At last they were married. Jack and Jacquetta’s ceremony, at Caxton Hall, Westminster, in July 1953, was a simple affair. Jacquetta wore an elegant printed dress with a simple hairpiece. A photograph taken of them posing with the register shows Jacquetta gazing at her husband adoringly; he looking at the camera, looking utterly relaxed and with a ubiquitous pipe in his hand.

The couple settled into a life together at Jack's home on the Isle of Wight. They maintained the two loyal staff members, Miss Pudduck and Gertrude, the problem of loyalty being eased away by Jane, supremely happy with her devoted ornithologist, who felt her new home was too small for staff.

Jack and Jacquetta were fond of visitors at Brooke Hill. And after so much energy dedicated to trying to be with each other, they resolved to make the most of their time together. Diana Collins noted: ‘Marriage for Jacquetta was, I think, a true liberation,a commitment to love with the whole of her life and being. For Jack it must have been peace: not simply a release from argument, turmoil and trouble, but the lasting peace of the heart and mind that is regenerative and creative. And contrary to a few dire warnings, Jacquetta says that she could not have found a sweeter companion and easier to live with than Jack, and he would have said the same about her.’

Jacquetta took on more projects. She became Series Editor for a range of books from Thames and Hudson, themed on ‘The Past in the Present’.

And she gladly accepted an invitation to script an experimental film, Figures in a Landscape, a celebration of the life and work of Barbara Hepworth. The film was made for the British Film Institute, of which Jacquetta was now a governor. It was directed by Dudley Shaw Ashton, and makes impressive and almost surreal use of the Cornish landscape, where Hepworth then worked and lived, and the modern art she created. With music by the female composer Priaulx Rainier, and Jacquetta’s poetic commentary spoken by Cecil Day-Lewis, it is a gem of its period. The film was premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 1954.

Jacquetta’s script could easily stand alone as a poem; she returns to her familiar themes of ‘land shaped by sea’ and the making of, and continuum, of an ancient landscape over time. While writing it she may well have recalled the images from her childhood visits to Cornwall with her family, recorded by her in photographs kept in her albums.

Barbara Hepworth’s son died during the making of the film, the news related to Jacquetta by Priaulx, with whom she was quite friendly. Jacquetta and Barbara Hepworth did not develop a friendship, possibly because both were strong characters who commanded – and often demanded – the centre of attention, and again, with few exceptions, Jacquetta’s favoured company was that of men. Luckily Jack was happier amongst women, and so the Jungian balance was happily kept. Jacquetta was friendly with Hepworth’s former husband, Ben Nicholson, and he was entertained by the Priestleys, sending in return a thankyou card of one of his own paintings.

Jacquetta continued her lifelong enjoyment of art in all its forms; she had been involved with the major Prehistoric Society conference on Prehistoric Art early in 1952 and continued being the voice of the artist in her writings. Her own art collection at Fitzroy Road had expanded over the years to a good collection of works by the contemporary group known as the neo-Romantics, which she had bought when they were modest prices.

As well as her much-loved Moore drawings which featured in A Land, at her Fitzroy Road home Jacquetta had a framed pair of Graham Sutherland sketches of tin-miners, possibly Cornishmen. These were by her desk and the subject matter possibly alluded to the ancient miners of Grimes Graves.

Also in the house, Nicolas recalls, was a Paul Nash lithograph inspired by Avebury, almost certainly bought by his mother from Contemporary Lithographs. Christopher Hawkes took it to the Institute of Archaeology at Oxford, and it hung there for several years see Nicolas Hawkes’s paper in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology, vol.21, 3, August 2002).

Nicolas remembers, in particular, his mother's passion for art collecting, his sense being that the artworks at the family home in Fitzroy Road were his mother's, rather than his father's choice. 'These purchases were begun with their flat in Bayswater in 1933, and were not at all costly in those days; indeed they had little spare cash in the 30s and 40s.'

While her own parents had been more interested in modest purchases of ceramics, Jacquetta’s ' preference was for paintings, lithographs and drawings. Nicolas recalls: 'She would buy pictures and objects impulsively with an immediate intuitive sense of what she liked and would look well. One such purchase was in a dealer's shop when she saw it from a moving bus, leapt off at the next stop and bought it there and then'. He also remembers her being convinced that an impressionist head of a woman she had seen was in fact, by Turner. 'She bought it, put it on the wall in her study at no.39, and did her best to convince the experts'. Its whereabouts today - and its attribution - remain a mystery.

