Early on in Lydia Carr's fine biography of the wife of Mortimer Wheeler, which brings to publication her Oxford DPhil thesis of 2008, the author notes the influence of the spouse of another eminent archaeologist. William Flinders Petrie's wife, Hilda, was, she writes, ‘Verney Wheeler's first model of how an archaeological spouse might be expected to comport herself’. Carr notes that it was a pattern of comportment that Verney Wheeler ‘quickly surpassed’, so the context is neatly drawn for a timely investigation into another of archaeology's mysterious disappearances. However, as Carr puts it, research rapidly revealed that, unlike many of her female predecessors, Verney Wheeler did not vanish into her husband's ‘considerable shadow’ but lectured and published independently and was his partner, not a ‘silent support’. Carr makes a strong case for looking again at these women, who cheerfully coped with the heat, dust and other discomforts, often to the surprise of their male fellow-excavators, but still had to balance being, essentially, a woman. She cites the glorious example of Margaret Murray (1863–1963), who dug with Flinders Petrie in 1903 and who, when Egyptian diggers refused to obey her, ‘asserted her personality and docked their wages for the day; after that, all ran smoothly’. Verney Wheeler was of the generation that succeeded Murray.
In Verney Wheeler's day women, having proved themselves tenacious excavators in the field and often finding liberation through their work, faced another hurdle: handling the male intellectual ego. If Verney Wheeler's generation were both accepted and respected for their own intellectual prowess, Carr's biography highlights the significance of the feminine in archaeology.
Born in South Africa in 1893, Verney Wheeler was a woman with an unusual pedigree. There was a question mark over the identity of her father. Her mother moved to England and entered into a common-law marriage. Tessa's studies at University College London, where Murray had been a precursor, focused on history (including both Roman and English history), Latin, English, French and Italian. Carr notes that she was also formally courted at this time by one Mowlem Burt. However, the next year, 1912, she met the redoubtable R E Mortimer Wheeler. They were engaged in 1913 and married the year after. While Rik was appointed to the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments, his wife left UCL ‘just before taking final exams’. In 1914 they were living with Rik's family in Herne Hill, a south-east London suburb, and the year after that, 1915, their only child, Michael, was born. An unsettled period of life on various army camps followed, with Verney Wheeler appointed the first female assistant surveyor of income tax.
Surprisingly, it was not until 1921 at the fort of Segonium in Caenarfon that she was first exposed to archaeology, Rik by then having been appointed to the significant post of Keeper of Archaeology at the National Museum of Wales. In 1924 he was appointed Director and his wife played an increasingly prominent role in site-recording, as well as helping the career of another outstanding archaeologist, J N L Myres. She became the first woman president of the archaeological section of the Cardiff Naturalists’ Society, and began lecturing in Cardiff. With Rik now appointed Keeper of the London Museum, his wife forged her independence at the Roman fort of Caerleon, where she excavated the amphitheatre.
Verney Wheeler was noticed, as a lecturer and, not least by the media of the day, as a woman who wore skirt suits to dig, in contrast to her students’ youthful and informal attire. Running the London Museum with her husband, she maintained a separate office. She became involved with the British School in Egypt, published for the first time and, in 1928, was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. Carr's timeline of her subject's life and work is indicative as she discusses ‘the Wheelers’ as excavators and co-publishers. They became media personalities: ‘Tessa … with great reluctance, Rik with great enthusiasm’. They both understood the power of the press in raising awareness of archaeology and encouraging funding. Rik was the larger-than-life personality, a favourite on Animal, Vegetable and Mineral, and the subject of a biography by another pioneering woman archaeologist, Jacquetta Hawkes.
Although the detailed case is well made for Verney Wheeler as an individual whose contribution to archaeology has to date been significantly overlooked, the book is also about a pair of archaeologists. But the argument is that she was more than the woman behind the successful man. She was not only a noted specialist in fine and delicate Roman mosaics, a skill honed at Verulamium, she was not averse to the dirty grunt work involved in investigating them. As Carr notes: ‘She explored the terracotta plumbing system by crawling through the tunnels herself, before beginning the work of consolidation; she may have been the only person present small enough to fit and old enough to do so legally.’
Wheeler was well known for his philanderings, perhaps thereby attracting the media's notice and breathless descriptions of the female species on site, ‘GIRL EXCAVATORS’ being one headline. Carr convincingly argues that Verney Wheeler was more than a woman wronged. Although the biography may be described as essentially the love story of Rik and Tessa, their relationship was more finely balanced than Rik's flamboyant persona might lead those who have not studied Tessa's life to believe. His wife's unexpected death after minor surgery affected Rik greatly, and moved at least one anonymous admirer to poetry. That her demise occurred during the excavation of Maiden Castle is poetic and tragic in itself, given her important role among the ‘maidens’ of archaeology. Her ‘energy’ and ‘enthusiasm’ in the foundation of the London Institute of Archaeology is recorded on a fine marble plaque there.
