Obituaries of Alan John Bayard Wace

Alan John Bayard Wace (1879–1957) was a classicist and archaeologist, famed for his excavations in the Near East such as that at Mycenae. He joined the Victoria & Albert Museum in 1924 as Keeper of the Department of Textiles, a post which he held until 1934.

From The Times, 11 November 1957

Excavations at Mycenae
Professor A J B Wace, the archaeologist whose name will always be associated with the Mycenae excavations, died on Saturday in Athens, our Correspondent there reports. He was 78. At the time of his death be was working on material he had excavated two years ago at a prehistoric settlement outside the Acropolis walls at Mycenae.

Alan John Bayard Wace was born in 1879, the second son of F C Wace. From Shrewsbury he went up to Pembroke College, Cambridge, as a scholar and took first classes in both parts of the Classical Tripos. He was Craven Student in 1903 and Librarian of the British School at Rome two years later. After holding a fellowship at Pembroke and a lectureship in ancient history and archaeology at St Andrews, be was appointed Director of the British School at Athens in 1914 and remained there till 1923. A year later he became Deputy Keeper in the Department of Textiles in the Victoria and Albert Museum, a post which he held until 1934, when he returned to Cambridge to succeed A B Cook as Laurence Professor of Classical Archaeology.

During the First World War Wace had served at the British Legation in Athens. At the outbreak of the second, he was engaged in excavations in the Near East and again reported for duty at Athens. With the Greek Government he moved to Cairo where he worked at GHQ until 1943. Retiring from his Cambridge chair under the age-limit in the following year, he was appointed Professor of Classics and Archaeology in the University of Alexandria and occupied the post until 1952.

The fruit of Wace's wide experience to the Near East is seen in a number of books which bear his name such as 'Prehistoric Thessaly' (written in collaboration with M S Thompson); 'Excavations at Mycenae'; 'Chamber Tombs at Mycenae'; 'Mediterranean and Near Eastern Embroideries in the Collection of Mrs F H Cook'; 'Approach to Greek Sculpture'; and 'Mycenae, an Archaeological History'. Wace also contributed many articles to archaeological journals. As a teacher he took infinite pains with his pupils and would always persevere with any who seemed to possess the right and proper feeling towards archaeological data.

His home, whether at Cambridge or at Cairo, was always open to the inquiring student and offered stores not only of learning but of kindness and good fellowship. In 1925 he married Helen, daughter of Professor W D Pence, of Evanston; he leaves one daughter.

'Helladic' Classification
Dr F H Stubbings writes:
After that of Schliemann the name most readily evoked by mention of Mycenae is and long will be that of Alan Wace. When he first went to the British School at Athens early this century knowledge of Mycenaean civilization was still young, and though he showed an unusual versatility, his principal attentions were soon claimed by Greek prehistory. Interest was beginning to shift from Mycenae itself to Crete, where the discovery of Minoan civilization as in many ways a forerunner of Mycenaean tended towards an incautious assumption that mainland Greece was in the late Bronze Age a mere province of Crete.

Wace, with his eye always on the archaeological facts, was quick to see that this view involved a misreading of evidence. His fieldwork on the earlier phases of the Greek Bronze Age left him in no doubt that there were other factors behind the Mycenaean achievement besides Minoan influence. As early as 1918 he worked out with his American friend and colleague Carl Blegen the 'Helladic' classification of Bronze Age remains in Greece which is still the accepted framework; and already he regarded Helladic art as essentially the forerunner of Hellenic art.

Then, in the 1920, his extensive exploration of the citadel, the beehive tombs, and the chamber-tomb cemeteries of Mycenae showed that Mycenae's greatest glories lay in fact in the period after the collapse of Minoan Crete. With all his insistence on sticking to the observed facts and avoiding premature speculation he had a striking power of what one might call prediction. He believed that Mycenaean influence on Knossos in its last phase had been strong, perhaps even involving a conquest: he was sure that the Mycenaean civilization must have involved the use of written documents; he deduced that the Shaft Graves found by Schliemann were part of a bigger cemetery and that there was substance in ancient tradition of royal graves outside the citadel.