On a surer footing, no.39 also housed two paintings by the acclaimed New Zealand artist, Frances Hodgkins, whose 'Wreckage Kimmeridge' of 1940 evokes the same resonance as the archaeologist's wartime writings. Hawkes owned a Hodgkins lithograph of bottles and jars, and another composition, in brwnish-red tones, of women's heads.

Her favoured work by the neo-Romantics, also extended to three ink drawings by John Minton, and the important pre-war work, "Girl Wishing for the Moon" by Leonard Rosoman, for which Jacquetta apparently paid £2 after the war. There was also an ink drawing by Donald Friend, titled "Two Heads - Italy boys". There were cards from Nicholson and Lynton Lamb, and she knew others as friends, among them Clarke Hutton, and Rupert Gleadowe.

On her marriage to J.B. Priestley, however, Jacquetta moved into another artistic realm. While some of the art Nicolas remembers from Fitzroy Road did not leave with her in 1953, she had already encountered Priestley's own wonderful collection at his homes in London and the Isle of Wight. Paintings in Albany included works by Sickert, Derain, Lorjou, Duncan Grant, William Nicolson and an Utrillo. These, and the water-colours at Brooke Hill delighted her. She wrote Man on Earth there, noting: ‘here in my room I have books, a few pictures, and some favourite possessions drawn from many ages and lands to remind me of the enduring treasures that mount from generation to generation..' (245)

Jacquetta was also a great supporter of local artists, increasingly so when she and Priestley moved to their last home together near Stratford-upon-Avon. She attended their annual shows and bought water-colours, many of which she gave to her two grand-daughters, Camilla and Corinna. And from the 1970s onwards she patronised the contemporary artist, Keith Grant, who primarily works in northern climes, but latterly in the Antarctic. She had eleven of his pictures the house in Chipping Campden which was her home after Priestley died. Grant's painting of Jacquetta in later life, now hangs in the JB Priestley Library at Bradford, next to a display of her husband's pipes. It is a stark portrait, in which one is drawn to its subject’s hands, and to the inclusion of A Land. The colouring is from the neo-Romantic palette which Hawkes particularly favoured.

Her higher profile with Priestley, her constant stream of lectures, functions, and her television appearances, also gave Jacquetta the opportunity to celebrate her innate fashion sense. She loved costume jewellery, and knew what complemented her strong bone structure; and now she had the financial means to buy fine clothes and furs.

At the end of 1954, Jack and Jacquetta set off on a literary honeymoon. They were to visit Texas and New Mexico, exploring the ‘anima’ and ‘animus’ of these two states – at polar opposites of the US economic scale – and exchange letters to each other about them. The work, Journey Down a Rainbow, was to be dedicated to Carl Jung. The premise for the book was again the consequences of technological change. Jacquetta would travel alone to New Mexico, exploring its earth-based pueblo cultures, while Jack would head to the skyscrapers of Texas. The result is both a charming exchange between of two lovers – they eventually meet up again in Santa Fe – but also a book which packs a considerable punch in its prescience.

Jacquetta draws extensively on her archaeology and anthropology to describe the lives of the ancient and modern pueblo dwellers, and contrasts their apparent lack of materialism with her own behaviour in the stores of New York. Diana Collins suggests Jacquetta had the better time, being involved with the kind of peoples and landscape with which she had an instinctive sympathy. Jacquetta wrote: `Because their culture had grown slowly from the land and the imagination they created patterns, shapes, combinations of colours which can be distinguished as belonging to them and them alone in time and space'.

The book is frank – Jack even reports back from racy bars - and as the book progresses, the arguments raised reaffirm their growing sense of un-ease about the Cold War and its mighty powers as the world stood in 1953.

Meanwhile, Jacquetta rapidly completed her next book, Man on Earth, published in 1954 and dedicated to Jack. It is a complex narrative, centred on the origins of human consciousness, in which she draws on memories from archaeology – notably Lascaux, Grimes’s Graves, and Mount Carmel – and from her explorations in nature, providing another lyrical synthesis of science and the imagination.

She brilliantly evokes the sense of excavation: ‘Down and down we went through the off-scourings of time, in a few weeks stripping off the silted layers which had taken tens of thousands of years to accumulate. They had fallen unnoticed, long before history, long before even words had begun to clarify the thoughts of man; now in turning them back we recorded all we could detect of the forgotten events of time past..to rescue them from forgetfulness, we used the sound symbols...’

