Rupert Bruce-Mitford


Rupert Leo Scott Bruce-Mitford, FBA, FSA was a British archaeologist and scholar, best known for his multi-volume publication on the Sutton Hoo ship burial. He was a noted academic as the Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge University from 1978 to 1979, in addition to appointments at All Souls College, Oxford, and Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
Bruce-Mitford worked for the British Museum in the Department of British and Mediaeval Antiquities from 1938 and, following the bequest of the Sutton Hoo Treasure to the nation, was charged with leading the project to study and publish the finds. This he did through four decades at the museum. He also became president of the Society of Antiquaries of London. Apart from military service in World War II he worked at the British Museum continuously until 1977, including two keeperships, and finally as a research keeper. Bruce-Mitford also held the titles secretary, and later vice-president, of the Society of Antiquaries, and president of the Society for Medieval Archaeology. He was responsible for translating Danish archaeologist P. V. Glob's book The Bog People into English.

Early life

Rupert Leo Scott Bruce-Mitford was born on 14 June 1914 at 1 Deerhurst Road, Streatham, London. Following Terence, Vidal and Alaric, he was the fourth of four sons born to Eustace and Beatrice Jean Bruce-Mitford. His mother was a daughter of John Fall Allison. Family tradition has it that Rupert's brothers were responsible for his given names, selecting them from their reading: Rupert from Anthony Hope's Rupert of Hentzau, Leo from Rider Haggard's , and Scott from Robert Falcon Scott's diary, or his "Message to England". The family's surname was little older. Eustace, born Charles Eustace Beer in 1875, had adopted the name around 1902; perhaps indicative of his desire to separate himself from his family's missionary past, the change occurred shortly before he left a teaching post at a school in China headed by his brother, and set out by himself for Japan. "Mitford" was a take on "Midford", his mother's maiden name, and perhaps not unintentionally, that of the unrelated Algernon Freeman-Mitford, 1st Baron Redesdale, whose name carried respect in the British expatriate community in Japan. "Bruce" may have been taken from Major Clarence Dalrymple Bruce, an acquaintance who commanded the Weihaiwei Regiment. Eustace Bruce-Mitford was a journalist, geographer, and vulcanologist. Rupert was born three years after his family returned from Japan, and three years before his father left for India. When Eustace died in 1919, Rupert was five years old.
Orphaned and poor, Rupert Bruce-Mitford was educated with the financial support of his mother's cousin. She did so "on one condition – that father's novel, depicting life in Yokohama at the turn of the century, should be burnt; she thought it immoral and scurrilous." Bruce-Mitford was thereby sent to Brightlands preparatory school in Dulwich, London, in 1920, and then to the charity school Christ's Hospital in 1925. At Christ's Hospital he was introduced to archaeology, in 1930 participating in a dig with S. E. Winbolt at the Jacobean ironworks in Dedisham, Sussex. By 1933 he had switched studies from classics to history, and was awarded a Baring Scholarship to attend Hertford College, Oxford.

At the British Museum

Bruce-Mitford worked at the British Museum for 32 years, from 1938 to 1977, with a wartime break from 1940 to 1946 in the Royal Corps of Signals. He was an assistant keeper for 11 years; keeper of the Department of British and Medieval Antiquities for 15 years, and of the Department of Medieval and Later Antiquities for six; and for two years, from 1975 to 1977, a research keeper.
In December 1937 Bruce-Mitford was named assistant keeper of the then Department of British and Medieval Antiquities at the British Museum. He was possibly helped in this position by his professor from two years previously, Robin Flower, also the deputy keeper of Manuscripts. That year Bruce-Mitford was reacquainted with archaeological work, spending three weeks with Gerhard Bersu at the Iron Age site Little Woodbury. In 1939 he was tasked with leading an excavation, this time at the medieval village of Seacourt. Though Seacourt was a difficult site, Bruce-Mitford was able to acquire complete ground plans of domestic buildings and of the church. It was also "a village deserted, in ruins, and archaeologically sealed within a century of the Black Death"; this precise dating—the village was deserted by 1439—"promised to provide important evidence for specialists in connexion with the chronology of mediaeval pottery and small objects" such as "brooches, ornaments, buckles, fittings of various kinds, shears, horseshoes, nails" the dating of which was "notoriously vague". Excavations wrapped up 15 July 1939, seven weeks before Britain's entry into World War II.
1940 to 1946 saw Bruce-Mitford serving in the Royal Signals, "reaching the standard Army morse speed of twelve words a minute and after his day-time job fire-watching in the dome of St. Paul's." He was commissioned as an officer on 1 February 1941. Bruce-Mitford spent the war awaiting his "eventual" return to the Department of British and Medieval Antiquities. As early as 1940, he was informed by T. D. Kendrick that he would "be responsible for the Museum's collection of Anglo-Saxon antiquities and also for the Germanic collections of Europe and the Late Celtic collections of the British Isles." The letter closed with a warning: "You will also be responsible for Sutton Hoo. Brace yourself for this task."
His 21 years as keeper saw outstanding acquisitions by the Museum, including the Lycurgus Cup and the Ilbert collection of clocks and watches; however, the Bury St Edmunds Cross was missed.

