The Rev. Greville John Chester and ‘The Ashmolean Museum as a Home for Archaeology in Oxford’

Gertrud Seidmann

doi:10.5334/10.5334/bha.1610

Abstract

Greville John Chester (1830–1892), an Oxford alumnus and ordained clergyman, devoted the latter half of his life to travel and exploration in Egypt and the Levant, where he collected archaeological artefacts for the British Museum and other institutions. His devotion to Oxford University led him not only to become a prodigious donor to the Ashmolean Museum, but to intervene actively in the debate on the future of the museum and of the teaching of archaeology within in the University in a period of change.

Highlights

Greville John Chester (1830–1892), an Oxford alumnus and ordained clergyman, devoted the latter half of his life to travel and exploration in Egypt and the Levant, where he collected archaeological artefacts for the British Museum and other institutions
This was not the Museum of Art and Archaeology in Beaumont Street that we know today, but the Old Ashmolean in Broad Street – the Museum of the History of Science – founded by Elias Ashmole as the repository of the Tradescant Cabinet of Rarities in 1683: it was the first museum open to the public. It acquired by miscellaneous donations a heterogenous collection of artefacts, including some Roman antiquities, fossils, and minerals and natural history specimens including a large collection of shells and the disintegrating dodo, ethnographic specimens from Captain Cook’s second voyage to the South Seas, and the Anglo-Saxon Alfred Jewel, given in 1718 (MacGregor 2001)
The German traveller Uffenbach, visiting in 1710, was appalled by its filth and that ‘even the women are allowed up here for sixpence’. It was not until the curatorships of the brothers Duncan in the first half of the 19th century that the Museum acquired a firm direction. It was still dominated by Natural History specimens, as the frontispiece of its first printed catalogue of 1836 clearly shows, but the subsequent donation of a large collection of Anglo-Saxon antiquities from excavations in Kent strengthened the archaeological side to the extent that there were proposals to establish the Ashmolean Museum as one of national, i.e. British, antiquities (Ovenell 1986)