‘At last toward midwinter, we came across the skeleton. It lay crouched on its side, the skeleton of a woman with low vaulted skull recalling the simian stock from which this race was lifting itself. Human consciousness had not been highly tempered when it was housed in that poor cranium, but now it was returning to discover, study, and reflect upon its ancient haunts. Flesh-covered hands used scalpel and brush to clean the delicate metacarpal fan of the bone hand; eyes charged with centuries of curiosity looked into the sockets of the skull.'

It is shot through with physical passions; there is an the early recollection from Mount Carmel, of the sound of tortoises copulating 'The rain had roused the anemones, and it seemed to stir the erotic impulses of these reptiles, setting them to make love in the prickly tundra below the camel thorn. One could hear the rattling of horny shells as the males mounted the females, and anyone inquisitive enough to peer through the thorns could laugh at the ridiculous antics of a species for which nature had provided such ample security that creation is all but prohibited. Flat base of the carapace rattled and slid upon the carved roof while the symbol of life darted vainly.'

Jacquetta invests the text with her own joy at being a female. Not least she expresses her genuine wonder at becoming a mother. ‘I do not think that any male can ever know and accept this participation with the poignancy that a pregnant woman is forced to know and accept it. No wonder that in all societies...woman is recognised as representing earth and its darkness; she belongs to this planet from which in fact we have all grown, while man feels himself something of a stranger, looking for a source of his spirit in some other realm. No matter if she ears ruffles or swans in her hair, inwardly woman understands her earthiness'. Was it possible, perhaps, that at the age of 42, she was considering motherhood again?

In these pages, she confidently disagrees with the functionalists and shows her strong humanist beliefs. Particularly seen in her discussions of early religion; but for all her wonder at life and her deep commitment to its spiritual forms, she was by no means a Creationist, either, questioning whether natural selection alone could have produced Hamlet or Beethoven’s last quartets. ‘I simply cannot explain our beautiful, surprisingly various and supremely imaginative world by the orthodox tenets of evolution. . . . There is, I believe, an all-pervading, and transcendent significance in human evolution’ which we `know enough of the past to comprehend.'

She delves into the brain’s workings to discuss the issue of head versus heart. the ‘Old Brain’ - the thalmus, ‘the power behind the throne of human nature’ and the ‘New Brain’, the cerebrum, which slowly grew from it to be ‘the prime seat of consciousness’. Jacquetta’s contends that the thalamus is feminine in its nature, in contrast with the later and essentially masculine nature of the cerebrum, explaining `one so much more ancient than humanity, the other in its full development as young as our species, that produces what is best in a rich, creative life'.

'While one honours the intellectual achievement of our species, it is the works of imagination and feeling that give cultures their distinctive flavour, colour and form, their power to delight and inspire. It is through them that a people is mainly remembered and judged.’

This argument feeds into Jacquetta’s reading of the ancient past, with its earliest symbols of the Great Mother Goddess evolving into the worship of her son, Apollo, as a form of resurrection. She explained:'We have expressed in these worldwide religious symbols an image of living forms that the evolution o£ consciousness has built up in our brains.'

Jacquetta again points to the long contininuum:'the world that man was to inherit, the life that was to be the matrix for his own, and the stuff of much of his religion and art were already present on earth seventy-five million years before man himself appeared to recognise and claim them. The properties of mind and imagination were being assembled, but as yet there was no consciousness to give them the reality of a name.'

And art again, is the pure form:'Any ultimate morality must evidently relate only to the supreme values… all active beings have their value, and help too to nourish and support the creative power of the most gifted.'

Jacquetta concludes Man on Earth with the warnings about the loss of art which she would echo repeatedly in her future works::

‘If we feel confident of anything in the modern world which has grown out of the Renaissance, it is that we have gone astray.... Even the artists have shown our loss of confidence by becoming unable to portray men in their full humanity. Afraid to claim the qualities of spirit, mind and heart which their predecessors showed in terms of Christian humility or humanist pride, they have escaped into noncommittal abstract forms.’

But she maintains her belief in human potential: ‘I am confident in the goodness of existence, and the need for it to go on. Our individual lives are of their very nature tragic, yet mind and senses together have grown up out of the darkness to equip us for delight. To be stretched between these two poles is the best exercise of the psyche. For the rest we can but look our ignorance in the face, for it is one of our few certainties. No religion, no philosophical or scientific system claiming any absolute and exclusive knowledge o£ truth is proper to our condition as inmates of one speck in a universe the vastness and wonder of which even our trifling minds are beginning faintly to apprehend.

It is because I accept our inevitable ignorance and the room within it for every kind of experience that I have dared to attempt this book, setting down my vision of our lot, and affirming my faith in human life - and my love of it.[

But at the end of the book, she returns to her fears for the post-war age: ''Like the most terrible of volcanic upheavals the neglected and unsatisfied depths of our psyche have erupted in cruelty and chaos, yet evil madness beyond the atom bomb'.

