Stuart and Peggy Piggott

'Mr Peggy Piggott'

SP at wedding of his student Catriona Whitehouse to Angus Myles 1965 Photo © CM & TD McArdle

By now there can be few people interested in archaeology who have not read the novel by John Prescott (2007) or viewed its film version The Dig (2021, two BAFTA awards). Fellows of The Society of Antiquaries of Scotland were introduced to both by the short bio of archaeologist Peggy Piggott (later Peggy Guido) in their Newsletter 33.1 Spring 2021.
In it Mairi Davies and Rachel Pope corrected estimation of Peggy's much-undervalued archaeological work. Long undeservedly in the shadow of her celebrated husband Stuart (right) former Abercromby Professor of Archaeology 1946-1977 at Edinburgh University.

Rachel further expanded Peggy's bio in an online talk September 2021 and in other articles.

Pen and trowel

Image widely reproduced in public domain: © Penguin Books; cover photo © Fox Photos/ Hulton Archive/ Getty Images

No need to recount Stuart Piggott's dazzling record as an archaeologist—any search on the internet will offer a flood of references.

But it is the complementary man and husband on view here—a poet—now using the medium of verse to express his love for his wife, an aspect of their relationship which was short-changed in the film. Including of course, an entirely fictitious near-affair by Peggy, who without evidence to the contrary known to us, seems to have been happy in their then three-years'-old marriage (1936, the film set in 1939).

Without apology we shoulder aside John Preston's chilly depiction of Stuart and Peggy's offhand relationship in both book and film. The warmth of his affection can be read in SP's own poetic words.

(Nonetheless, it should be said that the book is a good read in its own right.)

Verse

This other side of Stuart Piggott the prehistorian is not well known, but he left a fifty-year-long corpus of over ninety poems, running from light-hearted to deeply profound.

1. The Fire Among the Ruins (1948) OUP
2. Institute of Archaeology, Oxford

Twenty-five of which were published by OUP shortly after World War II.¹ Many deeply emotive letters to Peggy remain in his archive,² addressed to his then life's companion but he further distilled his affections into the miniature cosmos of poetry, perhaps achieving a deeper and more expansive level.

Early contact

Stuart and Peggy's paths crossed in the late 1920s just before the neolithic excavations at Windmill Hill by the rich and eccentric Alexander Keiller, now—his playboy character apart—recognised as a serious and capable archaeologist. Stuart, maybe Peggy also, had access to the material finds from the excavation stored at that time in Keiller's house.

3 'Archaeological Retrospect 5' Antiquity LVII #219 (March 1983), 32

Stuart later became his 'private archaeologist' ³ working at Avebury, the huge Wiltshire stone circle(s), excavating and restoring the many fallen stones.

Keiller's survey and excavation techniques echoed Mortimer Wheeler's organisational ethos and tutorial influence at The Institute of Archaeology, London University. His lectures were attended by both Stuart and his future wife Margaret (Peggy) Preston. These mentors' field achievements inspired both Piggotts' future methods and synthesis of material; but their personal influence was quite another.

Stuart had first met Peggy, whose independent income helped both his and her meteoric expansion in fieldwork (detailed by Davies and Pope) at an earlier excavation of The Trundle hill fort in 1928. Their friendship, then affection, blossoming around the time of the Avebury excavations became soured by Peggy's family

4. SP to CMP, letter probably 29-vi-1936

('. . . your bloody uncles and aunts!'),⁴ due to their disapproval of a pre-marital proposed trip for the pair to Brittany, although a chaperone—the imperial OGS Crawford, no less, as Ian Ralston reminded us—had been mooted. Scandalous in that morally remote era.

Stuart's indignant protest to Peggy:

5. SP to CMP, letter 30-vi-1936

[People] '. . . would conclude that I had acquired Keiller's morals, or lack of them ⁵ . . .' Nonetheless, they married the same year, on 12 November 1936, perhaps from the remaining letters in his archive, still edgy and offended by the rumours.

First poems

But Stuart's first set of lyrical Poems for Peggy, Christmas 1937 show that this had been partly at least put aside. He sent four of his poems under this title in a letter to Peggy: The Field Club member, Tea with a mystic, Ballade to a prehistorian and Congress of Archaeological Societies. A young man joyously in love with the totality of his environment, his discipline, and his companion.

