Edith Eccles was born in Liverpool on the 8th of October 1910 into a relatively modest but comfortable family and grew up at 34 Brelade Road in Stoneycroft. Her father, James Eccles, was a bank clerk and Edith attended the local council school from 1916 to 1921, and then the Queen Mary High School from 1921 to 1928. From 1928 to 1931 she studied classics at Royal Holloway College, London, partly funding her studies with a scholarship from the Holt Educational Trust, where her interest in Greek art and archaeology was sparked by the teaching of Bernard Ashmole. In 1931 she obtained a BA Hons. in Classics before returning to study in her native Liverpool where, in 1933, she was the first student to obtain a Certificate in Archaeology. The Institute of Archaeology had been set up in 1904 with The Liverpool Diploma only starting in the 1930s. During the academic year 1932-33, while studying for her Certificate, Edith worked as Librarian and Assistant Secretary to the Institute of Archaeology of Liverpool.3.
From 1936-1937 she was awarded a scholarship at Bryn Mawr College, as the Mary Paul Collins Fellow in Archaeology, before being admitted as a student of the British School at Athens for the session 1933-34. Women had been admitted since the 1890s, but ‘were not allowed to reside or to work on excavations’, and it was only after the 1910s, at the insistence of Jane Harrison, that women became eligible for Studentship. During the 1930s she belonged to a group of remarkably enterprising women who worked in the orbit of the British School at Athens and included, Sylvia Benton, Winifred Lamb and her friend Mercey Money-Coutts, an exact contemporary of Edith's, both being born in 1910, and who worked and travelled with her. She formed a lasting friendship with Mercy, who was also admitted in the same session and shared Edith's interest in Minoan pottery.
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| Arkalochori Cave, Heraklion, Crete |
In April 1934, together with John Pendlebury and Mercy, she explored Central Crete in search of new sites as well as to visit known ones. Her initial interest in Late Minoan seal-stones brought her to Crete in 1936, where she also worked with Spyridon Marinatos, J.D.S. Pendlebury and R. W. Hutchinson as she researched seal stones and gems of the Late Minoan period with excavations at the cave sanctuary of Arkalochori, one of the most important sacred caves in Minoan Crete and the most important in the prefecture of Heraklion. She also helped in the reorganization of the Stratigraphical Museum at Knossos, surveying Crete for ancient sites. Edith was ten years younger than Spyridon and respected and idealised him. She had asked him to write a reference letter for her when she had applied to Bryn Mawr College and other letters indicate there was a romantic friendship between the two of them. She maintained a strong professional relationship with Spyridon Marinatos throughout her life, which is documented through letters published in 2015.
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| Pictured at the BSA in 1939 with Vronwy Fischer (later Hankey) |
In 1938 she directed the excavations of the prehistoric caves near Ayio Gala on Chios and thereafter she traveled extensively throughout Egypt, Syria, Turkey and Cyprus. During World War II she worked in various positions including the BBC, WAAF and as a District Officer for UNRRA and in 1945 she served as an adviser to the Greek government on refugee affairs and in 1945. In 1944 Edith travelled with Mercy from Libya to the south coast of Crete with a fisherman on a boat, and then walked on their own to the Taverna, in Knossos, where they decided to stay until the end of the war. Her promising archaeological career was brought to an end soon after the war by illness as, in 1946 upon her return to England, she was found to be suffering from multiple sclerosis. She joined the Foreign Office in 1946 where, in spite of the disease, she worked until 1965, finally succumbing to illness and death in 1977. Like all women archaeologists of the time, Edith faced innumerable challenges and difficulties but prevailed to contribute significantly to the expansion of our knowledge of the ancient world. This was a male dominated field at a time when few educational opportunities or careers were open to women. Excavating in countries where traditional, patriarchal societies did not generally allow women leadership or even public roles, she gained government permissions to excavate in Egypt and Greece, even directing fieldwork using male workers whose own wives held subservient roles. Their activities were arduous, often dangerous, and required determination, stamina, a love of adventure, and certainly dedication.
see also:- http://www.thefootballvoice.com/2021/05/a-liverpool-exemplar-frank-hornby.html
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