"People Call The Romans, They Go The House?"

August, 2018. – As my friends and I emerged onto the dirt track leading out of the village all we could see were fields stretching to the horizon. It was a familiar view, but one which most of us hadn’t seen in some fifteen to twenty years. The smell of sunshine and tilled soil, dried grass and fresh air assailed each of us with a warm flood of memories. Shared memories of walking this quiet track together time and again; usually listening to the sound of the sun ripened corn cracking and popping in the warm sunshine, the breeze murmuring through the rippling tide of stalks stretching as far as the eye can see.

Very little appeared to have changed, but as we walked I couldn’t help thinking of all the things I’d done since I’d last trod this path; thinking of all the places across the globe I’d visited, and all the people I’d met in those fifteen or so years. A lot of water had flown under the proverbial bridge, but suddenly it seemed as if no time at all had passed. This was one of the places where for me a lifetime of archaeological adventures had begun. Suddenly one of our group noticed a flock of tall stalks with long, sleek white fins turning silently on the lip of the horizon.

“Look! – Tripods are advancing to attack the dig site!”

They did look incongruously modern, like the strange and sinister three-legged ambulating spaceships of John Christopher’s iconic trilogy of Sci-Fi novels, in which advanced alien overlords now rule an English countryside technologically regressed to medieval times. The wind farm itself was actually several miles away on the other side of the distant hum of the M1 motorway which, as I remember it, could only faintly and very rarely be heard if the wind was in the right direction. That’s one of the reasons why this spot was so special for us – it’s a place of total escape, into the serene quiet of the land.

During the 1990s we‘d all come here each summer for the first two weeks of August to take part in one of the longest running archaeological excavations in the country. It’ll be celebrating its fortieth anniversary next year. Run by a local group, called the Upper Nene Archaeological Society (UNAS), and directed by Roy and Liz Friendship-Taylor, near the village of Piddington in Northamptonshire, the site is a Roman Villa with traces of earlier settled occupation during the late Iron Age. The dig site has yielded a wealth of information regarding the Roman era in Britain. The Villa itself must have been quite grand. The floor plan shows a large building with two side wings, along with several out-buildings including a bath house and a stone-lined well which was excavated down to the bedrock with a votive niche set into the stonework near the waterline. It’s possible that the long, deep ditch which runs straight alongside the track leading down to the site itself dates back to the Roman era.

My brooch is the one on the top right

For many years my role here was to sit in a small rusty old caravan, cataloguing and describing the “small finds” – this meant I got to handle all the wonderful things everyone excavated, from fine ceramics, to delicate bone and bronze implements such as hair pins and finger nail cleaners, as well as coins and brooches; supervising the team sifting and sorting through heaving-great bags of broken animal bones, pot and tile sherds, and fragments of tesserae. From time to time I did some digging as well, and I was lucky enough on one occasion to find a gorgeous bronze brooch which still had traces of its original silver tinning.

At the time though, due to the nature of the work I was then doing as part of my day job back at the British Museum, I was very interested in lithics and so I often used to go fieldwalking when the field which surrounded the site where we were digging had been freshly ploughed. A short distance from the Roman Villa there’s a dip in the field, which was apparently the impression left by an old quarry pit (old but modern old, rather than ancient old). There must have been a lot of deeper material cast up in this area as a result of the quarrying because this was a spot where I used to find a lot of flint debitage – flakes, blades and occasionally blade cores, and every now and then a proper tool, like an arrowhead, or a flint scraper – the sort of implement which would have been used to clean and prepare skins and hides. Most of these finds were Neolithic, but the things I was really looking out for were the much older Mesolithic microliths. These are really hard to spot as they are very small worked slivers of flint which would have been set into the shafts of arrows (it’s almost impossible to find these without sieving the soil).

It’s hard to describe the feeling of spotting something shiny glistening in the wet mud and recognising it as a flint implement from a distance, then homing in and picking it up and thinking how – very probably – yours is the first human hand to pick it up in several thousand years who actually knows what it is and what it was used for. It’s a real deep connection to the past, which for me is a genuine thrill that goes to the very core of why I first fell in love with the subject of archaeology when I was a child.

