The youngest BSA Student

Students were normally admitted to the BSA after completing their studies. There were exceptions. Three Oxford students were admitted after completing Classical Moderations, and three Cambridge students after completing Part 1 of the Classical Tripos.

In spite of strict criteria about entry to the BSA, Richard Stanton Lambert (1894-1981) was admitted in 1912/13 when he was 18. He had been educated at Repton School (1908-12) and had won a classical scholarship to Wadham College, Oxford.

After his time in Greece, Lambert was admitted to Wadham in the Michaelmas term of 1913. By early 1914 he was speaking in public debates about the need for reductions in armaments. He secured registration as a conscientious objector in 1916 and subsequently joined a Friends' Ambulance Unit (1916-18).

After the war Lambert was a lecturer in Economics at Sheffield University, and in 1927 took charge of Adult Education at the BBC. He became the first editor of The Listener (until 1939).

BSA Students and Military Decorations from Greece

Several former BSA students were awarded Greek decorations in recognition of their military (and civilian) service during the First World War.

The most prestigious was the Order of the Redeemer first awarded in 1833. There are five classes. The Gold Cross was awarded to Erenest A. Gardner (who had served in naval intelligence in Salonica), and the Silver Cross was to John C. Lawson and Richard M. Dawkins (who had both served in naval intelligence on Crete). Other members of the school were awarded the order though the class is not clear: Robert C. Bosanquet, Stanley Casson, William R. Halliday, Solomon C. Kaines Smith, Arthur M. Woodward. Bosanquet had been present in Salonica working with refugees from Serbia.

The second most prestigious was the Royal Order of George I instituted in January 1915. There were two recipients, John L. Myres (Commander) and Henry A. Ormerod (Chevalier).

Kaines Smith and Lawson were awarded the Greek Medal of Military Merit, and E.M.W. Tillyard the Greek Military Cross.

BSA Students and Crete in the First World War

Students of the BSA had been involved in a series of excavations across Crete since the foundation of the Cretan Exploration Fund. These had included Knossos, the Dictaean Cave, Kato Zakro, Praesos, Palaikastro, the Kamares Cave and Plati.

Three former BSA students were commissioned as officers in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (RNVR): Richard M. Dawkins (1871-1955), John C. Lawson (1874-1935), and William R. Halliday (1886-1966). Their role was to monitor the activity of German submarines and to be involved in counter-espionage.

Lawson was a Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge, and Dawkins had just resigned as Director of the BSA and was a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Both were in their 40s. Halliday had been appointed Rathbone Professor of Ancient History at Liverpool in 1914. Lawson was commissioned in February 1916, Halliday in May, and Dawkins in December. All held the rank of Lieutenant; Lawson rose to be Lt-Commander. (Dawkins' father had retired from the Royal Navy with the rank of Read-Admiral.) Lawson was based at Suda Bay, Dawkins to eastern Crete (an area he knew well from his excavations there), and Halliday to the western part of the island.

Lawson later wrote about aspects of his activity as an intelligence officer:

He must secure native agents ashore along coastlines of many hundred miles to report sightings of submarines, and movements of ships or persons suspected of communicating with or re-victualling them, and devise codes for the passing of such information. He must direct the tracking and procure the arrest of spies and enemy agents in general.

One of Lawson's actions was to annexe (briefly) the island of Kythera in January 1917 as he considered it to be acting as a base for enemy submarines responsible for a series of sinkings.

This work on Crete was conducted alongside other intelligence work through the Eastern Mediterranean Special Intelligence Bureau (EMSIB) in Salonica (see Harry Pirie-Gordon) or through civilian activity in Athens.

Henry Arnold Tubbs

The biographical history of Henry Arnold Tubbs (Talbot-Tubbs from at least 1897), one of the BSA students, is unclear. He was born in Lancashire in 1865, and was a scholar at Pembroke College, Oxford (1883-87). Tubbs was awarded a Craven Fellowship and admitted to the BSA for two sessions (1888-89, 1889-90) to work with Ernest Gardner on Cyprus (Cyprus Exploration Fund). During the 1890 season of excavations he had to leave the island to take up office in the Department of Classics at University College, Auckland, New Zealand. He was made a full professor in February 1894 (initially for a period of five years, to 1899).

His time in Auckland was not easy. In January 1896 he was due to have been married in Sydney; however he sustained serious injuries and the marriage was unable to proceed.

Tubbs remained in office until 1907 when he was dismissed. In December 1907 Tubbs (named as Henry Arnold Talbot Tubbs) went to the Supreme Court in Auckland seeking £700 in damages ('Professor claims damages', [Auckland] Evening Post 3 December 1907; 'Professor and university', Otago Witness, 11 December 1907).

In later life he seems to have moved to Australia (New South Wales and Queensland).

