“Yours (unusually) cheerfully, Gordon”: Vere Gordon Childe's letters to R.B.K. Stevenson

Abstract

In early 1988 my grandfather, Robert Barron Kerr Stevenson (1913—1992), former Keeper of the National Antiquities of Scotland, was asked about his recollections of his former teacher and colleague Vere Gordon Childe. “There is”, he wrote in reply, “very little that I can say of use to you”. The reason for such a statement seems to be that my grandfather felt that his contacts with Childe had never been concerned with the broad historical and philosophical concepts that scholars were so interested in, believing rather that his own academic perspectives were more from the “worm's eye than the bird's eye view”. Yet what my grandfather knew was a more personal side to Childe that does not come across in his published works.