I won’t go into the elaborate history of the Roman Villa dig site itself, as this has been done by others far better qualified to do so than me (you can read more in a recent article in Current Archaeology here). Instead I want to write something about the intangible side of practical archaeology; what it is actually like to take part in a dig. Firstly, these things take a huge amount of organisation – there were a lot of people from UNAS who all contributed in whatever ways they could. Those with connections to the Army used to arrange the loan of a couple of large canvas tents as well as a bowser to supply the dig with clean drinking water. One of the members took care of the catering, providing a hot lunch each day for the diggers, along with a copious supply of tea. The ritual tinkling of a triangle would sound out across the site to let the diggers know when grub was up or that the kettle had boiled. The members’ and diggers’ subscription fees paid for the provision of portaloos. 

The village pub - The Spread Eagle, Piddington

Many of the summer diggers were university students from all over the country and from overseas who camped on site. Waking up in your tent on a sun drenched morning, listening to the sound of the ripened corn popping in the heat was an idyllic way to start the day. Being close to the starting place of the Northamptonshire Hot Air Balloon Festival also meant that on some years you’d awake to the strange sound of burners blasting overhead in the crystal clear stillness of the early hours, or you’d see and hear them passing by at dusk as the sunset. It did sometimes rain, of course. These days weren’t quite so fun, especially for those camping – but if it was too wet to dig there was always the local pub to dry off in. I remember one such soggy afternoon, when walking through the village we encountered the remarkable sight of a legion of tiny frogs on the march all intrepidly crossing the rain soaked Rubicon of the road. Of course, many evenings, whatever the weather, were spent at the village pub (which itself dates back to the 1700s) playing board games, or pool, or darts – or playing Northamptonshire table skittles.

Over the years many of the diggers became regulars, returning each summer, our shared interests in archaeology and ancient history cementing friendships between contemporaries and across generations. All of us collaborating in a combined endeavour to open up a window into the distant past, meticulously recording all the things we found. Several of the regular students wrote their dissertations on aspects of the excavation and its finds, such as analyses of the baby burials, the coins, or the oyster shell middens discovered there. UNAS facilitated the publication of some of these studies alongside the standard dig reports. It’s an impressive example of how the dedication and professionalism of a non-professional society can facilitate and make a real contribution to the wider academic world of British archaeology.

My original sketch of the Piddington Gladiator Knife shortly after it was discovered in October 2000

One of the most memorable finds from the dig was made in October 2000 in a newly opened up area of the site. A small lump of iron and bronze was discovered in what had been one of the courtyard areas of the Roman Villa. Looking at the plan of the site I realised that I’d pitched my tent on this very spot for my first summer at the dig in 1994, and so I’d spent two weeks sleeping on top of this object! – When the lump was cleaned of soil it soon became clear that it was a folding pocket knife, with an iron blade and a bronze handle cast in the shape of a gladiator. By a strange quirk of coincidence I was then working as part of the team setting up an exhibition on gladiators at the British Museum, and so I was able to help identify the type of gladiator it depicted (a secutor), and I also helped to get the knife included in the exhibition as the very latest gladiatorial find from Roman Britain. The pocket knife was later written up in the journal, Antiquity (which you can read here). It’s now on long term loan to the BM and is on permanent display in the Roman Britain Gallery (Room 49). 

The Piddington Gladiator Knife (left) with a replica, made by Nodge Nolan (right)

It’s wonderful to think of the fact that this uniquely beautiful and extremely evocative artefact was seemingly lost at random, perhaps falling from a pocket or a bag in the wide expanse of a courtyard unnoticed or unfindable, waiting some 2000 years to be rediscovered. Even more fascinating to wonder at its story – it was very likely to have been bought as a souvenir in a more urban centre somewhere in the Roman Empire. Remains of gladiatorial arenas have been found in the UK, even an actual gladiator’s helmet as well (see here) – so maybe it was a souvenir from Verulamium (present day St. Albans), or perhaps it came from somewhere further afield, perhaps even from the Colosseum in Rome itself? – It’s not hard to imagine that whoever lost it was probably pretty dismayed when they realised it was lost. I wonder what they’d think of the fate that awaited their pocket knife thereafter, travelling through so many centuries only to be found and treasured again in a museum, displayed alongside some of the most amazing Romano-British artworks made of gold and silver, such as the Hoxne and Mildenhall Treasures. Our world, with our metal horseless thunder chariots and wax tablets which talk to us and show us pictures that move, would probably seem as strange, incongruous, and alien to the old Romans as John Christopher’s tripods do stalking and probing the lost medieval world of his science fiction novels.