Then in early 1939 the Piggotts were drawn in as excavators at the Sutton Hoo Saxon ship burial, both Peggy and Stuart handling its awesome cargo of golden grave goods. It is here that John Preston's licence as a novelist has moved him to distort both chronology and plot, creating the implied frustration of Peggy and the nonchalant frigidity of Stuart. Epistle to Peggy written with 'fond affection's fire' in the midst of wintry house alterations a few months before the Sutton Hoo excavation began, is in the seventeenth-century style of Thomas Browne and shows his state of mind at the time. Both were experienced, married, fieldworkers when the discovery of the burial ship came to light in 1939, their honeymoon several years past.

Friends and neighbours

Their circle of friends at the time and country dwellers in Berkshire/Oxfordshire included the poet John and writer Penelope Betjeman who had taken Garrards Farm in Uffington in 1934, near Stuart's parents' cottage. The artist John Piper (commissioned by Stuart to paint a landscape as a birthday present for Peggy) and writer Myfanwy, John's wife, were to share rustic wartime cottager self-help interests with the Piggotts.

6 John and Myfanwy Piper archive (ex Clarissa Lewis, with thanks)

In a postcard, 1941, Peggy (to Myfanwy) wrote to delay a visit because of Stuart's leave, requesting recipe ideas for when they in turn had processed their household pig.⁶

Wartime

Thus at the beginning of WWII separation occurred as Stuart's Army career began, glumly, as Gunner Piggott in the Artillery. Military 'bull' did not go down well with the new intellectual recruit in the 'other ranks'. Feelings tersely expressed in another small collection of poems sent to Peggy, titled in typically dry humour (he had been nowhere near a battlefield): Songs from the battlefield. A book of military verse, 1939. Four new poems: Christmas Guard 1939, Evening in Ipswich, The Mind of Man, Military Training at Longford. This last expressing SP's pent-up frustration at the humdrum mindless training of the squaddie.

The relief which came was due to influence from friends, including Glyn Daniel, already a pilot officer in the Royal Air Force and organising transfer to photo-intelligence at Medmenham. Then an Army Commission, a thwarted posting to the Far East, ending with the rank of Lieut-Col to head air photographic interpretation in india.

His letters from abroad are highly affectionate, full of topical detail, illustrated with his evocative pen drawings. Poems written throughout the war show no slackening of his bond to Peggy and longing for her presence. Another small collection, titled Poems 1942-3 for CMP included Cock-crowing and several others inspired by a trip into the Himalayas, India and Tibet.

Northern fetters

Release came with post-war demobilisation: Now that the killing is over, / having so long paid court to death.

Time to move on. Careers were re-established; a move to Edinburgh, professorship, research and excavations,

7. Peggy's portentous telegram to Stuart, 1946: 'You have been offered the Abercromby Chair in Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh, God help us.' (Quoted in N. Shakespeare Bruce Chatwin (1999), 189

Stuart and Peggy each breaking their own new ground as scholars, but beginning perhaps from her side with a sense of trepidation.⁷ Peggy became immersed in fieldwork, Stuart busy building teaching courses as well as several excavations. No lessening of affection shows in Stuart's remaining letters, but now with fewer poems after the tensions of war. At times involved in each other's activities, but when not, he always with his impish sense of fun, ready to lighten the pressures of distance when both away in the field:

8. Probably refers to SP's excavation at Cairnpapple: 'The excavations at Cairnpapple Hill, West Lothian, 1947-1948' Proc Soc Antiq Scot 82 (1947-8), 68-123

University Club, Edinburgh Tuesday evening

Gorblimey, Mrs P., the ruddy cairn⁸ has got another intact cist in the last quadrant! I'm so overcome I've come into the club for dinner. TL Beddoes might have handled the situation better:

ENTER WOLFGANG:

Marry and well-a-day, old Fartilocks
Hast found another cist i' the cairn? Ah, Death
Still has his charnel jests. Dig where you will
'Tis mortal clay you shatter. I like well
To see the spade and mattock—there's good cheer
At the sign of the Gravediggers' Arms: I love the music
Of marrow-bones and cleaver—I've an account
With Death the Butcher, and the primest cuts
Are mine for asking.

