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HomeThese museum visits with her mother, who shared her passion for beautiful things, had been made even more pleasurable by an unexpected and direct connection with the family home. Amongst the museum artifacts which caught her discerning eye was an amber necklace dug out from below a gate-post at the entrance to 71 Grange Road. By an odd coincidence this family home, where the aspiring archaeologist found such early inspiration, had been built where a Roman road was overlapped by an Anglo-Saxon cemetery.
Jacquetta was fascinated by this meeting of cultures across the centuries, and by the realisation that archaeology was concerned with such matters of distinguishing `things made by one people, or at a particular time, from those made by other people or at a different time.' Reflecting on this years later, Jacquetta realised that her appreciation of this contrast `between the soft, hand-shaped pottery of the Anglo-Saxon burial urns and the harsh, striated Roman stuff', had placed her at an important intellectual vantage point. One `at the very root of the simple archaeology then near the beginning of its rapid growth and flowering'.
Leaving aside the academic pursuit, Jacquetta had seen a grave group on display at the museum, and longed to dig deep into the garden to retrieve her own ancient finds. When she was denied permission to do this, her bravado overcame any fear of reprimand and she mounted a clandestine excavation by torchlight. ‘I took a torch and my garden trowel and laboured greatly in the middle of the lawn to remove about one square foot of turf in many fragments. It would be much easier lower down. But it wasn’t. I drove the trowel downwards again; it cam up with only a dessertspoonful of dull earth. Every time a bicycle went by, usually with a bobbing and wobbling front light, I put out my torch and squatted over the hole. My right palm was beginning to blister, and I seemed to have been at work for hours, I stood up to survey my excavation by torchlight. The sides sloped inward meeting at a point about eighteen inches below the surface. It was no good’. This early excavation was an improbable start to her archaeology career, but it was one which signalled the maverick spirit within.
The coincidence of the ancient find at Grange Road provides a pragmatic explanation for Jacquetta's early passion for archaeology - `interest would be too cool a word' - she insisted, but such an explanation was not wholly satisfactory to her. Instead, she reached down into her unconscious for an explanation, and wrote as a means of excavating her self; archaeology helped her to articulate her world.
In the preface to A Land, perhaps her most critically acclaimed work, she suggests that if such writings did recall her own childhood, it was something `not so much from egotism as from a wish to steal that emotion which uses our own early memories for a realisation of the most distant past...I find I am being led back far beyond the bounds of personality and of my own life'. Her later reading of Jung, which was shared with Priestley, would have helped her make sense of her fascination for the past. She was not a wholesale supporter of Freud, however, despite parallels often drawn between his work and archaeology, his writing on the archaeology or the self and, indeed, his large, personal collection of antiquities.
Jacquetta was inspired by the very physicality of archaeology, and thinking again about those places she visited as a child, they were imbued with the very stuff of her distinctive style of archaeology; a form imbedded in the intangible - perception, intuition, imagination and sensation.
The Brecks, in the East of England, which she visited with Emma Turner, were a fascination to her because they contained the prehistoric flint mines known as Grimes Graves.The archaeological evidence for Neolithic activity suggests the digging of shafts into the chalk was achieved with nothing less than antler picks, the flints brought to the surface for reshaping and trading. These tools worked by `brain-held hand' as had been the delicate brooch in the museum case, played on Jacquetta's mind. Of the prehistoric miners, she noted in A Land:`They were the first men to cut down through the accumulation of time to reach hidden resources which would then be used to transform the land itself'. In the same work, which fuses geography, geology, history and prehistory, she introduced an element of ethno-archaeology, as she recalled visiting present-day flint-knappers at a cabin `deep in silica dust and flakes', where the products were gun-flints, rather than prehistoric axes.
