Cylchgronau Cymru

Obituaries SIR CYRIL FOX (1882-1967) SIR CYRIL Fox, President of the Cambrian Archaeological Association in 1933, died in 1967. He was 85. First as Keeper of the Department of Archaeology, then as Director of the National Museum from 1924 to 1948, he spent most of his working life as an archaeologist in Wales. Others elsewhere will have written of his con- tribution to archaeology in the wider field this appreciation will be concerned with the part that he played over this time in the land of his adoption. Fox had succeeded Dr. R. E. M. Wheeler (as he then was) successively as Keeper and Director. It fell therefore to the National Museum to provide a setting for the two outstanding British archaeologists of the twenties and thirties and it was a matter of great good fortune for Wales that (without wishing to imply any limitation on the part of either) their specialisms should have been complementary. Wheeler's brilliant investigations of Roman sites had given Roman studies in Wales a new impetus his Prehistoric and Roman Wales, published in 1925, gave form to the scattered and disjointed efforts of generations of earlier workers and set the scene for a future in which archaeological work here might hope to achieve the level of the best in England. Fox's appointment was strictly in the tradition of the National Museum, which from the time of the first Keeper, John Ward, had recognised (as then few if any other national institutions had) the importance of field-research in archaeology side by side with the study of objects, generally regarded as the museum man's main concern. The writer of this note can testify to the further benefit that could accrue to the archaeologist from the fact that the Museum also housed natural science departments manned by colleagues prepared to look sympathetically (and unselfishly, for their own work) at archaeological problems. For the writer of the Archaeology of the Cambridge Region (published in 1923) the situation could hardly have been other than completely congenial. In Wales he was confronted by a small country archaeologically less wealthy than the lowland area in which his chief work had been done, yet possessed of geographical and topographical characters which gave it its own distinctive quality. To its internal diversity were added varied external relationships which gave Wales participation in the affairs of both the Highland and the Lowland Zones as they were later to be defined and while it is certainly the case that the Personality of Britain did not originate from contemplation of the Welsh scene as such it would probably be true to argue that consideration of specifi- cally Welsh discoveries and of their significance in a wider context helped to formulate Fox's thinking, acting as it were as a series of preliminary studies for the more general work. For before the first edition of the Personality appeared in 1932 there had been a number of papers, some of which embellished the pages of Archaeologia Cambrensis, which served this end. The survey of Offa's Dyke (Arch. Camb., LXXXI (1926) to LXXXVI (1931) ) which incidentally performed a service long threatened in the early Inventories of the Welsh Commission, was itself an exercise in the study of east-west relationships. Two new beakers from Wales (Arch. Camb., LXXX (1925) )