I suspect that the original occupants of the Roman Villa would be surprised to know that so many centuries on people would be painstakingly sifting through the ruins of their home, setting up a small museum in the nearby village – thereby recreating a picture of their life and times for the present day locals and school children to remember and appreciate them. As regular diggers we often used to joke that the fact we were all drawn back to this magical place each summer over the course of a decade or so was perhaps because we were all reincarnations of the Romans who’d originally lived there – certainly, once you get involved with the world of archaeology, especially in joining a small, close-knit society like UNAS, it can feel a lot like a family. Hence returning after fifteen or twenty years, all of us having kept in touch throughout all that time because of our common interests, our deep sense of camaraderie and a shared silliness of humour, it was more than a reunion – in many ways, it was more of a homecoming. 

The jeweller's kiln

Walking back up that track after visiting the dig again, listening to the sound of the birds chirping in the hedgerow and the breeze gently soughing through the leaves of the tall trees, having seen some of the secrets the old Roman Villa was still revealing – such as a small jeweller’s kiln, and catching up with old friends there, it was quite a wrench to leave again. But the promise of a pint or two over an evening spent in good company at the village pub (another tradition universally adhered to by all good, self-respecting archaeologists) certainly eased the way!

You have to ask yourself though: “What have the Romans ever done for us, eh?” – Q.E.D: All roads lead to Rome, but for this little band of archaeologists all our memory lanes lead us back to this magic field steeped in the mists of both the ancient and our personal pasts. 

Read more on my interest in Prehistoric lithics (and a Viking battleground) here

Deeper Than Indigo - Transcending Time

Deeper than Indigo: Tracing Thomas Machell, Forgotten Explorer

By Jenny Balfour Paul

(Medina, 2015)

I’d wager that most historians are hooked on history primarily for the thrill of research, leafing through archives, puzzling over old photographs, wandering down side-streets in obscure places in search of long forgotten buildings where the events or people we are researching once happened or inhabited. Publication in the form of articles or books, and presentations in the form of talks or conference papers can be rewarding, but, for me at any rate, they don’t come anywhere close to the feeling of actively being engaged in digging down to find the bedrock of research which belies all our work. It’s a thrill which we often discuss amongst ourselves. It’s quite common for historians on Twitter to post photographs of the doorways to libraries or archives they are about to enter, with a gleeful note of anticipation – saying they are entering for a day of trawling through the archives. “I maybe sometime …” No need to send a search party if I don’t emerge, because I’m happily immersed in my element. The past is a foreign country, and many of us would be more than happy to permanently emigrate there! 

In that sense archives can be addictive. Even if we have reached saturation point, thinking we’ve had enough of one particular project – more often than not we find a little overlooked thread which just needs pulling, and, more often than not, that little thread turns into a great unravelling which manages to consume us once again, and so the process starts all over afresh. This is exactly what happened to Jenny Balfour Paul, an academic specialising in the study of indigo, the natural blue dye derived from indigo plants, when a librarian introduced her to Thomas Machell and his travel journals. 

The initial link was the fact that Thomas Machell had worked for a time as an indigo planter in Bengal during the nineteenth century, overseeing the processing of the plant into solid blue bricks of dye which could be traded and shipped across the British Empire and to other parts of the globe. But Machell’s life and career was far more varied than that fact alone. Machell, like Jenny Balfour Paul, was also a traveller and an artist. Born the son of a country vicar in Yorkshire, his wanderlust struck early on when as young boys he and his brother ran away from home one night and travelled on foot to the south coast of England before returning home. In many respects that journey was a rite of passage for the globe wandering life he was to lead later on. From Yorkshire, via the Marquesas and South America, to Afghanistan and India. Making his way in the colonial world and all the while charting and recording his progress in colourful, illustrated journals which he wrote as extended letters home to his father (these journals now reside in the British Library, see here). He collected many trinkets and souvenirs along the way which he sent back home in order to form the basis of a small personal museum intended to entertain, amuse, and educate his family and friends. 