In A Land Jacquetta also made reference to another of the themes recurrent in her work, that of `goddess-worship', an area with which she is often associated by feminist archaeologists, and about which more will be discussed later. Jacquetta noted that at the bottom of one mine shaft at Grimes Graves, which had failed to strike the flint bed, `a figure of a goddess was discovered enthroned above a pile of antlers on which rested a chalk-carved phallus...Our Lady of the Flint Mines, it seems, was being asked to cure such sterility.' The suggestion, too, that the chalk `must at all times have recalled the flesh of the White Goddess', is significant. Years later, when Nicolas was young, Jacquetta had taken him to Majorca, ostensibly for a conference. While there, she visited the poet and writer Robert Graves, the author of the mythology-inspired work, The White Goddess, at his home in Deja. One imagines a fascinating conversation ensued and, in 1950, Jacquetta felt confident enough in the rapport to send Graves a selection of her poems for critique.
Back in Cambridge, Jacquetta's schoolgirl interest in archaeology had continued to flourish as she anticipated the thrill of her own finds. In the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, she delighted in the prehistoric artefacts suspended in the preserving peat of the Fenlands, such as a perfect shield, which conjured up for her `visions of Bronze Age chieftains', while an armilla from Gunty Fen was all the potent for her imagination, its golden curls springing up through the peat. `Knowledge of such local treasures was beginning to inform and inspire my archaeological consciousness', she said.
A meeting with the prehistorian Miles Birkett proved fateful. He told her about a new - and unique - tripos at Cambridge, in Archaeology and Anthroplogy. In the end, she had to take the exam at home, struck down with influenza, and strangely unnerved by a chimney fire at Saxmeadham. However, Jacquetta's unique talents were recognised at interview and she was given one of the keenly contested places, but without a scholarship. She would go to Newnham, where her sister had gone. One of the few all-women colleges at Cambridge, had extensive grounds and spacious buildings. It was close to Grange Road, and Jacquetta could have lived at home. But she resolved to live at college, and began then to cut her family ties.
She also cut her ties with her old school days, and would go on to find people who understood her waywardness and apparent disregard for hard work and authority.
An interesting relationship is revealed in a series of letters from Miss Elizabeth Kemp, Jacquetta’s teacher at Perse School, which were contained in a leather wallet of notes and mementoes from early adulthood. Like the Italy journal, these affectionate letters, and the related photos to which they refer, reveal another perspective of Jacquetta, as a favoured pupil preparing to enter the university world.
On 6th September, 1926, Miss Kemp had sent Jacquetta congratulations on hearing of her School Certificate results. Her note is in the wallet with Jacquetta’s self-addressed results card - the address formed in a quite naive hand - showing her subject passes for English, French and oral, English History, and European History. There is also a congratulations note from the Head of the Perse.
On 23rd Nov, 1927, Miss Kemp writes to thank Jacquetta for the snapshots ‘which are very good’ and seems to offer some consolation to her for some unfortunate incident. She writes: ‘Life certainly sounds a bit hectic for you but after all there’s no progress where there’s no noise, is there? Explosions clear the air until next time’. She adds: ‘I hope you enjoyed the Gainsboroughs and that you will have managed the rugger match’, a sentence which underlines Jacquetta’s catholic interests. One sense some considerable confiding on the part of her former pupil, and she continues with sage advice: ‘I hope you will manage to start straightaway on the thing you want to do, as it’s rather a drudge to do something else first, although we are told that it is good for us. The ‘ology’ sounds most imposing. I suppose you don’t feel drawn towards theology too?’
She writes again on 31st March, 1928, on the headed notepaper of the Royal Colonial Institute, London, WC2. In this she refers to Jacquetta being a prefect and having her ‘wings clipped’, before continuing brightly: ‘I hear that there has been an epidemic of Morris cars among the staff and I hope that none of them will come to grief.’
On 17st July, 1928, she notes her disappointment at the exam performances of Jacquetta’s year. ‘You were really rather an intelligent set of whom I hoped rather much’, she says sadly. She also mentions that she is not leaving the school after all ‘..although some of the members of the staff feel that Miss H and I are both a little irrepressible! They had apparently turned the staff room into a ‘parrot house’ and were hosting ‘an orgy of functions’. She concludes with Jaquetta’s looming examinations: ‘with all best wishes for the ordeal. I hope that nothing untoward will happen’ to you.
On 21st Feb, 1929, it seems she is responding to another incident. ‘That was the unkindest cut of all,’ she says, ‘ and so I am now laboriously writing to you on the tip of my pen to wish you luck next Tuesday and I hope what you write will at least be legible!’ .
