Precarity and Independence

This blog post was written by Hélène Maloigne, archaeologist, historian, cultural heritage professional, and IHR Fellow.

As a historian, you meet a lot of people. Or at least, that is how I like to think about my research on the history of archaeology in the Middle East: as meetings across time and space. Like many historians, I have grappled with and reflected on the connections with some of my research ‘subjects’, especially those whose lives have intersected with mine over a long period of time. One of my longest-lasting ‘relationships’—nearly 15 years now—has been with Charles Leonard Woolley (1880–1960). I first read about his archaeological work as a student and since 2012 I have been lucky enough to be part of a team that excavates one of his former sites; Tell Atchana, Alalakh in Türkiye. Writing first an MA dissertation and then a PhD thesis about different aspects of his work and archival legacy, I have come to know quite a lot about him as a person beyond his research, especially about his friendships and relationships. I have written previously about his 40-year collaboration with Sheikh Mohammed bin Sheikh Ibrahim el-Awassi (c. 1875–1953), but it is Woolley’s wife Katharine (1888–1945) who has been on my mind for quite some time (Fig. 1). The three of them worked together at the site of Ur in southern Iraq from 1922 to 1934, Katharine joining as a volunteer in 1923. Leonard and Katharine married in 1927.

*Fig. 1: Katharine Woolley at Ur, 1923–1934*

Almost no records of hers have survived in institutional archives and a deeper dive into her personal life and friendships has not yet been possible for me. In addition, I have been reluctant to do so as it has always seemed to me that she was a very private person. Both Leonard and Katharine Woolley are said to have burned their private papers prior to their death but Leonard’s prolific professional output, including surviving recordings of his voice at the British Library’s Sound Archive, and consequently larger archival footprint have provided a more ready canvas for my research. Of course, as historians we are constrained by our own biases and the limits of our imagination, and I could be projecting my own ideas of privacy onto Katharine, something we should all consider when planning to publish private papers and diaries. When I have written about her, as I recently have for the German magazine Antike Welt, I have focused on her work as an archaeologist, conservator and illustrator, steering away from fragments of information on the couple’s private life that survive in some archives. These are also strongly influenced by Agatha Christies’ Murder in Mesopotamia (1936), a Poirot novel, in which the main characters are based on Leonard and Katharine Woolley. Christie and her husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan, were lifelong friends with the Woolleys.

Whatever the rumours, Leonard Woolley clearly valued her as a collaborator and fundraiser and they seemingly had a symbiotic professional relationship until her early death in 1945, both as archaeologists as well as in their work protecting North African and European cultural heritage and with refugees during the Second World War. It is therefore difficult if not impossible to know why she didn’t appear as a co-author on any of their excavation reports or popular books as her contribution to the work remembered under her husband’s name was significant. But such was the fate of many archaeologists’ and other scientists’ wives of the period.

In addition to using her creative talents in her work as an archaeologist, Katharine Woolley was a sculptor and skilled communicator, publishing articles in the Daily Mail, The Observer, Britannia and Eve and The Cornhill Magazine. With the exception of articles in the latter outlet, these all appeared between 1929 and 1932, one of the busiest periods of the Ur excavations due to the discovery of the ‘Royal Cemetery’ and the publicity that followed in its wake from 1926–1928 (Fig. 2 and 3). Still, Katharine found the time to write and publish a novel—Adventure Calls—with John Murray in 1929, a text that has always intrigued and puzzled me. I first read it during my PhD, and its setting, characters, and topics exemplify themes of the interwar period that I have revisited again and again during my research: the aftermath of the First World War with its drawn-out military occupation of Iraq and the violent suppression of revolutions in 1920; the shift in British women’s place in society and their opportunities at home and abroad; and racist and orientalist ideas of different Arab communities.