Jenny Balfour Paul connected with this creative side of Thomas Machell and finding him a kindred spirit she ended up falling for him in a big way. A traveller herself from an early age, she joined up with a band of friends to follow the hippy trail to India, after which she responded to a job advert that read simply: “Interesting job in a warm agreeable country. Applicant must be graduate with wide interests and a driving licence.” Her application was successful and so she found herself living and working in Jordan, where she met and later married the British diplomat, Glencairn Balfour Paul. The couple spent many happy years travelling the world together. In later years these journeys were to be very much influenced by Jenny’s inadvertent meeting with Thomas Machell. Indeed, the journals of Thomas Machell were more than enough to inspire her to follow in his footsteps in an attempt to track this man down and find out more about who he was and how his story ended. The itinerary was a broad one, ranging from Egypt and India to Patagonia and Polynesia, then back to Afghanistan and India again, with recurring visits to his family homes in Yorkshire and Cumbria as well. In all this travelling Machell became a kind of time-travelling intimate friend to Balfour Paul, always a couple of steps ahead of her, beckoning her onwards – follow me to find out more, he always seemed to be saying. And the connection ran so deep she found herself compelled to write letters to him, even going so far as to send him a fax on one occasion! … (How many historians wish we could invent a time-travelling steam punk telegraph which might enable us to talk directly to the denizens of the past?!)

A postcard to the past ...

But as with all such research, as the project expanded and one link lead to another the story of Machell’s life which Balfour Paul was amassing began to beg its own question – how was all of this going to come together in the end? – And when it did, what was she to do with it all? ... (It’s a question I can relate to intimately. When I first began researching the lives of my brother-in-law’s grandparents I had no idea that several years down the line it would turn out to be a little project which had somehow substantially transmuted through an MA dissertation into the starting point for a much larger theme for a full PhD thesis!) ... It occurred to Jenny that the project of tracing Machell’s life path kept crossing and intertwining with her own, such that she was finding it hard to pull the two apart when attempting to put it all down in words – so, as a friend suggested to her, why not go with that aspect of the research? Why not let the two stories permeate and saturate into one another as they were clearly indelibly linked? The result is a wonderfully hybrid work, titled Deeper Than Indigo – combining all the best aspects of lucidly described travel writing, grounded by narrative history, and carried along by an evocative retelling of the research process itself. It is a narrative in which the research itself becomes a kind of quest, lending the book a remarkably personal and pacy quality, almost like a thriller. Once engrossed in the first few pages I found it very hard to put this book down! – It reminded me of A. S. Byatt’s novel, Possession; skilfully capturing the thrill of the academic quest to unravel a mystery of a lost life story, yet (happily) without a baddie in hot pursuit, even though the quest itself was not without its perils – perhaps most notably in dealing with distinctly dodgy taxi drivers, suspiciously skeptical policemen, and even modern day Somali pirates!

Parallel pages from Thomas and Jenny's travel journals

One of the most magical sections of the book for me was when Machell and Balfour Paul visit the Marquesas; somewhere which I would deeply love to visit myself some day. Haunted by the shades of Paul Gauguin, Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson (a distant relative of Jenny’s husband), Arthur Grimble, Thor Heyerdahl, and even the young boys in R. M. Ballantyne’s Coral Island, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and Joseph Conrad’s Caspar Almayer and Axel Heist, I’ve often dreamed of visiting distant Pacific Islands (I’ve only managed to get to one so far, see here). As Balfour Paul relates it, Thomas Machell’s experience in the Marquesas, where he fell in love for the one and only time in his life (he never married) with the daughter of a local chieftain, gives a frank and clear voice through his journals to the kinds of boundary crossing which I suspect equally seduced other European travellers before him; men like Joseph Banks and Fletcher Christian in Tahiti, causing them to transgress the social norms of their own societies and experience the world through the cultural norms of another people entirely opposite to their own. An experience which I suspect can hardly be comprehended by us today, even though all instances of travel still to this day require this kind of openness and inquisitiveness in order to be fully appreciated, albeit perhaps to a lesser degree of removal. The world is still a vast and varied place, but our relative perceptions of it have perhaps narrowed in these present times given that all parts of the world are now seemingly connected and made similar by association. Yet if you strive to look that little bit deeper, there are still discoveries of your own to be made. Delving into the self there are often personal depths to plumb "full fathom five" beyond the reefs and familiar coastlines we are normally content to cling to, especially when travelling abroad.