There is also an indirect reference to Turner: 'Once when I was a little crazy from grief I found myself drawing a symbol which may perhaps have expressed one aspect at least of the myth of the heightening of consciousness. The main device was an oak tree, rooted in the earth and with the sun above its crest; each oval acorn of the tree held a human being, crouched embryo-like, and the whole was enclosed in an oval which was both an acorn and a human skull. Not perhaps a very appealing symbol, but one which for me, if I think of it together with my vision on mount Carmel of the caravan beneath the moon does seem to help me towards my own apprehensions’

Jacquetta concludes with an evocation of her new contentment at Brooke Hill: 'I am finishing this book in the month of May in open county in the south of England. The house is on a hilltop with chalk downs behind, and looks out over a steep, wild slope across field to the sea. From my window I have been able to watch white butterflies rising and falling idly above the bluebells, and beyond them white gulls tossing above the ploughland, or forming into a palpitating train behind the plough... I enjoy the perfection of each moment of these blue days, from the milky , shimmering mornings to sunset when the disc of Aten, crimson red, sinks in palpable divinity behind the cliffs, and the flowers in the garden burn unnaturally bright.Great have been the powers of Eros, the Great Goddess, and the Dying God!’

Although well received, Man on Earth was not as popular a work as A Land. However, Diana Collins very much admired this book, not least because of her own landscape of spiritual practice – her husband was Canon of St.Paul’s. She felt it ‘so well illustrates Jacquetta’s thinking and temperament’.

It is indeed a complex work, which confirms Jacquetta’s erudition, but one feels the reader is less of a participant on this journey. One sense s instead it was very much Jacquetta’s personal journey of commitment, and a celebration of her life with Jack.

In 1959, Christopher remarried. His bride was a young archaeologist, Sonia Chadwick. Just before they married he had written to his bride-to-be:

‘…the fact is, I really have no very marked emotions about the Priestleys, who seem to me people in another world, so that I seldom remember that they exist, and when I do I don't bother anyway. I think one can say quite objectively Jacquetta's would have been a hard case - and mine perhaps still harder - if she hadn't behaved as she did . . . and looking back - as I never do usually - on my grief when it all broke up, it seems to me just a matter of fate, and 'a case' more than a moral outrage, because she remained a charming and affectionate and natural mother to Nick all through, so that he is a perfect chap altogether, and we have all been entirely cheerful for so long now, that as I say, I never worry my head about it at all, we almost never meet, nor need to. Naturally, Nick's affection was a wonderful help and, naturally, the friends who helped by their affection included women as well as men. . . . I'm awfully grateful: and to archaeology I've been grateful ever since I took it up as a boy because it's such an endlessly gay and exciting subject, so many of my friends are in it, and it always seems to provide the stuff of life so happily. No, honestly, I've no grudge or grievances against life at all ... and I don't carry any burden of inner woe. . . . I like gay things and amusing things and interesting things and strenuous things and beautiful things....’.

Jacquetta responded to this news of Christopher’s remarriage with genuine joy, saying to Diana Collins, who was staying with her at Brooke Hill when she received word: ‘Oh, I do so hope he will be happy’. In Sonia Christopher had found a devoted wife and colleague, and he was, indeed happy, for 33 years.

Jacquetta was now engaged in several projects, but at least she could apply her mind absolutely. She prepared to have a series of fables published. This selection would be dedicated to Nicolas. The first had appeared in the Cornhill Magazine in Winter 51/52, called ‘The Fable of the Weevil and the Chestnut Tree’, and others were also published singly.

These simple allegories explored Jacquetta’s usual themes; the dire consequences of change and a lack of mindful action. Nature - birds, animals, plants - figures especially in them. [x] Fables, was published by Cresset in 1953, and also in America where it was given the title A woman as great as the world, the title of one of the fables. The allegories hint at turmoil within, or beneath the surface – a garden seat is overtaken by plants, there are conflicts between land and sea, man and nature, individual and the masses; regrets at loss; some have shades of Orwell’s Animal Farm. Women are regarded as beautiful but bound up with unrequited love, and a fear of age. Some perhaps be read as partly autobiographical. ‘Death and the Stanard of Living begins:

‘A young girl lived with her comfortably widowed mother, helping her in the housse. 'She was hardly a beauty, but an extraordinary vitality inspired her face, and she was possessed of an aloofness, and ability to retreat into mysterious and private territories, that made her irrestibly attractive'.