Lectures for the Royal Society of New Zealand:

• '"A", a Passage in Archaeology', 30 June 1897 [details] (history and development of alphabetic writing)
  
• 'Greek Painted Vases: their Importance, Form, and Design', 19 August 1901 [details]
  

BSA Students and Clerical Family Backgrounds

It is striking how many students (about one sixth) admitted to the BSA up to the First World War were sons and daughters of clerical families. Several students were later ordained members of the Church of England, or served as ministers in Scotland.

Church of England

• Thomas Dinham Atkinson, son of the Rev. George Barnes Atkinson (d. 1917), Rector of Swanington, Norfolk, and schoolmaster in Sheffield.
• Edward Frederic Benson, son of the Rev. Edward White Benson (1829-96), headmaster of Wellington College, and later Archbishop of Canterbury (1883-96).
  
• Alexander Cradock Bolney Brown, son of the Rev. George Bolney Brown (1850-1931), Rector of Aston-by-Stone, Staffs.
• John Winter Crowfoot, son of the Rev. John Henchman Crowfoot.
• David George Hogarth, son of the Rev. George Hogarth (1827-1902), vicar of Barton-on-Humber.
  
• Charles Cuthbert Inge, son of the Rev. William Inge, DD., Provost of Worcester College.
• Montague Rhodes James, son of the Rev. Herbert James (1822-1909), Rector of Livermere, Suffolk.
• Henry Stuart-Jones, son of the Rev. Henry William Jones (1834-1909) Henry William Jones (1834–1909), Vicar of St Andrew's Church, Ramsbottom, Lancashire.
• John Cuthbert Lawson, son of the Rev. Robert Lawson (d. 1909), Rector of Camerton.
• William Loring, son of the Rev. Edward Henry Loring (1823-79), Rector of Gillingham, Norfolk.
• Robert John Grote Mayor, son of the Rev. Joseph Bickersteth Mayor (1828-1916), of Queen's Gate House, Kingston-on-Thames, Surrey; schoolmaster, headmaster and university professor.
  
• John Linton Myres, son of the Rev. William Miles Myres (d. 1901), Vicar of St Paul’s Preston.
• Oswald Hutton Parry, son of the Rev. Edward St John Parry; in 1891, private school master in Stoke Poges, Bucks.
• John Ff. Baker Penoyre, son of the Rev. Slade Baker Stallard-Penoyre.
• Edward Ernest Sikes, son of the Rev. Thomas Burr Sikes (St John's College, Oxford, 1849), Vicar of Burstow, Surrey.
• John Laurence Stokes, son of the Rev. Augustus Sidney Stokes (1846-1922), Vicar of Elm, Cambs.
• Erwin Wentworth Webster, son of the Rev. Wentworth Webster (1829-1907), Anglican chaplain at St Jean-de-Luz, Basses-Pyrénées.
  
• Hercules Henry West, son of the Very Rev. John West, Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin.
• Rev. William Ainger Wigram, son of the Rev. Woolmore Wigram (1831-1907), Vicar of Brent Pelham with Furneaux Pelham, Hertfordshire.
  
• Arthur Maurice Woodward, son of the Rev. W.H. Woodward.
  

Ministers in Scotland

• John G.C. Anderson, son of the Rev. Alexander Anderson, from Morayshire.
• Mary Hamilton, daughter of the Rev. William Hamilton, minister of Trinity Congregational Church, Dundee.
• Elizabeth Hilda Lockhart Lorimer, daughter of the Rev. Robert Lorimer (1840–1925), minister of the Free Church of Scotland at Mains and Strathmartine, Forfarshire.
  

BSA Students and Oxford Poetry

Several of the BSA Students wrote poetry. The following BSA students published in Oxford Poetry:

• Roger Meyrick Heath (1889-1916), Oriel Coll.: 'The Crimson Box' (1910-13)
• Richard Stanton Lambert (1894-1981), Wadham Coll.: 'East-End Dirge' (1914), 'For a Folk-Song' and 'War-Time' (1915)
  

John Ellingham Brooks

One of the more shadowy students at the BSA was John Ellingham Brooks (1863-1929). He had been educated at St Paul's College, Stony Stratford, Bucks., and then Peterhouse, Cambridge (1883-86; BA 1886). He was admitted at Lincoln's Inn (28 January 1887) and passed his Roman Law examination (1889).

In 1890 Brooks met (William) Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) in Heidelberg (see also Samuel J. Rogal, A William Somerset Maugham Encyclopedia [Greenwood, 1997]). Bryan Connon has noted:

Ten years his senior and an ostentatious homosexual, Brooks encouraged his ambitions to be a writer and introduced him to the works of Schopenhauer and Spinoza.

Brooks was admitted to the BSA in Ernest Gardner's last year as Director (1894/95). The reason stated was to do:

some preliminary work with a view to further research in another Session, especially in connection with the early Italian travellers in Greece, with the Greek teachers in Italy at the time of the Renaissance, and with the records and doings of the French and English travellers at the end of last and the beginning of the present century.

Brooks was re-admitted as an Associate in 1896/97 under Cecil Harcourt-Smith.

