Bloody Old Britain: O.G.S. Crawford and the Archaeology of Modern Life Review

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Bloody Old Britain: O.G.S. Crawford and the Archaeology of Modern Life ReviewTeacher 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unions, and with no concept of workers' nationalism, he took a negative attitude to Britain, hence the title of his unpublished manuscript of the late 1930s, from which Ms Hauser took her title.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.
Bloody Old Britain: O.G.S. Crawford and the Archaeology of Modern Life OverviewO. G. S. Crawford (1886–1957) was a man who thought history held the answers to everything, and that to study it was to know humanity's glorious future. At first a field archaeologist, digging into the mysterious mounds and ditches of rural England, he became a photographer/observer flying over the Western Front during World War I—an experience that taught him the new skills of interpreting the earth from above and made him a pioneer of aerial archaeology. Then he fell in love with Marxism, was befriended by H.G. Wells, and traveled to the Soviet Union as one of its disciples. In the 1930s, it seemed to him that contemporary 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—as future evidence of how unenlightened British society had once been in its worship of God and the motor car. 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—including fascinating undocumented scenes and sites such asanti-fascist graffiti and signs in Berlin and London in the 1930s—and penetrates neglected but fascinating aspects of British life that have themselves become history.

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