‘A clever young schoolmaster came to village 'it was not long before he discovered her to be not only desirable but also keenly intelligent. ' The taking of her virginity only roused her intellect and ambition. She became civilised and intellectual, but when she came of age the schoolmaster left her and ‘having lost the love of God, nature and man, work became her distraction and the accumulation of material goods her obsession'.

'She spent all of her money.. upon possessions which she could wear, hang, pin or carry upon her person. While favouring tightly fitting clothes and shoes, she embellished them with beads, cameos, brooches and buckles...She invariably carried a gigantic and swollen handbag packed with cigarette cases and lighters, powder compacts, lipsticks, fountain pens and propelling pencils, pencases, money, business papers, memo pads and many other things of the moment and no moment. Although she had long ago ceased to have any religious feeling she now added lucky charms and amulets to her other belongings'. (79) Overwhelmed by fear of death and loss, she is confronted with her past, a barefoot girl with 'a mischievous, innocent and secret face', into which she looked as if it was a cinema image, dissolves into it and plunges into a grave.

'As compact, lipstick and a shower of coins came into rest in the crannies of her person and clothes, the first crumbs of earth began to dribble down'. Perhaps Jacquetta was thinking here of the poor female victim she discussed in The Guide to Prehistoric and Roman Monuments.

Nicolas has noted (pers comm) that ‘The Weevil and the Chestnut tree’ and ‘The Nature of the Red Admiral, have been very significant for me' .

‘The Nature of a Red Admiral’ begins: 'Life in the garden was very well ordered...the vegetables owed much of their attractiveness to symmetry… The whole vegetable side of the Garden expressed serious oneness of purpose, an earnest pregnancy. The flowers were merely content to bee, to exist in the pride of their colours...'. But Enlightenment in the garden brings downfall, and knowledge comes too late.

'The Weevil and the Chestnut Tree' also looks at power corrupting, and the playing of one force against the other: 'Why do you toil down here in dull obscurity?' the weevil asked the root, while the trunk is warned that its worth was unrecognised; and the weevil then tells the flowers hat they were being betrayed by the others’ idleness. The tree eventually dies, Jacquetta’s pay-off being that "weevils thrive in dead wood".

While ‘The Unites’ is a curious combination of science fiction and creation myth, involving crystals, and a chalice of shining metal which 'after many adventures came to rest in the British Museum'.

Jacquetta describes the population of an imagined planet:‘The unite skin colour was pale brown with a faint greenish tinge, not at all unpleasing, and their hair dark brown, either straight or woolly'. She described their housing, ' Every apartment in every green block throughout the world (I assured myself of this) had a reproduction of Van Gogh's Cornfield' and their mating procedures: 'love having faded altogether from their planet it had to be fired again in the carnal furnace ...' .

Needing to be nearer London, Jack and Jacquetta moved back to the mainland, and to Kissing Tree House a large 18th century property with extensive gardens, at Alveston, near Stratford-on-Avon.

As at Brooke Hill, Diana and John Collins were regular visitors to the couple’s final home together: Diana described later “ Jack, the large open-hearted extrovert in his sunlit study, and Jacquetta, the reserved introvert, hidden away in her little northfacing room. Perhaps, really, she just wanted Jack to have the best room and the best view; he was certainly a man who needed space. The Priestleys were very happy at Kissing Tree House; Jack loved it. It had been Jacquetta's choice. 'If it suits you, it suits me', said Jack. So much of the arrangement and decoration reflected Jacquetta, but there was plenty of Jack around as well - his possessions, his huge library of books, his pictures, his piano, his billiard table; it was a happy blend of them both.’

The pair continued to write prolifically, drawing on their enormous depth of knowledge. Jack's massive work Literature and Western Man was dedicated to Jacquetta. She in turn continued to work on a monumental volume, Part one of the UNESCO History of Mankind, which eventually appeared in 1963.

But they had another preoccupation, which each had been working on for many years, and which finally appeared to come together in Journey Down a Rainbow. Throughout the 1940s, 50s and 60s, Jacquetta’s conviction that nuclear war was not the answer to the world’s ills worked its way into her writing in a myriad of ways. Transformed from an simple early appreciation for landscape and nature, and the workings of time, they worry away as grave concerns.

In Jacquetta’s popular works - Man on Earth, A Land, her forthcoming Man and the Sun, and in her Fables and poetry - such concerns provided a backbone on which she pegged her theses on technological and human evolution. In 1959, she published a seemingly light novel called Providence Island, for which the central plot device is the threat to a Pacific idyll from American scientists. It appeared in British and American editions, and in paperback, all with distinctive artwork on their covers.

