O. G. S. Crawford

BLOODY OLD BRITAIN: O. G. S. Crawford and the Archaeology of Modern Life

By KITTY HAUSER

Granta Books, 2009, 286 pp, $27.99 (pb)

Review by Phil Shannon

Osbert Guy Stanhope Crawford, a British archaeologist, was the original Grumpy Old Man of the 1930s. His manuscript, Bloody Old Britain, was not just an attempt to apply archaeological methods to the study of contemporary society - it was also, says Kitty Hauser in her biography of Crawford, a “long howl of indignant frustration” at capitalism and its inefficiencies, irrationalities, snobbery and class distinction, where everything is badly made and nothing works. Unpublished because it was too bitter and unpatriotic as war loomed, Bloody Old Britain combined comedy with polemic, Basil Fawlty with Karl Marx.

Crawford huffed against grim hotels, adulterated food and poorly designed teapots, and he puffed against money-driven town planning, the destruction of archaeological sites, a car-based society ruining the countryside, the commercialisation of sport and the plague of advertisements.

Capitalist production, he said, was little more than an attempt to cheat the consumer of value, from coal tongs, fire pokers, soup spoons and drinking glasses which placed appearance over functionality, to cinema seats which sacrificed leg room to pack in the punters. Shoddiness was profitable, planned obsolescence a fast-track to money-making.

Whilst many of Crawford’s conservative middle class readers (as editor of the journal, Antiquity, he had a few) would have nodded in agreement at many of his complaints about the degeneration of standards of workmanship and service, the difference was that, for Crawford, the solution was socialism.

Crawford was born in British-ruled India in 1886, and looked set to follow his father on the path to colonial service – through Marlborough College (whose savage bullying and forced games made his time as a prisoner in a German POW camp in the first World War seem preferable), to Oxford, the army and then the Civil Service.

The first World War, however, taught Crawford two things. First, that reason and intelligence should replace religion, nationalism and war, and that science should be the foundation of a new ‘universal brotherhood’. Second, that the higher the vantage point (he conducted wartime aerial photography as a Royal Flying Corps observer) the better the view of general patterns. He applied this perspective scientifically and professionally as a pioneer of aerial archaeology, and politically as a Marxist analysing broad historical processes and social forces.

Like many other progressive intelligentsia, before the reality of Stalin’s betrayal of the Russian revolution had sunk widely in, a trip to Russia (in 1932) reinforced his socialist commitment. Pre-disposed to view the Soviet Union positively, Crawford did not observe the human costs of Stalin’s rapid industrialisation and forced collectivisation, the Terror and repression.

This sanitised view of Soviet Russia further soured Crawford on Britain where religion, private property, slums and advertising increasingly seemed to be the artefacts, rituals and remains of a dying which he set about photographing to produce a modern archaeological record which would document human evolution from Stone Axe to Five Year Plan. He also photographically documented the hidden history of Marxism in Britain, including the buildings where Marx, Engels and Lenin lived, worked or went drinking. For Crawford, capitalist culture would now be subject to the museological scrutiny usually reserved for other cultures which were safely distant in time and space.

His dreams were hit, however, by a Luftwaffe bombing raid on the Ordnance Survey offices in Southampton where he worked, destroying much of the historic resources for his politically-inspired archaeological vision. Crawford retired soon after the war, his hopes in the Soviet Union abandoned but still well-known as a socialist until his death in 1957.

Hauser’s book shows us another fascinating socialist plucked from obscurity but it also comes with the fashionable debunking of socialist ideals. Crawford’s problem, in Hauser’s post-modernist view, is that he was a man of faith – a socialist faith that the past was knowable, that history had a pattern and that the future was shapeable and therefore bright, a vision “both heroic and foolish”, says Hauser, for whom Crawford’s “big picture” socialist idealism is “alien to us”, the preserve of eccentrics.

As much as Stalinism has besmirched the socialist project, however, and as much as the political sceptics declare socialism dead, only the second adjective in O. G. S. Crawford’s Bloody Old Britain needs to be updated for his socialist politics to remain relevant to a world where production is still in the cause of profit, where commercialism runs roughshod over nature, and where war and race lord it over universal bother-(and sister)-hood.