in Cyprus, which was increasingly serious.
31
Late in 1956 Egypt's President Nasser had nationalised the Suez Canal. Israel invaded and was joined a day later by Britain and France. British airfields in Cyprus were of strategic importance and British troops from Cyprus were involved in the invasion. In an unlikely Cold War alliance, the United States, the USSR and the United Nations combined to force a humiliating withdrawal. It was the British Empire's last gasp.

The struggle for independence on Cyprus, which for many Greek Cypriots meant
enosis
or union with Greece, led to increasing attacks on British interests. Tensions between Turkish and Greek Cypriots festered. Kalopsidha, a possible excavation site, was in an area thought unsafe and the Kumarcilar Khan, Jim's base in Nicosia where pots from the 1955 excavations were still stored, was in the Turkish part of Nicosia. Megaw agreed that few Greeks would dare to travel there to work. Jim was saddened to hear of the murder of his driver and worried at the rise in political violence, although the situation changed daily.
32

Jim's moods fluctuated between histrionic claims about his poor health and cheerful, almost exuberant bravado. The political situation looked bad but Jim believed he might be able to broker a truce with the Greek independence movement, EOKA.
33
As Jim cheerfully pointed out ‘there will always be sporadic shootings, but it is wise to remember that the total casualty rate so far is only about 50% more than the normal murder rate', although there was always the risk that the situation might deteriorate into civil war.
34
Hector Catling, on the spot in Cyprus, warned that the road to Myrtou was dangerous; perhaps, thought Jim desperately, they could find somewhere nearer his old stamping ground, Bellapais.
35

The British residents of Cyprus received a circular prepared by the Colonial Office in 1956, which was now reissued. Residents were advised to take extra precautions when driving and should not make confidants of Cypriot servants. It was best to carry a gun in a shoulder holster and not in the pocket ‘as it will probably catch in the cloth if you have to draw it quickly'. The government told residents to shop in the Turkish area of old Nicosia and avoid the Greek area.
36
An article in
The Times
reported one death and several shootings in the Kyrenia district. A rural policeman was murdered in Karmi.
37

Jim had paid a visit to Melbourne University during 1958 to lecture to students. John Mulvaney lectured in the Department of History, having completed studies in archaeology and anthropology under Grahame Clarke and Glyn Daniel at Cambridge. Mulvaney and Childe had met in 1957 and Childe thought him the only person with the technical skills to tackle Australian archaeology.
38
Mulvaney was not impressed with Jim's lecture but was delighted by the question one of his students posed. ‘Where did the people live?' the student asked, ‘and how? Why do you only excavate tombs?' Jim replied bluntly that tombs were the only source of whole pots.
39
Mulvaney was shocked. This was not an archaeology of which he approved.

For an Australian intent on excavating in the Old World, the financial costs were steep. They still are. In Jim's day financial backing came from museums, which sponsored excavations as a way of building their collections. As Jim explained to Hector Catling, ‘we need at least five or six tomb groups for Australian and New Zealand museums'. Donald Harden from the Ashmolean Museum expressed a typical attitude when he said he was happy to subsidise work on tombs as the museum wanted display quality material. Habitation artefacts did not fit the bill and they hoped for pots that needed little mending.
40
‘The period is very largely immaterial', Jim admitted.
41

Jim and Eve left Australia on the
Iberia
. Robert Merrillees and Molly Hartzell, Jim's students, would follow a month later and, together with a Melbourne University student, Harriet Cook, would comprise the expedition. Possibly Paul Åström and his wife Lena would join them.

No excavation site on Cyprus had been chosen, although Kalopsidha might prove free of trouble and remained a possibility. Most of their time would be spent working on the Vasilia material left in the Cyprus Museum a little over two years ago. Newspaper reports quoted Jim as saying that Cyprus was no more risky ‘than crossing a Sydney Street in the traffic-hour', but within a few days of their departure Jim telegraphed Basil in Sydney, asking him to check with Porphyrios Dikaios on the state of affairs on Cyprus and asking whether ‘he considers our project possible'.
42
Had the expedition only involved him and Eve, Jim might have proceeded, but he felt heavy responsibilities for the students who would join them. On Dikaios's advice the Cyprus trip was aborted. Jim's father was relieved, as was Basil. ‘The thought of some future archaeologist resurrecting your remains from a Middle Bronze Age tomb into which you had been dunked did not seem to me to be a very pleasant thought', he wrote.
43
Eve's father was disappointed but agreed with their decision
44
and told them that ‘quite a number of people have sold up here and are making Spain their next stop'.
45