*Fig. 2: Katharine Woolley and Alawi or Yahia (sons of Sheikh Mohammed bin Ibrahim) at Ur, 1923–1934*

The plot is quickly summarised: Twins of Scottish heritage, Alexander (Sandy) and Colin Gillespie grow up in a family that has long had strong bonds to the East. Their ancestors worked for the East India Company, were explorers, archaeologists or diplomats, and the children partly grow up in the Ottoman Empire, particularly in Baghdad, where they, their father and elder brother Alasdair form friendships with the Bedouin community. Despite her masculine name, which she has been given in honour of one of her forebears, Colin is a girl. She and Sandy enjoy the close, almost symbiotic bond that characterises some twins’ relationship and the children are dismayed when they realise that Colin will grow up to be a ‘lady’, not a boy, and that they will be separated when Sandy goes to boarding school while she will be expected to make herself useful at home, looking after her father and Alasdair. In the prologue Alasdair prophesises that one day the opportunity will come when she will be indispensable as a woman, if only she keeps up with her written and spoken Arabic and immerses herself in life in Baghdad where he and their father are taking up residence.

In 1920, both brothers are stationed in Iraq, and they become aware of unrest and stirrings within the population. They hatch a plan according to which Sandy will disguise himself as a Bedouin to infiltrate the independence movement while Colin, who now lives in London as a young ‘lady’, will pretend to be Sandy and take up his posting in southern Iraq assisting a Political Officer, Major Charles Stanhope. Colin and Stanhope, who remains unaware of the plan, briefly meet in London and it is clear that there is mutual attraction. As the twins are only 19 years old at this point, the novel just about manages to convince the reader that Colin can successfully get away with concealing any physical differences in an all-male environment through the use of face paint to give a more ruddy appearance, by never wearing shorts (which would reveal her knees not to be ‘regulation man’s size’) and pretending that Sandy hasn’t started shaving yet. But the constant proximity to Stanhope complicates matters for Colin as she struggles to keep her feelings for her superior officer under check while working and living closely together. The novel is written from Colin’s perspective and at no point are there any hints that Stanhope, although friendly towards his subaltern, feels any attraction towards him or is ever confused about Sandy’s gender. Yet the themes of living in a gender you weren’t assigned at birth and the freedom this would have given a woman in the early 20th century bring an (intended or unintended?) queerness to the book.

And yet, for all the joy this gives me as queer reader with its themes of cross-dressing and hidden yearnings, Adventure Calls has always been a very unsettling read. The British characters never once question their right to govern Iraq after the war, nor do they question the brutality with which the Iraqi Revolution of 1920 was suppressed both in the novel and in real life. The book relies on stereotypical, racist and orientalist descriptions of Arabs, dividing them into effeminate, urban, (aspiring) middle class effendis and honest, truth-loving (if revolutionary) desert-dwelling Bedouin, for whom ‘collaboration, the bedrock of civilisation, is meaningless…’. As with much orientalist writing, these kinds of statements are constantly undermined by the text itself, especially during the sections focusing on the budding revolutionary uprising, when different tribes take either the revolutionary side or collaborate with the British, both positions clearly requiring advanced methods of collaboration across a colonized and heavily militarized country.

*Fig. 3: Katharine and Leonard Woolley and two unknown archaeologists excavating in the ‘Royal Cemetery’, 1926–1929*

Nor do the British characters escape stereotyping. Colin and Sandy Gillespie are of Scottish origin and are therefore ‘Celts’. It is because of this ‘clannish’ heritage that they are able to understand and impersonate the Bedouin, although ‘they never became oriental’. Both Sandy and Colin use black- or brownface when disguising themselves, adding a further layer to the white characters’ deeply problematic complicity in the enforcement of imperial rule.

They might spend years with the nomad Arab, wearing his dress, using his speech, but retaining their original uncompromising bluntness, never more the Highlander in thought and action than when crouching before the black tents of the desert; and their very devotion to their own clan strengthened the bond of sympathy and understanding between themselves and the Bedouin who saw the beginning and end of existence in their tribe and tribal laws. The overwhelming, arrogant pride of the desert Arab found an echo in their own hearts, his dignity and hospitality were added bonds (p. 12–13).