This novel, billed as ‘an archaeological tale’, is a variation on familiar Hawkesian themes: a group of academics travel to a remote island to investigate a people apparently still living as if in the Stone Age. The lush descriptions of the island’s landscape and peoples, gathered in part from Hawkes’s now-frequent professional travels, lead the reader into a false sense of security. There is a threat to this idyll. A group of Americans arrive on the island with the aim of using it for nuclear bomb testing – a nod here, to the Pacific tests which had just begun, and especially to the fate of the Marshall Islanders. It is also a reference to other ‘prehistoric’ peoples who were being scrutinised by academics at this time of renewed with premodern societies. In the novel, Jacquetta calls on the powers of fantasy and wish fulfilment to resolve the tale; the islanders develop psychic powers with which to ward off the American invaders.

Jacquetta’s imaginative take on a very real global theme begins with a swift kick to a personal hobbyhorse. It begins: ‘Like most professors, Professor Pennycuick had given no thought to domestic grace. He had spent much of his time handling lovely things, made by ancient people, but he himself lived in a morass of ugliness’ . This unappealing description of the central male character – and one thinks of Pennycuick as the embodiment of academic reason and reductionism - again allows Hawkes to return to the theme of intellect pitched against sensuality. This story of male versus female psyche on an archaeological excavation on an idyllic island was sure to raise academic hackles.

The work was reasonably received, enough at least to go into a paperback edition, although it does not stand among Hawkes’s most distinguished works . Diana Collins regarded the book as one of Hawkes’s ‘delightful and lighthearted publications’ and noted: ‘There was talk of making this Garden of Eden story into a musical, but it never happened. One of our lost pleasures, alas’.

However, Jacquetta had cleverly flagged up a concern shared by many of her readers at that time. In Journey Down a Rainbow, published in 1955, it was Jacquetta who travelled to see the H-bomb research city of Los Alamos, and Jack who responded to her vivid descriptions.

The Priestley collaboration on their passionate concern - that rampant technological change posed danger for humankind if unchecked - was surely an early points of empathy in the early days of their affair. In the late 1950s, however, it passed out of a simple personal conviction and expanded into a new political movement, named the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

The lobby had its origins in a number of like-minded groups all over Britain. It was made up of people who, like the Priestleys, were expressing an increased public anxiety about Britain’s nuclear policy. This included, not least, concern about the nuclear tests in the Pacific, which Jacquetta drew on for Providence Island. In the 1980s, she would have seen those who witnessed the explosions campaign to prove they had sustained lasting health damage.

On 17th February, 1958, Jacquetta and Jack attended the public launch of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, at the Central Hall, Westminster, London. Speakers that night included Michael Foot, A.J.P Taylor, and Priestley himself. Despite such a luminous turn-out - and the crowds packed into Central Hall and into a further five others – the event was ignored by the national press.

Also present that evening were another couple committed to this cause, Diana and, Canon John Collins, whose official residence, number 2 Amen Court, by St.Paul’s, was the Campaign's first home.

Canon Collins was the first chairman of this newly-christened CND; Diana’s memories chart both the history of a radical movement, and that of a life-long friendship; they are particularly valuable and illuminate Time and the Priestleys. She recalls Jack’s speech that night was ‘spell-binding’.

In fact CND, as it quickly became known, had been inspired into formation by Priestley’s own words. Those looking for a way to bring together Britain’s disparate anti-nuclear groups, among them the Hampstead-based National Campaign against Nuclear Weapons Tests, read an inspired article by Priestley in the New Statesman on 2nd November, 1957. ‘Britain and the Nuclear Bombs’ was an unstinting and powerful attack on the nuclear arms race and its ‘insane regress of ultimate weapons that are not ultimate’. The article ended with a plea: ‘Alone, we defied Hitler; and alone we can defy this nuclear madness into which the spirit of Hitler seems to have passed…There may be other chain reactions besides those leading to destruction; and we might start one…’.

It proved the ‘catalyst’ as Diana Collins recalls in Time and the Priestleys: ‘The article chimed with everything John and I felt and thought about the nuclear issue, and we were by no means alone’. Before writing, Priestley had asked the magazine to supply him with all the arguments it could muster in favour of the bombs, only to demolish them with his words. Jacquetta, meanwhile, had been demolishing the arguments in her own way.

The couples eventually met. John and Jack had got on famously, now its was Diana’s turn to meet Jacquetta, whose work they barely knew, but whose reputation preceded her; in Diana’s words ‘no normal male, especially one susceptible to female charms, could fail to be dazzled by her’.