Parallel pages from Thomas and Jenny's travel journals

Deeper Than Indigo is quite definitely one of the best books I’ve read, period. It joins my list of absolute favourites – the handful of books I’d take with me to my desert island, the books I want to spend the rest of my life with, revisiting them from time to time like reconnecting with an old friend, because that’s what the best books ultimately are. As a historian I found I could really connect with the way that at times, as Balfour Paul describes exquisitely well, how our research seems to take on a life-force of its own, in which it ends up guiding us according to its own ends. Those are the moments when research becomes almost magical. Often there are many instances within this process of a kind of ‘harmonic convergence’ – something which transcends a mere coincidence; something which is more akin almost to a shepherding at the behest of the Fates. It’s all about that moment when you feel like you are almost communing with your subject directly across time. Coincidences which are too uncanny to be merely coincidences, and the effects of which can sometimes seem seriously spooky. 

I’ve written about some of these instances which have occurred to me before on this blog. Often the deeper you get into a research project the more frequently these uncanny alignments seem to occur. I remember once when I’d spent ages searching a library catalogue for a register of missionaries who’d been sent to China in the nineteenth century. I didn’t have the full publication details of this register, and so, in repeatedly clicking the search box I tried every permutation of search terms I could think of in order to tease it out of the computer catalogue system (a skill you learn from working in museums and archives over many years!), but alas, on this particular occasion, it was all to no avail. I even went to the long section of bookshelves in the library which contained all the books on China missionaries and scanned the book spines one-by-one in a David and Goliath-like effort to find the register, yet once again this little David was ultimately defeated by the immense size of the library. In the end I gave up and so turned my attention to other things. I spent next few hours installed at a desk, working on other books, making notes, thinking of other things. Eventually, once I was finished for the evening and had packed up my things I decided to look up a different book on my way out – a book entirely unrelated to my research (it was actually Robert Drury’s journal, which I wrote about here). This book the computer told me was located several floors down in the Africa section; so on my way out of the library I stopped off at this different floor and found the relevant bookstacks, and began to peruse the shelves, following the classmarks until I came to the book I was looking for, and, as I reached out to take it from the shelf, my eye was caught by the title of the second spine to the right – it was the register of missionaries which I’d been looking for! … Unbeknownst to me this particular Mission had sent missionaries to China and Africa. Hence the register had been shelved here in what I suspect was a 50/50 coin flip of a chance between the China and the Africa sections. But what were the chances of that? Like a needle in a haystack, on this very same occasion of my searching for it, to find it in that huge labyrinth of a university library by a complete stroke of luck? – At such moments it’s hard not to feel like there is some sort of serendipitous hand guiding you sometimes ... Jenny Balfour Paul’s Deeper Than Indigo is the only book I’ve found which has come close to capturing this feeling. That almost preternatural sense of what it is like to be in the full flow of research, flying on an exhilarating ride, forging a deep connection to the past; when everything feels like it is simply falling into place for you.

The framing of Deeper Than Indigo also struck another chord with me too. Balfour Paul’s decision, as the researcher / writer, to actively include herself in the narrative to the extent she does is an unusual one. You sometimes find historians breaking that textual fourth wall to address the reader directly, for instance, by serendipitously regaling us with an anecdote about visiting a certain place which they are writing about. One thinks of William Dalrymple’s books which are masterworks of the historian as informed guide. But Jenny Balfour Paul has taken this device to another level in the writing of Deeper Than Indigo. And it is something I admire because it shows how the imagination is very necessarily an active part of the process of doing historical research. It’s impossible to write history without attempting to inhabit the people and the times we are writing about, empathy comes from an informed process of imagining. But the key is to always remain open to the infinite possibilities which exist until we find the evidence by which we can be certain of our facts, and even then to weigh them as to whether or not we feel they may have been dressed or couched towards a particular agenda.