Alasdair’s earlier promise comes true when Colin, disguised as an Arab woman, gains access to one of the conspirator’s women’s quarters where evidence is being hidden—something that would have been impossible for Sandy. For it is easier for Colin to pretend to be Sandy: ‘After all she and Sandy were almost the same thing, she was Sandy with something added. Sandy could not be Colin but she could be Sandy (p. 59).’ In good old white saviour fashion, she saves a child from fever in the process of obtaining the incriminating piece of paper that seals the revolutionaries’ fate, nipping the uprising in the bud. In the final pages of the novel Stanhope, although at first upset at not having been let in to the secret of the swapped identities, proposes to Colin, who happily accepts.

One of the more enjoyable aspects of the novel are the landscape descriptions. This is a theme Katharine Woolley revisited again and again in her articles, and she was clearly fascinated by a geography so different to her native Midlands (Fig. 4). Long sections of descriptions of sunrises and sunsets focus on the colours of the sky and clouds, desert plants and animals, the quality and variety of the soil or journeys through the southern marshes and are a joy to read as they really evoke her strong bond with the country where she spent a good part of her life.

*Fig. 4: Excavations at Ur showing sections of a wall, with the light railway and desert landscape in the background*

No archival material has survived in the publisher’s archive and the few reviews I have found in newspapers and magazines indicate a rather moderate success. A letter encountered by chance in her husband’s file at Oxford University Press reveals a little of how she felt about it. Writing to Robert William Chapman, Secretary to the Delegates of OUP, to thank him for a review he had forwarded her, she thought that “it has been a complete failure and I think I deserve it, for I am thoroughly ashamed of it & am never going to write anything again because I have been [damned?] to do it!” Chapman, in a letter to a colleague, didn’t agree with this assessment, but Katharine made good on her promise as the only topics she published on (at least under her own name) after that were archaeological in focus.

Katharine wrote her letter on the eve of their departure from Ur in March 1930 at the end of the excavation season, packing up late into the night to close down the excavation, the annual task of the migratory archaeologist. Neither Katharine nor Leonard Woolley ever held a salaried university or museum position, and every year from 1922 to 1934 the Woolleys had to renegotiate their contracts with the project’s funders (the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology—now the Penn Museum). This was quite a precarious existence, especially after funding dried up during the Great Depression. Yet perhaps they preferred the freedom this arrangement gave them; to travel, to live where they chose, or to visit friends across Europe and the eastern Mediterranean on their way to and from excavations in Iraq, Syria and Türkiye without being bound to term times and annual leave entitlements.

As a Fellow at the IHR from 2024–2025 I walk a similar tightrope between precarity and independence. The freedom to work in the Common Room or the library according to my own schedule, to be surrounded by books and magazines, and the intellectual stimulation and connections I experience at the IHR seminars are privileges I frequently reflect on. Yet this freedom comes at the prize of writing countless job applications and balancing freelance and non-academic jobs that eat into the time I would like to dedicate to research and professional development as I, too, am ‘between contracts’. Has nothing changed in academia in a hundred years?

Reading back across time nearly a hundred years later, Katharine’s words touch a chord in me. As academics, our lives are governed by perceived ‘failures’: requests for revisions to articles, grant application rejections, negative (student) assessments of our teaching, or the lack of citations of our work. Yet we must remind ourselves that publishing anything—novels, articles or blog posts—under the current climate of redundancies and arbitrary measurements of ‘research excellence’ is an accomplishment and a testimony to our resilience.

Image credit: All images © The Trustees of the British Museum. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

Photos on the excavation were usually taken by Yahia, son of Sheikh Mohamed bin Sheikh Ibrahim el-Awassi.

Precarity and Independence

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