Invited to dinner with the Priestleys at the Albany, and having to go alone because John was committed elsewhere, Diana recalled an apprehension. But she had seen all the press reports about the divorce: ‘…the slight aura of wickedness that hung about them was undeniably intriguing’.

Her memory of that evening provides a fascinating glimpse of the Priestleys at home, and adds weight to Jacquetta’s enduring reputation – to those who she did not take to - as stately and imperious. ‘

‘Once inside there was warmth and light and welcome, though I was a little overawed by Jacquetta, who looked so elegant in her long evening dress,and who had a slight air of formality that made you wonder what lay behind. I had not understood this as a dinner party, more of an anti-nuclear get-together, so I had put on a short woollen dress. The only other guest was Laurens Van’s der Post’s wife, Ingrid, whom I already knew and liked…’

‘Of course I was struck by Jacquetta’s appearance, tall, dark-haired and with a beautifully curved cheek line. Her eyes were grey with a hint of greenish-blue, they had a Mona Lisa look, neither cold nor lacking in kindness, just mysterious. Her fascinatingly lovely smile quickly dissipated any faintly chilly formality. Jack., on the other hand, could certainly not have been described as handsome…He immediately put me at ease by explaining how happy he was to be dining with three women; he preferred their company to that of men…’.

When both couples eventually met – ‘Jack gave me a friendly kiss and said, “We rather took to you. Did you take to us?” – lasting bond was forged from their common interests. For Diana it was clear that this was one of those ‘instant friendships that are some of the delights and mysteries of life’. She became their staunch ally in the face of criticisms that the Priestleys were socially aloof or shallow, or somehow fake – ‘How mischievous, malicious and false are those sediciously propagated public images’. The CND the movement gathered momentum, the friendships grew, and lasted their lifetimes; Diana’s own memoire of the Jack and Jacquetta is afterall subtitled The Story of a Friendship.

To Jacquetta, this political cause was entirely in line with her passion. As her husband had stirred the British public with his wartime broadcasts, she was continuing to show her readers the possible consequences of ignoring the fragile relationship between environment and the human species. Another writer, Rachel Carson – who became a better known figure than Hawkes - had worked a similar vein with ‘Silent Spring’, in which she alerted a wide global readership to the effects of chemical pollutants. Jacquetta had reviewed one of Carson’s works.

Jacquetta deserves her recognition, not least because in the early 1960s, she was regarded as one of the founders of the CND movement. She had asked Diana to be part of a group of women who were behind the cause, including Marghanita Laski, Dr. Antoinette Pirie, Margaret Lane, Storm Jameson, and Dr.Janet Aiken.

Diana quite understood that her friend brought a unique intellectual perspective to the campaign. She recalled: ‘She was aware, more than most, of the long slow climb of humanity from the simplest possible forms of life…A willingness to put a catastrophic end to this immensely long and amazing story, to poison the lands and waters that had nurtured and made it all possible, was something could not be tolerated; no ideology, no religion could every justify such an Armageddon’.

The women’s group initiated by Jacquetta met at the Priestley apartment in Albany – ‘now, for me, one of the friendliest of places’ – Collins remembered. This was a lobby group, not a tea party; the group of distinguished women had the clout to garner attention, not least through the publication of significant work such as Pirie’s included Tomorrow’s Children, on the effect of nuclear fall-out.

Jacquetta suggested holding an all-women rally; and this significant event was also distinguished for being hugely well attended – and, although prominent female journalists attended, the rally was unreported by the national press.

The ten-minute speeches were interleaved with quotations read in semi-dramatic style. These quotations – Diana remembers these illustrations of ‘some of the dottier ideas about nuclear defence’ included advertisements for survival kits, and various forms of shelters. ‘One was advertising ‘seven years to pay’, Diana wryly observed. Some of the observations were so bizarre as to be laughable: ‘A heated debate was taking place in America as to whether you might be justified in shooting your neighbours if too many wanted to crowd into your shelter’. Others, she recalls, were simply horrifying, being extracts from the findings of expert scientists, Senate Hearings and the Hollifield Report .

In fact, one of Hawkes’s lesser known works – not least to archaeologists – is her contribution to this meeting. Her address is published in a booklet entitled Women ask Why. Inside its bold, graphic cover are the words of the three major figures who addressed the meeting; the philosopher and author, Iris Murdoch; the scientist, Anne McLaren - and the archaeologist, Jacquetta Hawkes.