Jacquetta received her Newnham offer letter on 23rd March, 1929, a borderline case, without a Scholarship, but she had obviously impressed at interview. The next day, Miss Kemp writes: ‘I hope that by the time this reaches you, you will no longer be in doubt about squeezing in.’ This, perhaps, says something about Jacquetta’s personal lack of confidence at getting to her sister’s alma mater. On 6th April, Miss Kemp sends Jacquetta a postcard congratulating her on entrance to Newnham.
Jacquetta, her future in some part assured, may have felt less of a need to confide in her former teacher about her academic insecurities. However, she continued her correspondence. The next letter from Miss Kemp found in the wallet is dated 28th Sept, 1929. She is obviously delighted to hear from Jacquetta, and the communication is interesting as this time Miss Kemp is the one who is confiding : ‘I enjoyed your letter from Italy so much and now the one from Rye too. Italy must have been delightful in the spring especially on the top of the knowledge that you do not need to do any more work until October’.
‘I tell you this in confidence because I think it will amuse you. The Board of Education has interviewed me for an inspectorship of secondary schools and told me that at the moment I looked a bit too young and flippant’.
Miss Kemp returns the communication to that of teacher and pupil, with some salutary advice:‘I do hope that you will enjoy Newnham and that you will not become what you call respectable. Always make up your own mind about things and not take opinions second hand but there is little fear of you doing that I should imagine.
And she ends with a hope for continued communication: ‘Needless to say I shall much like to see you as a Newhamite and will come when you ask me.’
On the 2nd April,1930, she replies again: ‘I am glad that you like Newnham and that you have found one or two congenial girls. Your work sounds very interesting but rather too pre-historic for my rather Romanised mind.’ Miss Kemp tells Jacquetta she has come second for a new job, and updates her on the rash of engagements at the school. One senses perhaps, that the teacher is now impatient for some movement in her own future career.
There is also an undated Christmas card, presumably sent for Jacquetta’s first as a Newnhamite: ‘May your dreams come true’ signed from ‘A much harassed mistress of Perse’.
Piecing together the narrative of Jacquetta’s later childhood is aided again by Diana Collins’s work, and the interviews she carried out with Jacquetta and her childhood friends, most of whom have since died. I visited one of Jacquetta’s closest friends, Peggy Lamert, in London, before she too, passed away, and was aware that almost 70 years after first meeting Jacquetta at Newnham, she was still rather in awe of her.
Shortly after being feted so publicly in Stockholm, as we saw earlier, Jacquetta Hawkes went up to Cambridge to read Archaeology and Anthropology. She was at last in her element, independent, and able to indulge in her growing passion for the past, secure that she had been regarded worthy of a place; Miles Burkett would be one of her tutors.
The Tripos was in two sections, physical and cultural anthropology and archaeology, and Anglo-Saxon, Norse archaeology and Roman Britain, for which students had to learn Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon. Her first tutor was the esteemed H.M.Chadwick. Although Jacquetta was not good at linguistics, she would have liked to have included Celtic in her studies. Perhaps she was influenced by its aesthetics, and such lovely objects as the Celtic ornament seen in the Cambridge museum. There was also the lure of Celtic mythology; Jacquetta had developed a life-long fascination for the work of W.B.Yeats. However, she was told was no Celtic tutor and so she could not pursue it. But later she enjoying revelling in its beguiling aesthetics, with Celtic artifacts discussed, and often appearing as illustrations, in her books, and displayed almost as art objects in works such as the film, ‘The Beginning of History’and her Festival of Britain display-
There was just a small group of men and women reading for the tripos. It was a time to indulge in serious socialising, but Jacquetta was not fond of parties. Unsurprisingly, given the headstrong character of her early childhood, she was never going to be a team player at Cambridge, either.
A leather wallet in the archive contains fragments of Jacquetta’s undergraduate years. There are many wild bird lists, now familiar in the assemblage of her writings, and a membership card from the British Empire Naturalists Association, dated Nov 5th 1930.
There is a letter from an Arthur Hardin, from the Grand Hotel, Stockholm, who writes: ‘enclosed is a small memento of our visit to Stockholm, a visit which has been made so much more pleasant by the presence of the Hopkins family’. The nature of the memento, possibly a photograph, is unknown.