His renewed excavations in 1939 proved this last paint, though it was the luck of his Greek colleagues actually to unearth the second grave circle; his American friend Blegen found tablets inscribed in Linear B at Pylos in the same year and Wace found others at Mycenae in 1952 within a few days of the first announcement that the language of the script was Greek. His contention that Mycenaean civilization was Greek was thus vindicated so was his belief in Mycenaean supremacy at Knossos. His work at Mycenae from 1950 to 1955 disclosed a city of even greater wealth and extent than previously supposed, with evidence for events in its history that are still to course of elucidation.

All this would be more than enough for most men but Alan Wace's knowledge and interests embraced many things besides Greek prehistory, too many to mention here. For most of them Greece was the unifying theme: Greece ancient, medieval, and modern. He will be mourned in Greece as he will in England and in America by the many who respected him as an archaeologist, admired and were indebted to him as a teacher, and loved him as a friend of wide sympathies and great personal kindness and charm.

From The Times, 13 November 1957

Fruitful Years at the V and A
J L N writes:
To supplement what has been written of Professor A J B Wace as an archaeologist, something must be said of his 10 years in charge of the Department of Textiles at the Victoria and Albert Museum. It was not easy to come from outside the museum circle and take over a varied but specialist department at a time when staff changes were rare and curators were expected to know every object in their crowded galleries. Wace, however, had a photographic memory for patterns, his skill in identifying scenes from history or classical mythology was unsurpassed, and he plunged with enthusiasm into the study of new subjects for him such as Sheldon tapestries or Elizabethan embroideries. He worked on English private collections, he helped the museums in the United States, but his great achievement in this field was the Exhibition of English Decorative Art held at Lansdowne House in 1929, where the emphasis on textiles was strong. Here the selection display and cataloguing set a high standard for a varied series of charitable exhibitions in the 1930s, from which connoisseurs, collectors, and one hoped, the charities gained so much.

But the greatest gainers by Wace's leadership were his juniors; Wace had the rare gift of being able to delegate work and yet make it seem important; he knew how to arouse interest in a subject which appeared unattractive at first sight, and how to impart something of his own enthusiasm and methods of work. Where others hesitated, Wace would at once give his opinion on an object and follow up with his reasoning; he made no mistakes about textiles. Many were the regrets when he returned to archaeology and to Cambridge.

Mention must also be made of his long friendship with the late Professor R M Dawkins and their rivalry in collecting Greek Island embroidery, the art of which had nearly disappeared. Finally, one must recall Wace's art as a lecturer who neither paraded his erudition nor talked down to his audience, and as a teller of tales - it is only a few months since we read in print his ghost story of St George the Vampire.
In these hustled days of committees at home and conferences abroad, of publicity and of television, there can be no more museum curators such as A J R Wace.

From The Times, 16 November 1957

Mr G F Wingfield Digby writes:
May I supplement JLN's remarks about Professor A J B Wace's work at the Victoria and Albert Museum? He was one of the earliest collectors of Greek Island embroideries (with his colleague of the British School at Athens, Professor Dawkins) and this was his original interest in textiles. He was an acknowledged authority on Greek Island embroideries and be formed the museum's unrivalled collection of Mediterranean embroideries. He published a number of informative articles on English embroideries and, as JLN points out, his name will always be connected with the magnificent Lansdowne House Exhibition of 1929. In his study of embroideries he paid special attention to the classification of stitches and it is due to him that no museum label is now considered accurate unless it identifies the class of stitches used.

Wace's book, in collaboration with E A B Barnard, 'The Sheldon Tapestry Weavers and Their Work' remains the standard work on the subject. He also made a lengthy study, with the late Mr H C Marillier, of the Art of War tapestries, which included the famous set at Blenheim woven for the Duke of Marlborough. This work, unfortunately, still remains in manuscript.

Reproduced with kind permission of The Times
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