[EXIT ACCOMPANIED BY A JESTER, TWO DWARFS AND A GHOST.]

Or Alfred, Lord Tennyson:

We clomb the hill; 'twas on a summer's day
And Old Man's Nuisance clad the hedges o'er.
My aunt and I: there was eglantine and pinks
And flowers in crannies by the ransacked cairn
Where someone dug, and so we spoke to him
And then he answered:

'I know the types of pot and quern
I've several books in galley:
With Childe and Hawkes and Fox in turn
I'm really awfully pally.

The Antiquaries I hang around
And listen to their papers—
I think they're sometimes quite profound
But oft'ner cutting capers.

I dig, I plan, I photograph
I draw out reconstructions
You wouldn't understand a half
Of my profound deductions.'

So said, we parted, and my aunt and I
Made onward for Linlithgow. And at eve
We supped at the St Michaels . . .

Or Mr TS Eliot:

And in the excavation that has no end
because perhaps it had no beginning
there is always a cairn within the cairn
there is always a cist within the cist
because there was no beginning
and therefore no end
nor can we now
apply the schoolmen's dictum
entium non sit multiplicanda
for the inevitable multiplication of our ends
(which are still our beginnings in the rose garden)
holds all of us, especially those
who stand in tumulo excelso
cursing
cursing
the delaying of the beginning
of the unapproachable end.

As for myself, I have no adequate comment
Blessings o Bestest Love
S

1950s

Their separate but emotionally linked archaeological careers were in full swing. But why should anyone, be they never so serious about their discipline imagine that two such potent scholars could not see the wry humour in thwarted efforts to reveal the past? In the summer of 1952 Stuart with his characteristically wicked wit, wrote to Peggy from his dig in the Highlands, whilst she was busy with her own excavations:

9. Corrimony cairn: 'Excavations in passage-graves and ring-cairns of the Clava group, 1952-3' Proc Soc Antiq Scot 88 (1953-5), 174-84
10. Signature tune of a much-loved radio comedy show in the late 1940s/1950s Much Binding in the Marsh
11. SP's joking reference to his Abercromby professorship

Corrimony⁹
Thursday

My darling ℿ.

(To the tune of 'Much Binding in the Marsh')¹⁰

At Much-Squalor-in-the-Glen
We live in an appalling hugger-mugger
At Much-Squalor-in-the-Glen
We've dug a cairn that proves a perfect bugger—
We think our predecessors have been really most unkind
They've hogged the bloody chamber and they haven't left a find
And poor old Abercrumble's¹¹ getting softened in the mind
At Much-Squalor-in-the-Glen!

In other words, although we've got the remains of a lovely corbelled chamber, we now find, after hard digging by an excellent firm of local contractors, who were consulted and advised going in from the top (very wisely) and did so, that the whole thing must have been cleared out and refilled in the last century (willow-pattern sherd on bottom!). Everyone, including contractors, most disappointed. There is a faint chance of pits in the floor, but not much. It's very odd there's no local tradition of opening, but there it is. There are still 5 stones of the surrounding circle to do, but not much hope (no finds from the 4 we've done so far). So we must content ourselves with STRUCTURE, damn it! The corbelled chamber is v. Iberian and must have been about 7' high originally. Arf! Arf!!

Thanks so much for reading matter. I shall now go to bed and read it, dropping the silent tear from time to time.

All love to you, all hate
to this dig.

Yours

S

Triggered by whatever reasons, by the middle 1950s their childless marriage was no more.

Peggy, during a visit to an uncle in England, announced the end.

12. Phone call from AS to TDM 30-x-2021

Stuart was 'in a terrible state' and needed deep support from longstanding friends and neighbours Stewart and Alison Sanderson. For a time he became part of their family.¹²

After annulment in 1956 Peggy and Stuart took their separate paths.

Sex

Particularly after the publication of The Dig, it was queried in some parts of the Press whether SP was homosexual, resulting in the non-consummation of the marriage, apparent reason for the annulment.

No similar suggestions have been made on Peggy's side as far as we know.