There is also a telegram to ‘Hopkins, Ballymore, Ireland’, presumably another family holiday, reassuring all that Jacquetta’s sister, Barbara, and new daughter Jennifer, born on the 28th of September, 1929, were well; she was Jacquetta’s first niece.
Also a letter to ‘Jackanapes’ before her 21st birthday, from Jane, a friend who was eight years younger than Jacquetta. She writes a revealing social commentary: ‘Mummy and daddy are returning from their trip of the world today...’ and, discussing a local prizegiving and lack of audience ‘this year we have asked some of our maids to go down and make a noise’. There follows some revelling in fictional and actual murders, followed by Jane saying she was ‘simply dying to go to the Oval to see the Test Match’.
There is a programme for AAA v. Cambridge Athletic Meeting Friday, 13 June, 1930, marked with pencil (distances, places etc). Also a photo of ‘Nannie’ outside a church door, possibly in Lugano, Italy, with two others, ansd a postcard massage.
There are also plenty of photographs from these Cambridge years. Jacquetta’s enthusiasm for photography continued unabated, producing some of her most interesting work, and her most unaffected portraits. In one set, black and white passport snapshots of Jacquetta and a friend have been enhanced by the addition of coloured ink. Another taken by Jacquetta, presumably in her room at Cambridge, is a simple display of pots and books given the quality of a still life by its composition and soft light. Many of the photographs are in their original folders, as if just from the processor’s, contextualising the moment of capture and first-viewing.
Archaeology and Anthropology consumed her intellectual world at Cambridge, but Jacquetta sought a soul-mate. She rapidly formed a close alliance with another undergraduate at Newnham, Peggy Lamert. There was a mutual attraction on their first meeting; Jacquetta recalled she was drawn by Peggy's humour and husky voice, while Peggy, up to read English, was compelled towards friendship by Jacquetta's good looks and ` a rapier-sharp brain'. Peggy later told Diana Collins: ‘At Newnham, Jacquetta stood out like a star’.
The beginnings of Jacquetta’s complex attraction to, and for, both men and women, crystallized at this time. A tomboy child, who particularly loved a bow and arrow set given to her as a present, Jacquetta, for all her own appealing looks, detested dolls. Diana Collins remarks that she had smashed a large blue-eyed doll on her mother’s precious rockery, an act which could now be read as one of extraordinary symbolism.
Jacquetta had received no sex-education at home, and she, and others in her class, relied on the evidence of her friend at the Perse School, Kitty Turner, who had found out what sex entailed. Jacquetta apparently found this information of ‘what mothers and fathers had to do to get babies’ too hard to take,a nd was entirely put off. In fact, she told Diana Collins that she remained uninterested in sex throughout childhood and adolescence. Jacquetta’s childhood appeal had transformed into a beauty which was strangely ambiguous. The Janus face projected onto Jacquetta would reveal both masculine and feminine profiles. It was certainly a combination which created persistent dilemmas, particularly in her early adulthood, but it was one which also gave her a unique allure. Certainly, in her life with Priestley, which allowed them to engage their Jungian interests, the two appeared to celebrate an idealised quota; a balance of male in female, and female in male. This combination also gave Jacquetta an unusual perspective on the trickier problems of interpreting archaeology, that relating to gender and the roles accorded to male and female in ancient cultures.
But that was a discussion be honed over a future time. At a fundamental level, the Jacquetta now at Cambridge was open to experience. Diana spoke of this with frankness in Time and the Priestleys, an account she knew her friend would read, and had indeed authorised: ‘She was certainly beautiful, but seemed strangely unaware, and had a certain, sometimes even ruthless, masculine quality. Like many complex and sexually attractive people, Jacquetta is attractive to women as well as to men, and though vulnerable to male charm and admiration, she also has a lesbian quality. She was somewhat in love with Peggy Lamert, and when, after two years, she learned that Peggy was to have a year off to go round the world with her father, Jacquetta wept tears of bereavement’.
