Cylchgronau Cymru

Chwiliwch trwy dros 450 o deitlau a 1.2 miliwn o dudalennau

A TRIBUTE TO 'DR KATE' MARION LÖFFLER On the morning of the last Saturday of the National Eisteddfod at Bala, 1997, a visitor to the Lolfa stall would have had an uncommon experience. He would have seen a fragile-looking old lady, silver haired, but with a strong voice and young lively eyes, talking to a young blonde woman who had to look down on her because of the difference in height. He would have heard the old lady urge the young one to sit down, 'so that you don't have to look down on me while we are talking,' and the young one follow her advice. Perhaps the visitor would have lingered a bit to over- hear their conversation and maybe find out which part of Wales they came from, because their Welsh sounded unfamiliar. If so, he would have experienced some- thing even stranger: after a few sentences, the women switched the conversation to German. I was the young woman who obediently sat down, and this is how I met Dr Kate Bosse-Griffiths, who died on 4 April 1998 at the age of 87. Meeting her made a deep impression on me, because this seemingly fragile body housed a lively per- sonality and a very sharp mind. After sixty years in Wales her German was still immaculate. She did not ask me to sit down, she told me to do so, just as my German grandmother would have done. And she was right, too. It would have been more polite if the two of us had sat down, but we would not have been able to talk as freely as we eventually did. And she would not have been able to look me in the eye. Everybody who met her remembers her liveliness, her single-mindedness and her sharp intelligence. On her last visit to the new Centre of Egyptology at Swansea University, which now houses the Wellcome Collection, she carried boxes with artefacts from their old location to the new display rooms without accepting help. The new curator described how the children would assemble round Dr Bosse- Griffiths to hear her speak about Egypt, comparing the archaeologist's work to that of a detective. The staff of Swansea Museum, who were full of admiration for their 'Dr Kate', had similar stories. Kate Bosse-Griffiths had been Honorary Curator of the museum's Archaeology Department from 1946 until her death. For half a century she received every find from Swansea and Gower in order to catalogue it and include it in the collections and displays. Her introduction to the Gallery of Local Antiquities in the Swansea Museum, Ugain Mil o Flynyddoedd o Hanes Leol/ Twenty-thousand Years ofLocal History, was as one of the earliest bilingual catalogues produced in Wales. Dr Bosse-Griffiths enjoyed serving Swansea and its inhabitants