Older readers may be aware of the situation pre-1970 about divorce proceedings, but briefly put, substantial reasons had to be presented before annulment of a marriage could be granted by the Courts. Hard evidence was sought. For example, in the case of reasons of adultery: an unscheduled visit by an investigator (yes, grey belted mackintosh) was carried out for evidence of 'cohabitation' of the guilty party with another person. Unmade-up double bed slept in by more than one person; domestic arrangements for two; et cetera.

Other reasons for breakup of a marriage were usually harder to prove. Admitted adultery was a simple course to achieve the result, even though reputations generally suffered thereby in a more moralistically conservative society. Neither Stuart nor Peggy to our knowledge had extra-marital affairs even in the strained conditions of a five-year wartime separation. Without certainty we would guess that the 'non-consummation' option may have been the best means of an agreed parting without involving others, if any.

The marriage had been childless. It is not known if either desired children although we can vouch for Stuart's easy and avuncular contact with our own two-year-old daughter in the early 1970s. As Peggy was aged 40 when married to Luigi Guido, children at that time were likely not in question.

Today when much more liberal values are held in the West on personal relationships, we can ask, 'Does anyone care?'. Almost certainly not, but to answer the accusation re SP's proclivities, we can consider some details from his past.

Betjeman giggles

Among the Piggotts' great friends were John and Penelope Betjeman. Stuart and John swapped poetry, gossip, anecdotes and of course jokes between minds of a similar dry humour. Homosexuality was a joke between them expressed in some of the poems listed here in a boarding-school Common-room sort of snigger: mildly funny but not in any way vicious or seriously condemnatory. Although active homosexuality was treated as a crime, and punished, until 1967 in England (1980 in Scotland) attitudes at that era towards it varied from the minority outrage and disgust to the majority disapproval at worst or good-for-a-laugh titter about the practice. We conclude this last was SP's attitude. JB's affairs, serious or fantasy, were many and convoluted: easily followed in his many biographies for anyone interested.

The Chatwin episode

Likewise for admitted bisexual travel writer Bruce Chatwin, a brief flash-in-the-pan archaeology student at Edinburgh 1966-67. Dazzling us all—dull slogging students (and staff, too, it should be said)—with his glossy Sotheby's-sale-catalogue compendious urbanity. He found the course nothing like the Indiana Jones canter through prehistory he had expected. During a fractious research trip to Russia with Piggott, Ruth Tringham (a senior researcher) and another, he claimed the Prof had 'come onto him'.

13. Quoted in N. Shakespeare, op. cit. 196

As Stuart had earlier owlishly noted in his diary that Bruce had 'homo tendencies',¹³ the accusation was treated as another of Bruce's romantic fantasies. Chatwin left the Department in haste, eyes set on opal horizons, my dear, leaving an unsettling brittleness in the air.

Aftermath

Can anything remain the same after the cataclysmic breakup of a twenty-year-long marriage? Even with so many friends, contacts and colleagues in the North (whose archaeological foundations he had helped to construct over a thirty-year tenure), his natural homeland was his native Wessex. he reflected to us as the 1970s advanced that the students had become rather dull after 'our lot'. And Senior Lecturer Charles, and Jessica Thomas his novelist wife, both firm friends and source of moral support were getting itchy feet for pastures new: Leicester University, chilling the comfy côterie of Georgian New Town Edinburgh.

Peggy had been effectively out of the frame in Sicily with her marriage to Count Luigi Guido and Mediterranean-oriented studies and interests. After Guido's death, she returned to England still a productive scholar, to produce her seminal work on Anglo-Saxon beads.

14. Hegener, Michiel: Archeologie van het landschap. Langs de aarden monumenten van Nederland (1995), 13

She spent her final years in Devizes, a 'short Indian summer'¹⁴ with AW Lawrence the authority on Greek sculpture and architecture, brother of TE Lawrence.

Some personal contact and collaboration as colleagues between Stuart and Peggy did continue. He, after retirement in 1976, to the cottage in West Challow inherited from his aunt. Both were still busily involved in the discipline of archaeology they had espoused for so many years.

On reflection, perhaps for each their first love?

Peggy died in 1994, Stuart in 1996.

NOTES
Unless otherwise attributed, all letters and poems quoted are in the Stuart Piggott archive, Institute of Archaeology, Oxford and were consulted before their cataloguing had begun.