There was another passionate incident, which is recorded in a journal kept by Jacquetta during her Cambridge years. It involves a similar display of fury, a lack of acceptance that she could not control the actions of another female to whom she had grown close.. . This can of course be read as the passionate outburst of someone rather self-absorbed, and possibly rather lonely at an all-female college; it is otherwise an example of the extent to which Jacquetta’s all-consuming passion could reach, if it was destabilised.
However, Jacquette met a match, of sorts, in Peggy. The two quite deliberately, and as Peggy told me, quite arrogantly, marked themselves out of the crowd at Newnham. They spent their time going into the countryside, where Jacquetta could show off her knowledge of birds, and in the evenings they regularly saw plays at the Festival Theatre.
They also shared an interest in poetry. Peggy was more keen on games than Jacquetta, although they both like to watch rugger, and on one occasion attempted to organise a women's match against Girton `largely to annoy the authorities'. The pair were regarded as exclusive and were much disliked by grammar-school women; throughout her life, Jacquetta found women who were not actually attracted to her, did not generally take to her as much as men did.
Jacquetta was the sophisticate of the two: `not a tomboy - rather the reverse - vain rather than conceited', as Peggy recalled. Even then, Jacquetta paid great attention to clothes and make-up, a concern she would adhere to all her life. She retained such a desire to be individual, and be accorded treatment which was somehow special, that her behaviour at one time even threatened her friendship with Peggy. She remembered how Jacquetta always like good wine `and my father had an outstandingly good burgundy cellar. Jacquetta used to brag that he gave her more wine than anyone else.'
Despite Peggy's qualms about Jacquetta's ability to charm her own father, the young archaeologist remained a frequent visitor to Peggy’s family homes at Fiveashes near Mayfield in Sussex, and Gloucester Square in London. When in town, the pair would go to the theatre and cinema. May Balls in Cambridge had little impact on their social life.
The depth of Jacquetta's affection for her friend and intimate showed itself, as Diana Collins indicated, when Peggy left for a year to go round the world with her father. The pair had functioned in exclusivity. `There was Jacquetta and the loneliness went away' as Peggy recalled, and the feeling was certainly mutual. Peggy's departure would leave the fiercely independent Jacquetta isolated for two terms and when told the news, Jacquetta `started to cry quite gently.' as Peggy remembers. Peggy has said their obviously close relationship was not a lesbian affair. However, as Jacquetta said openly in A Quest of Love, she was attractive to, and attracted by, other women. Peggy instead simply spoke of a physical affair that Jacquetta had maintained at Newnham, which went on for a long time. `She was quite casual about it in a way. It didn't worry me. Everyone knew about it,' she said.Years later, Jacquetta was to disclose her confusion at falling passionately in love with another woman, Betty Pinney, with whom she was evacuated to the country during the Second World War.
Peggy's other descriptions of Jacquetta also included `very ruthless', which although harsh, was as likely true, particularly in matters of love concerning either sex. Although devoted to her close ally, Jacquetta, who was becoming supremely aware of her immensely striking personality and her power to attract men as well as women, did not compromise in relationships. She simply did not suffer fools and, as she told Peggy: `one must be honest, mustn't one?’, as she dismissed the attentions of one erstwhile suitor.
After Cambridge, the pair, once inseparable, grew estranged, Peggy feeling that Jacquetta was `behaving rather spuriously grandly', but that passed and later Peggy not only was to introduce her friend to the poet Walter Turner, with whom she began a passionate affair, but she was privy to the start of Jacquetta's relationship with Jack Priestley.
It would be inaccurate to suggest that Jacquetta’s earliest relationships and passions revolved completely around women. At Cambridge she welcomed her circle of male admirers, and appeared to have cultivated suitors for some time. One thinks back to the frisson she expresses, not so much in words as in sensation, in the journal of the family holiday to Italy.
The leather wallet of Jacquetta’s Cambridge mementoes includes a letter dated 4th July, 1924. It comes from an apparent male admirer, ‘Chidders’, whose identity is apparently unknown, and includes greetings for Jacquetta’s forthcoming 14th birthday in August. It is sent on the headed paper of the Asiatic Petroleum Co. SS Ltd.