In 1895, the year of Oscar Wilde's imprisonment, Brooks and Maugham arrived on Capri. It was there Brooks met (Beatrice) Romaine Mary Goddard (1874-1970), an American citizen. Brooks and Goddard married on Capri on 3 June 1903; they separated after a year.

On Capri Brooks developed a close relationship with Edward Frederic Benson (1867-1940), another former student at the BSA (1891/92-1894/95). Benson recalled in As We Were (1930):

For several years I had been out here for some weeks of the summer, sharing the quarters of a friend of mine resident on the island, but now we had taken between us the lease of the Villa Cercola, and my footing in Capri was on a more permanent basis. ... the house was much bigger than Brooks's last habitation. (p. 339)

These events took place in 1914, but Benson had clearly been visiting Capri since 1895 (see Robert Aldrich, The Seduction of the Mediterranean: Writing, Art and Homosexual Fantasies [London: Routledge, 1993], 126) as he had been part of the circle of Goddard, Maugham and Brooks. The Villa Cercola was also leased with Maugham.

Brooks died in May 1929.

Mary Hamilton and the BSA

Mary Hamilton (1881-1962) was educated at St Andrews. Her father, Rev. William Hamilton, was the minister of the Trinity Evangelical Union Church in Dundee. (The church had been opened by James Morison [1816-93], founder of the Evangelical Union, in December 1877.) She held a fellowship from the Carnegie Trust (working on incubation) and was subsequently admitted to the BSA for the sessions 1905/06 and 1906/07. In Athens she met Guy Dickins (1881-1916) and they were married, c. 1909. Mary continued to use the address of her parents in Dundee.

Dickins was appointed lecturer in classical archaeology at Oxford in 1914 and they moved to 12 Holywell Street. Dickins was commissioned in November 1914 (Kings Royal Rifle Corps) and served in France; he died of wounds received on the Somme in 1916. Mary continued living at Holywell Street until 1917 when she moved to Bevington Road in Oxford. In 1925 she returned to Scotland, Callendar in Perthshire. She subsequently married Lacey Davis Caskey (1880-1944), curator of Classical Art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and her contemporary in Athens at the American School (ASCSA); they lived in Wellesley, Mass.

Mary returned to Callendar in 1950.

Bibliography
Hamilton, M. 1906. Incubation, or, the cure of disease in pagan temples and Christian churches. London: W.C. Henderson & Son.
—. 1906/7. "The pagan element in the names of saints." Annual of the British School at Athens 13: 348–56.
—. 1910. Greek saints and their festivals. London: W. Blackwood & Sons.

BSA Students and St Andrews

Only a small proportion of students admitted to the BSA had studied in Scotland. There was a single student from St Andrews. Mary Hamilton, originally from Dundee, graduated from St Andrews in Classics in 1902, and subsequently held a Research Fellowship under the Carnegie Trust (1903/04). This resulted in her study of Incubation, or, the cure of disease in pagan temples and Christian churches (1906) [WorldCat]. She was formally admitted as a student to the BSA in 1905/06 and 1906/07; in 1905 she was also admitted to the British School at Rome.

Three former students of the BSA were lecturers in St Andrews:

• William John Woodhouse (1866-1937) was lecturer in Ancient History and Political Philosophy (1900). He had been admitted as a student at the BSA in 1889/90 and had subsequently been an assistant lecturer at Bangor (1896-99). In 1901 he moved to Sydney to be professor of Greek.
• Adolph Paul Oppé (1878-1957) was a lecturer in Greek from 1902 immediately after his year in Athens (1901/02). In 1904 he was appointed lecturer in Ancient History at Edinburgh.
• Alan John Bayard Wace (1879-1957) was appointed lecturer in Ancient History and Archaeology (1912-14) after a long-period as a student in Athens (first admitted 1902/03) and librarian for the British School at Rome (1905/06). He left St Andrews to become director of the BSA.
  

Students at the British School at Athens (1886-1914): Index Available

The index for the Students at the British School at Athens (1886-1914) is now available from Amazon. [Further details]

Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire

Debbie Challis has published her study of British archaeology in the Ottoman Empire. This covers three main areas:

• Asia Minor: Lycia and Caria
• North Africa: Carthage and Cyrene
• Ionian Greece: Ephesus and Smaller Excavations

This book discusses the period before the establishment of the Asia Minor Exploration Fund (see also Funding) and the later work by students of the British School at Athens (see Gill 2004).

References
Challis, D. 2008. From the Harpy Tomb to the Wonders of Ephesus: British archaeologists in the Ottoman Empire 1840-1880. London: Duckworth. [WorldCat]
Gill, D. W. J. 2004. "The British School at Athens and archaeological research in the late Ottoman Empire." In Archaeology, anthropology and heritage in the Balkans and Anatolia: the life and times of F.W. Hasluck, 1878-1920, edited by D. Shankland, pp. 223-55, vol. 1. Istanbul: The Isis Press. [WorldCat]