Bloody Old Britain: O.G.S. Crawford And The Archaeology Of Modern Life, by Kitty Hauser
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Bloody Old Britain: O.G.S. Crawford And The Archaeology Of Modern Life, by Kitty Hauser
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O. G. S. Crawford (1886-1957) thought history held the answers to everything. A field archaeologist, he later became a photographer flying over the Western Front during the First World War - an experience that made him a pioneer of aerial archaeology. An impassioned Marxist, it seemed to him that 1930s Britain would soon disappear, conquered by history's inevitable march to world socialism, and he made a photographic study of everyday things - churches and advertising hoardings - as future evidence of how unenlightened British society had once been. Later there came angry disillusionment and a book, too bitter to be published, called Bloody Old Britain. In recounting Crawford's extraordinary story, Kitty Hauser uses many of his photographs and penetrates neglected but fascinating aspects of British life and belief that have themselves become history.
Bloody Old Britain: O.G.S. Crawford And The Archaeology Of Modern Life, by Kitty Hauser- Published on: 2015-06-04
- Released on: 2015-06-04
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review '[A] wonderfully captivating biography - This is a most engrossing piece of work, written in supple prose that now and again approaches the rhapsodic. Kitty Hauser is driven by curiosity rather than idolatry. Through the tetchy figure of Crawford, she broadly illuminates archaeology's progress throughout the first half of the 20th century' - New Statesman 'Hauser has written a truly fascinating and unexpected book - She has told an intriguing story about the way we can look at our landscapes and find in them the life, or lives, we want to believe in when stark reality insists that we are wrong' - Guardian 'A delightfully written, richly imagined account of a remarkable individual of a type rarely celebrated in book form' - Art Newspaper
About the Author Kitty Hauser is the author of Shadow Sites: Photography, Archaeology and the British Landscape and Stanley Spencer.
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0 of 0 people found the following review helpful. Plucked from obsurity - a fascinating scientist, socialist and Grumpy Old Man By MR PHILIP J SHANNON Osbert Guy Stanhope Crawford, a British archaeologist, was the original Grumpy Old Man of the 1930s. His manuscript, Bloody Old Britain, was not just an attempt to apply archaeological methods to the study of contemporary society - it was also, says Hauser, a "long howl of indignant frustration" at capitalism and its inefficiencies, irrationalities, snobbery and class distinction, where everything is badly made and nothing works. Unpublished because it was too bitter and unpatriotic as war loomed, Bloody Old Britain combined comedy with polemic, Basil Fawlty with Karl Marx.Crawford huffed against grim hotels, adulterated food and poorly designed teapots, and he puffed against money-driven town planning, the destruction of archaeological sites, a car-based society ruining the countryside, the commercialisation of sport and the plague of advertisements.Capitalist production, he said, was little more than an attempt to cheat the consumer of value, from coal tongs, fire pokers, soup spoons and drinking glasses which placed appearance over functionality, to cinema seats which sacrificed leg room to pack in the punters. Shoddiness was profitable, planned obsolescence a fast-track to riches.Whilst many of Crawford's conservative middle class readers (as editor of the journal, Antiquity, he had a few) would have nodded in agreement at many of his complaints about the degeneration of standards of workmanship and service, the difference was that, for Crawford, the solution was socialism.Crawford was born in British-ruled India in 1886, and looked set to follow his father on the path to colonial service - through Marlborough College (whose savage bullying and forced games made his time as a prisoner in a German POW camp in the first World War seem preferable), to Oxford, the army and then the Civil Service.The first World War, however, taught Crawford two things. First, that reason and intelligence should replace religion, nationalism and war, and that science should be the foundation of a new `universal brotherhood'. Second, that the higher the vantage point (he conducted wartime aerial photography as a Royal Flying Corps observer) the better the view of general patterns. He applied this perspective scientifically and professionally as a pioneer of aerial archaeology, and politically as a Marxist analysing broad historical processes and social forces.Like many other progressive intelligentsia, before the reality of Stalin's betrayal of the Russian revolution had sunk widely in, a trip to Russia (in 1932) reinforced his socialist commitment. Pre-disposed to view the Soviet Union positively, Crawford did not observe the human costs of Stalin's rapid industrialisation and forced collectivisation, the Terror and repression.This sanitised view of Soviet Russia further soured Crawford on a Britain where religion, private property, slums and advertising increasingly seemed to be the artefacts, rituals and remains of a dying society which he set about photographing to produce a modern archaeological record which would document human evolution from Stone Axe to Five Year Plan. For Crawford, capitalist culture would now be subject to the museological scrutiny usually reserved for other cultures which were safely distant in time and space.His dreams were hit, however, by a Luftwaffe bombing raid on the Ordnance Survey offices in Southampton where he worked, destroying much of the historic resources for his politically-inspired archaeological vision. Crawford retired soon after the war, his hopes in the Soviet Union abandoned but still well-known as a socialist until his death in 1957.Hauser's book shows us another fascinating character - a scientist, a socialist, a Grumpy Old Man - plucked from obscurity but it also comes with the fashionable debunking of socialist ideals. Crawford's problem, in Hauser's post-modernist view, is that he was a man of faith - a socialist faith that the past is knowable, that history has a pattern and that the future is shapeable and therefore bright, a vision "both heroic and foolish", says Hauser, for whom Crawford's "big picture" socialist idealism is "alien to us", the preserve of eccentrics.Despite Hauser's political scepticism, however, we only have to replace Old with New in Crawford's Bloody Old Britain to have a book that is still relevant to a world where production is in the cause of profit, where commercialism runs roughshod over nature, and where war and race lord it over universal botherhood.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful. Interesting biography of a fascinating character By William Podmore Teacher and writer Kitty Hauser has written a fascinating biography of the British archaeologist O. G. S. Crawford (1886-1957). Crawford was one of the pioneers of field archaeology, cycling all over the country to dig into the mounds and ditches of rural England.During the First World War, he flew missions over the Western front photographing German trenches and gun placements, learning the new skills of reading the earth from above. This led to his later, original work in aerial photography, whose invention was for archaeology what the invention of the telescope was for astronomy.Crawford's sensitivity made him a good observer and also a good photographer. He took thousands of photographs of everyday things, adverts, horse-drawn carts, graffiti, churches and other buildings, as well as of archaeological sites and finds.At the Ordnance Survey, he collected archaeological data county by county. He had "a faith in evidence, a faith in consequences, a faith that history had a pattern, and a faith in our ability as camera-wielding human observers to make that pattern out." He played a big role in turning archaeology into a profession.He became a friend of the Soviet Union, and believed in a future socialist Britain. Like the scientist J. D. Bernal though, he thought that the advance of science, not class struggle, would end capitalism. Lacking any knowledge of Britain's trade unions, and with no concept of workers' nationalism, he took a negative attitude to Britain, hence the title of his unpublished manuscript of the late 1930s, from which Ms Hauser took her title.Unfortunately, Ms Hauser shows little sense of why so many people respected the Soviet Union. The book would also have benefited if she had a better grasp of archaeology, and if she had included a proper bibliography of Crawford's writings. So this is a good introduction to this intense, awkward and original man, but not a definitive biography.
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