This kind of analysis is what makes time-travel in such books possible. All too often though I’ve opened history books, mostly those published in the last few decades, which confidently assert that on such-and-such a day “Admiral so-and-so scratched his elbow and shifted from foot to foot on the deck of such-and-such a ship, his brow furrowed and deeply pensive …” Such descriptions aim at the evocative, but they always fall flat with me unless they come with a footnote to direct me to the source for those very facts. Who saw him looking pensive? Who saw him shifting uneasily from foot to foot? Who did he tell he was feeling pensive? Did he write it down himself in a letter or a journal? – Or is it completely made-up simply for dramatic effect? It’s not pathos, it is pretence. And it bugs me no end! And as a writerly technique it is so easily solved as well, i.e.: “It is easy to imagine Admiral Itchy Elbow shifting pensively from foot to foot on the deck of HMS Assumption on the eve of the great battle …”

For me this is Jenny Balfour Paul’s greatest skill. She is wholly open to the imaginative (and even the rather more unorthodox spiritual side) of her quest. She is able to present her fictional conjectures as part of, and alongside the genuine facts she has been able to ascertain without ever fully succumbing to the unknowable certainties of such suppositions. As any historian knows there’s an enormous and ever present hazard of becoming convinced of your own educated guesses sometimes, and if you let yourself this tendency can derail your entire endeavour. But in Deeper Than Indigo the two tales of Thomas Machell and Jenny Balfour Paul’s journeys are skilfully told, switching from Thomas Machell’s past to Jenny Balfour Paul’s present and back again; each time leaving you wanting to know more so that you are relieved to switch back to take up the initial thread again, but simultaneously sad to let go of the parallel story for a while. It is a gentle yet compelling alternation between warp and weft. Very neatly all these strands are drawn together in the end when the book reaches a joint sense of homecoming, both for Thomas and for Jenny. 

Putting this magical book down after turning the final page you are sure to feel glad you have come know Thomas Machell and Jenny Balfour Paul so intimately. It’s as if you too had been their anonymous travelling companion, experiencing the world through their eyes and their words. If the best history books bring the past evocatively to life, Deeper Than Indigo does more than this – it lends the past a soul. It is often said of such books that they are love letters to the past, this book is certainly that. It’s a love letter on more than one level. As multi-layered as the experiences of travelling slowly, seeing, recording, and reflecting on the passage from here to there and back again, from then to now, the past and its ties to the present. It’s exactly what history and travel is all about. “An odyssey, set on the edges of time.” It’s a book to be treasured.

Find out more about Jenny Balfour Paul and her work here

Jenny Balfour Paul on 'Deeper Than Indigo' - ILHAM Gallery, 2018.

Read an interview with Jenny Balfour Paul | The Wild Dyery, 2019

Ludlow & Sherriff's "Botanical Endeavours"

Frank Ludlow (third from right) & George Sherriff (second from right) at the Gangtok Residency, 1933

Earlier this week I went to a talk at the Royal Geographical Society (RGS). Titled: Primulas, Poppies and Rhododendrons – the ‘Botanical Endeavours’ of Ludlow and Sherriff. It was given by Jan Faull, a retired film expert from the British Film Institute (BFI), now writing her PhD on the use of film during the 1920s Everest Expeditions. The purpose of the talk was to highlight the recently digitised RGS film archive relating to the remarkable exploits of two intrepid plant hunters, Frank Ludlow and George Sherriff.