Sutton Hoo

Excavated in 1939, the Anglo-Saxon Sutton Hoo ship-burial was to become "the defining moment of Rupert's life, his greatest challenge, the source of almost insuperable difficulties, and his greatest achievement." By 1954 he was already recognised as the "spiritus rector of present day Sutton Hoo research", a title that would only become more deserved with time.
Soon after returning to the British Museum Bruce-Mitford began publishing the Sutton Hoo finds, which had waited out the war in the London Underground before being returned to the museum in 1944 and 1945. In 1944 Herbert Maryon, a Technical Attaché recruited for the task, set to work restoring them, and when Bruce-Mitford returned two years later, he quickly began work. As he later wrote, "here followed great days for Sutton Hoo when new, often dramatic, discoveries were being made in the workshops all the time. Built from fragments, astonishing artefacts – helmet, shield, drinking horns, and so on – were recreated." The first edition of The Sutton Hoo Ship-Burial: A Provisional Guide was published in January 1947, the same year that Bruce-Mitford was elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London. The work quickly "turned out to be one of the Museum’s most successful publications ever"; by the time the second edition, The Sutton Hoo Ship-Burial: A Handbook, was published in 1968, the first had gone through ten impressions.
Dozens of articles, chapters, and books on Sutton Hoo would follow. In 1947 he visited Sweden for six weeks at the invitation of the archaeologist Sune Lindqvist, in what Bruce-Mitford would later describe as "one of the most rewarding experiences of my life." There he studied the similar finds from Vendel and Valsgärde, learning Swedish along the way. In 1960 Bruce-Mitford was put in charge of a definitive Sutton Hoo publication, but before it was completed, from 1965 to 1970 he led another round of excavations at Sutton Hoo to acquire "more information about the mound, the ship and the circumstances of the burial". The first volume of The Sutton Hoo Ship-Burial was finally published in 1975, and hailed as "one of the great books of the century" by A. J. Taylor, then president of the Society of Antiquaries. The second volume followed in 1978, and the third volume—published in two parts—came in 1983.

Personal life

Bruce-Mitford was married three times, and had three children by his first wife. In 1941 he married Kathleen Dent, with whom he fathered Myrtle, Michael, and Miranda. A professional cellist, Myrtle Bruce-Mitford would herself contribute to the Sutton Hoo finds, being employed by the British Museum to work on the remnants of the lyre and co-authoring a paper with her father. She was also the longtime partner of Nigel Williams, who from 1970 to 71 reconstructed the Sutton Hoo helmet.
Bruce-Mitford's relationship with Dent was "long in trouble", and he left home in the later 1950s and formed a series of relationships. He married his former research assistant Marilyn Roberta Luscombe on 11 July 1975; the marriage was dissolved in 1984, at which point Bruce-Mitford found it necessary to sell his library, which went to Okinawa Christian Junior College in Japan. In 1986 he married for a third time, to Margaret Edna Adams, a child psychiatrist and published poet, whom he had met at Oxford fifty years before.
After years of inherited heart disease, Rupert Bruce-Mitford died of a heart attack on 10 March 1994. He was buried eight days later in the burial ground by St Mary's Church in Bampton, Oxfordshire. His widow, Margaret Edna Adams, died in 2002.

Publications

Books

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