Molly and Harriet withdrew from the expedition, but Jim agreed to sponsor an extension of Robert's trip. He would join them in England and France.
Robert Merrillees left Australia in November 1958 to meet Jim and Eve in England. While Eve visited Bisterne, Jim and Robert travelled to Oxford and then on to visit the numismatist Peter Grierson in Cambridge. They called on Max Mallowan at the Institute of Archaeology in London and worked on Cypriot material amongst Flinders Petrie's collection at University College London. At the British Museum they were welcomed by Reynold Higgins, who had known Jim as a fellow prisoner of war.
46

In Paris, the group lunched with Claude Schaeffer and the next day Eve noted in her diary that Jim had a ‘bad night'.
47
For five weeks Jim and Robert worked in the storeroom of the Louvre on material excavated by Schaeffer at Vounous in 1933 and never completely published. They ‘dusted, sketched, catalogued, drew and photographed all the pottery and bronzes', and went on to work on other Cypriot material on display, as well as material stored in the basement of Schaeffer's house in St Germain-en-Laye. For ease of work, many objects were taken back to their hotel, and in a room on the fifth floor they continued cataloguing and photographing material ‘in dank and grimy conditions'.
48

Jim and Eve sailed for Australia in March 1959. Both were sick during the voyage. Robert wrote to thank Jim in April: ‘I find that I am overwhelmed by the recollection of the past five months, when I realise how much I managed to see, do and learn in the time we had in Europe'.
49
He promptly wrote about his trip for the Union Recorder and diplomatically sent copies to everyone he could think of.
50

At some point all the promises made would have to be kept, but the workload was more than either Jim or Eve could manage. At the beginning of 1958 Vassos Karageorghis had written to Jim. Vassos had worked as an Assistant Curator at the Cyprus Museum for the past six years but his relationship with Porphyrios Dikaios was uneasy. Ambitious and energetic, Vassos was a short man inclined to tubbiness who peered at the world through heavy dark glasses. He had completed a doctoral dissertation on Mycenaean pottery found on Cyprus and was eager to publish it. Peter Megaw was not interested in doing so, and Vassos began to canvass options. Would Jim publish it? His typed document was over three hundred pages and he was waiting for some material to be published so he could include it.

Vassos's manuscript was ready by the end of the year and he sent it to Jim in London, with apologies for his poor English and with hopes that Jim might be kind enough to help with this.
51
He sensibly retained a copy so he could begin work on the index. At the same time he negotiated on Jim's behalf with Petro Colocassides, who had a group of bronzes that both Petro and Jim believed came from Vasilia, although Vassos disagreed, thinking they dated to a later period. He told Jim, in confidence, that few objects would be retained by the Cyprus Museum, perhaps three bronzes.
52
He assured Jim that he had friends in Cyprus who were only too happy to help Australia.
53

Neither Jim nor Eve was able to look at the thesis before the end of 1959 and the job of editing fell to Eve who added it to the work she promised Paul Åström and his wife Lena.
54

As Cyprus moved towards independence, Jim worried what this might mean for archaeologists. In 1959 the armed struggle had ended with the signing of agreements and the appointment of a provisional Ministerial Council headed by Archbishop Makarios
55
with a Turkish Cypriot deputy, Dr Fazil Küçük. Would an independent Cyprus, Jim wondered, legislate as other newly independent countries had to limit the export of archaeological material? Would it still welcome archaeologists? Vassos Karageorghis assured him that Cyprus would remain friendly towards archaeologists. ‘I do not share your pessimism about the future', he wrote. ‘I am sure we will stay in the Commonwealth, and the Antiquities Law will not necessarily follow the drastic changes it suffered in other countries. After all we want to
attract
archaeologists here, and by being generous we can do it better.
'
56