I am also looking at the Ludlow and Sherriff expeditions, but from a slightly different perspective, as part of my PhD research. Beginning with Ernest H. Wilson and Augustine Henry at the turn of the century, and followed by George Forrest, Reginald Farrer, William Purdom, Joseph Rock, and Frank Kingdon Ward, the period covered by my study of botanists on the Sino-Tibetan frontier up to 1949 is neatly bookended by Frank Ludlow and George Sherriff. In June this year, whilst I was researching in the archives of the Royal Botanical Gardens in Edinburgh, I was able to take a quick look through some of their personal papers, diaries, and photographs. They made six extensive expeditions in total, steadily and systematically working their way east from Bhutan to Tibet in the years between 1933 and 1949. Given the level of their meticulous organisation in conducting these very methodical expeditions it is surprising they published very little of the results, only authoring a handful of articles on their botanical and avifaunal discoveries themselves. Neither of them published any book length accounts of their travels. Instead the main work to consult today is Harold Fletcher’s excellent A Quest of Flowers (Edinburgh, 1975), which makes extensive use of their diaries and letters to retell their expeditions in their own words. There is a wonderful chapter in Fletcher’s book which is written by George Sherriff’s wife, Betty, recounting the years of the Second World War – an ‘interlude’ from their plant collecting expeditions, which they spent on a British Government posting to Lhasa. Hence I was fascinated to find out that shortly before she died in 1978 Betty Sherriff recorded a narration to accompany one of their original colour films, which has now been digitised by the BFI and can be viewed here:

Jan Faull’s talk was illustrated by several similar clips from their black and white films (now held in the archives of the RGS) which they shot in Bhutan and SE Tibet, as well as one filmed in Kashgar (in present day Xinjiang). These films show a wealth of fascinating detail, particularly in terms of life on expedition; the wonderful national dress found in these Himalayan communities; and the warm smiles of their porters and the local people they met is very notable. However, I was particularly struck by two things with regard to Ludlow and Sherriff themselves: firstly, the fact that George Sherriff always appears to be industriously occupied, busying himself with various tasks, whereas Frank Ludlow often seems to be strolling around, meditatively staring off into the distance at the high, misty peaks surrounding them. Writing in The Alpine Journal in 1997, Michael Ward notes that Sherriff was 15 years younger than Ludlow: “Their attitudes were complimentary; Ludlow was the scholarly academic, whilst Sherriff was the precise, efficient, practical organiser and an expert mechanic and electrician. Both were captivated by the magic of the Himalaya and Tibet. They had a great mutual respect and harmony of views, and serious arguments and friction were unknown: yet, during all the long years of their friendship, they always addressed each other by their surnames only.” They were also great friends of the King of Bhutan, Jigme Dorji Wangchuk.

The second thing I found most striking about their films is how remarkably heavy and very cumbersome the loads which the expedition porters had to bear on their bent backs seem to be (although it’s possible these loads weren’t quite so heavy as some of the regular loads of tea which were carried into Tibet from China), as well as the precarious state of the ‘roads’ they had to travel, with precipitous inclines, fording fast flowing rivers, or shinning across precarious ropeways and suspension bridges. These were journeys for the hardiest of travellers. Jan Faull pointed out that George Sherriff always swore by the health-giving benefits derived from the large supplies of whisky which they took with them; something which he also considered as highly effective against malaria too! … I didn’t realise before but Sherriff was related to the famous family of Scotch whisky distillers of the same name from Bowmore in Islay.

Something else which these films show are the remarkable vistas of flowers that were the commercial and scientific purpose of all their expeditions. I’d pictured these scenes from the very vivid descriptions found in Farrer and Kingdon Ward’s books, as well as Fletcher’s, along with my own experience wandering through the region further to the north, but seeing these vistas as rendered first-hand in their films is quite something else. As Jan Faull explained, Ludlow and Sherriff pioneered the use of colour photography on their journeys, at first using Kodacolour film made by the Eastman Kodak Company, a type of film stock which was only in use for a few years before it was superseded by the more familiar Kodachrome film. It’s thought that these films were primarily made by Sherriff and Ludlow for their own records, or for use as part of their public talks and lectures rather than for proper distribution. As can readily be seen these films now comprise a unique record. They certainly constitute an invaluable source of information for historians, anthropologists, and for the local communities of the Himalayas themselves. Through the joint work of the RGS and the BFI, it’s wonderful to see that many of these films (and others like them) are currently being preserved through digitisation, and it’s even more wonderful that they are now being openly shared with everyone across the globe via the world-wide-web for free:

 See for yourself:

BFI – Royal Geographical Society Film Archive

(including George Sherriff’s B&W and Kodacolour Films)

BFI – India on Film, 1899-1947