Murdoch wrote the first essay, setting the scene in no uncertain terms in ‘Morality and the Bomb’; the second, ‘Genetic Effects of Radiation’, by McLaren, also pulled no punches. The final essay, by Jacquetta, proposed ‘The Way Out’; but it was no liberal easy-option. She was unstinting in its castigation: ‘the very monstrousness of nuclear war tends to paralyse our thinking about it’, she writes on her first page.

‘We are all in a condemned cell awaiting a peculiarly brutal form of execution…’ . she goes on, and she rallies her female audience to find ‘the physical, mental and above all the moral courage to resist what is being done in our name. If we cannot,’ she continues, ‘then we may deserve to burn’ .

Raging further against the ‘satanic laboratories and factories’, Jacquetta whipped up her audience. She condemned the arms race as ‘the material expression of something in the human mind - and it is in there – in the human mind – that has got to be stopped’ and while the possibility existed for salvation, it was not a cause for celebration: ‘we may be saved by a great moral and psychological mutation which will make large-scale war unthinkable’. Jacquetta’s words are sadly prophetic: ‘…we should try to make our present government behave itself as a member of the United Nations’, she urged .

Her rally returned to now-familiar themes, using the analogy of biological change – ‘sudden and irreversible changes in the structure of our social conduct’; and the wrongness of practices once regarded as permissible – cannibalism, slavery, Celtic and Aztec sacrifice, but she is never far from a critique of her own Western society.

‘Punishments by death are on the way out – the burning of heretics already has an impossible sound – and executions for crime of any kind survive only in the more primitive countries – such as our own, Russia and the United States’.

Jacquetta now in full flow – and commanding the crowd’s attention like a magnet – then reminds her audience of the advantages of their own time. ‘…ladies, we should not be here at this meeting if there had not been an almost equally powerful mutation in western society’s conduct towards women…for there is no doubt that in war a male instinct that goes back a million and more years to our primitive ancestors has become embedded in powerful elements of our modern world’. .

And she delivers another series of punches: ‘If the Labour party betray the future, if the churches fail, who in this country can save it? If gives me courage to say something which I have never quite boldly expressed before. Who, then, in this country and beyond, is to save the future? Why should it not be women?’

Jacquetta offers a silencer to the female critics saying: ‘We ourselves have become independent, educated, more confident. I am not usually feminist, I do not like to think of women apart from men. But in this one thing it is different. Men have the instinct to fight and to war. We have not’.

She could have left it there, with those words ringing in the air in the London hall, and no doubt revelling in a new bevy of feminist admirers. But she quickly retrieves the essence of her Jungian ideal: ‘Women are slow to change. It might be that we should all still be peasants if it were not for masculine genius.’ (15)

And her final sentence satisfies both male logic and female passion: ‘But now that genius is running mad...’. Without offending either sex, she leaves her audience to consider their consciences, and their own ‘way out’.

Jacquetta’s presence was such that she developed a following; Diana recalls how a woman raced up after the meeting and gave Jacquetta her gold watch, insisting it be sold for the cause. The women’s group went from strength to strength, lobbying MPs, and delegates to the Geneva Disarmament conference. They organised a ‘Woman’s Day’, and literally stopped London’s traffic with staged dramas and floats. Diana remembered Jack ‘sitting gloomily in the Albany surrounded by balloon, bits of costume, cardboard cut-outs for scenic effects. ‘I wish you’d all stop’ he had apparently said in a weary and melancholy voice’

So numerous were the luminaries involved in the movement, that the Prime Minister, Harold MacMillan, was obliged to met a deputation led by the distinguished civil servant Dame Alix Meynell, including Iris Murdoch, Dame Peggy Ashcroft and the Nobel Prizewinners Professor Dorothy Hodgkin and Dame Kathleen Lonsdale. The action helped to secure a test-ban treaty. Jacquetta joined Jack on the CND executive and Jacquetta took part in the Aldermarston marches, her presence leading the way on defined by her large, scarlet, wide-brimmed hat. She was photographed in the national press, and was delighted to be so publicly associated with the campaign.

Meanwhile Jack used his writer’s skills to promote it with continued ardour, and organised a fund-raising event at the Festival Hall called ‘Stars in your eyes’. Like Jacquetta, he wrote fictively on the theme: Doomsday for Dyson was screened on TV, and like the prescience of Jacquetta’s early archaeology works, he also heralded a dark dawn in the 1937 novel, The Doomsday Men. Jack, who was not overfond of committees, resigned from CND after a split in the ranks, but Jacquetta stayed on, and continued to propagate her message that science was not the whole answer.

Forward to Chapter Nine

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