‘I haven’t heard anything from you for a long time. What about sending me a letter and telling me something about yourself? How you are, where you are, why you are - oh all about yourself?’ Chidders describes himself ‘still selling oil and volunteering (playing about with machine guns) and am also a frightful dab at Amateur Dramatics.’ (Chidders illustrates this with page of sketches. He was about to play the Duke of Plaza Toro I in The Gondoliers.)
‘In September I go up to a place called Penang in the north of Malaya and hope to travel a lot - mainly over southern Siam. Cheerioh Jack, love from Chidders with ‘Write soon!!’ underlined at the end.
It is interesting that is fond letter was kept by Jacquetta into her Cambridge years, and was among her final possessions.
The wallet contains another intriguing series of letters, also from an unidentifiable admirer. Although mainly on the subject of birdwatching and car problems, the sender, ‘Con’ appears to have had great designs on the redoubtable Miss Jacquetta Hopkins.
Letter from Con, 14 June , 1931. ‘Dear Jacquetta I do hope that we can continue to carry on as though nothing had ever happened, and that you will come on Monday evening?’ (presumably for the Cambridge Footlights?). ‘When we get to the Balls we will do our best to find Clive’s party in which case there would be no need for you to dance with me if you would rather not. Yours Con.’
It it likely that Con proposed to Jacquetta. A letter from him, dated 12 June, 1931 reads:.‘Dear Jacquetta, I am most awfully sorry that you were so upset about this incident, though entirely fail to see why you should feel guilty. I think it is on the contrary I who should feel guilty, as I actually do. The only thing that worries me at all is that you were so upset about it. Personally, I think the sooner the incident is forgotten the better, and it is best to behave in a perfectly normal manner as if nothing had happened. Yours very sincerely Con. PS Looking at myself, it amuses me to think what I have (sic) an awful fool I have made of myself.
There is a further letter from Con, undated, noting that he had a family car at his disposal and inviting Jacquetta to accompany him to Breckland for a census of Great Crested Grebe. ‘I don’t think there is any need to reiterate any of the correspondence which has already passed between us last week end. Anyway, I can assure you I am quite innocuous, whatever that may mean.’
The final item is brief and workmanlike, a letter from Con postmarked the 3rd July 1931. ‘Many thanks for the book, your letter and the photograph. Certainly to my inexpert eye it appears quite excellent’. It appears Jacquetta’s charm have saved the day. Con simply remained one of the number of Jacquetta’s disappointed suitors at this time.
(In recent months, Jacquetta's son, Nicolas, has revealed the "Con" to be one C.W.Benson, or "Birdie Benson", so called for his dedication to ornithology. Nicolas wrote to me: "The key factor was the 1932 letter I found written on a Union Castle ship going to Capetown, which revealed that he graduated from Cambridge that summer with a 2nd, and was the only admin grade cadet admitted to the Nyasaland Colonial service that year. Rhodes House told me that there was no annual service list for N'land then, but they had remembered an elderly prof in S Wales who had once been there (Malawi) and knew a lot about it. Blow me down, he remembered that it was likely to be a man called C.W.Benson, commonly known as 'Birdie Benson', because of his dedication to ornithology!! That must be him, I cried! They looked him up, found he was at Magdalene, and left the service in 1952 to become a biology or zoology lecturer at the University in C.Africa. So then I was off on to the main 2nd hand books website with his name, and BIRDS as a keyword. Hoop-la! The Birds of Northern Rhodesia, Malawi etc etc. And who do I know who was involved with birdwatching in Zambia? Ah yes, of course, my wife! I toddled upstairs, and there was one of his books on Peta's shelf!!". NB Nicolas's research is also in-progress, he remains keenly involved in piecing together his mother's life.)
Jacquetta's Final year at Cambridge coincided then with the loss of Peggy as a companion. It could also have been an ordeal for her academically, but she continued to work hard, with high standards to achieve: she had received a Class II.1 in her Part 1 examinations, and a First in the second.
There was, however, another distraction on the horizon. At the end of her second year at Cambridge, and barely 21, she had met a brilliant young archaeologist, Charles Francis Christopher Hawkes, known as Christopher. He was the site director at Camulodunum, a pre-Roman site near Colchester in Essex, which was the site of Jacquetta's first serious excavation. The thrill of digging which had been anticipated since the night-time forays at Grange Road, was thus heightened by her introduction to the hugely popular Christopher. She had heard tales of his Mediterranean lineage – a Spanish grandmother – and she pictured someone tall, dark, and handsome. He was, in fact, short, dark, and quite attractive. He wore glasses, which rather suited his studious demeanour, and he had a broad smile, not unlike her own. At twenty-seven he was a graduate of Oxford, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and worked at the British Museum.
Christopher, confident and outgoing in his passion for archaeology, had his own family history to live up to. His father Charles Pascoe Hawkes, or ‘C.P.’, was a moderately successful London barrister, who had read history at Trinity College, Cambridge, and a sometime cartoonist to boost his income. He married the wealthy Eleanor Cobb, whose Spanish mother, Victoria, had died in childbirth. Her father Don Demetrio Duarte was a successful Spanish businessman, a sherry importer. (The young Christopher thus had an unexpected link to the enduring European trading systems which were, albeit of Roman wine into Britain, such a fascination for his archaeology).
Christopher not only had a brilliant intellect, but he was a social success, with no shortage of female admirers. Musical and artistic, as his family encouraged, he was also not shy of intellectual challenge; he earned a Double First in Greats and Classics at Oxford. Not least for Jacquetta, he was the leading authority on Celtic Britain – thus her tutor in this subject she had longed to study had come hand-picked by Destiny.
Jacquetta sensed a challenge herself, rose to it, and was swiftly smitten. She wrote about this in A Quest of Love, flagrantly honest as ever: `I soon found I could have a choice of suitors, but Christopher Hawkes could not fail to eclipse the rest - he was lively, energetic, a master of my beloved subject - and the boss'. If Jacquetta was enamoured, the mutuality of Christopher's feelings were displayed in his letters home, in which he talked about ‘the charming Jacquetta Hopkins, daughter of Professor Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins, discover of vitamins, PRS, and Trustee of the British Museum…’-
After noting this string of her father’s accreditations, Christopher added: ‘She is such a nice girl, taking archaeology for her Tripos.’ He knew his mother well, and as Jacquetta discovered, even these dazzling family accomplishments would be sorely tested by Christopher’s snobbish, possessive, and strong-willed mother. As Diana Collins acknowledged: ‘There were always going to be problems with anyone Christopher wanted to marry’. This tension would rapidly become evident in the relationship.
However, at the beginning at least, all seemed well. Jacquetta recalled: ‘I cannot remember just when or how he first declared his love for me, but I think it might have been before the end of that season’s excavations.’ Given the number of glamorous women with whom he had been associated, this must have given the undergraduate considerable kudos, even if she was not short of admirers.
‘Certainly he continued to court me and meeting him on his own ground in London impressed me with his social confidence and knowledge of the world – largely illusory, but considerable when set beside my own total lack of them,’ she wrote years later, the last observations mildly caustic in the hindsight of their divorce.
Peggy Lamert remained sceptical of the romantic alliance. `I thought he was an awful bore', she said. Jacquetta, moreover, was relatively unknown in academic circles, while Christopher was becoming distinguished.
Then Jacquetta, to her great surprise, gained a first-class honours degree in the tripos. She had worked hard, admittedly, and possibly her involvement with Christopher had given her focus; it would not have harmed that he gave her a proof copy of a survey of British archaeology, which he had authored with another brilliant archaeologist and colleague, Tom Kendrick. Jacquetta told Nicolas, some 60 years later, that she did not feel she had deserved the first-class degree, only that others thought she ought to have it.
But it was still a dazzling achievement. To add to the honour of her degree, Jacquetta was also awarded the Gladstone Travelling Scholarship. She chose to go to Palestine, to dig with the highly distinguished archaeologist, Professor Dorothy Garrod, on the slopes of Mount Carmel.
This would be a defining journey for Jacquetta, emerging now out of her proto-adulthood, and into a world in which she would be recognised for her unusual talents. On this challenging excavation she would begin to work through the complex ideas which would later emerge as a thread through all of her writings, her lectures, and her creative work. And with her to this wild and passionate terrain, Jacquetta took a framed photograph of Christopher Hawkes.
Forward to Chapter Three
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