Michael Hamilton Burgoyne 1944–2021

Michael Hamilton Burgoyne, who died on 21 September 2021, is probably best known to members of the CBRL and its predecessor institution, the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem (BSAJ), as the leading architect and director, between 1975 and 1986, of the School’s survey of medieval Islamic buildings in the Old City of Jerusalem and, together with Donald S. Richards, author of the resulting monograph, Mamluk Jerusalem (1987). Michael was born in Irvine, Ayrshire, on 11 July 1944, shortly after his twin brother, John. The boys’ father, John Burgoyne, known as Jack, was a doctor, and their mother Lesley had trained as a teacher. The family lived in Prestwick and the boys attended Prestwick Primary and briefly Prestwick High School before moving to Edinburgh, where Jack had obtained a position as consultant anaesthetist. In Edinburgh the twins went to George Watson’s College and both studied architecture at the Edinburgh College of Art, from which Michael emerged in 1969 with an honours degree in architecture (BArch), awarded by the college’s then academic partner, Heriot-Watt University.

At the time of Michael’s graduation, the BSAJ, located in East Jerusalem, was still adapting to the changed political circumstances following the 1967 war and Israel’s de facto annexation of the Old City. Unable to continue its excavation programme west of the Jordan, including projects in Jerusalem and Samaria-Sebaste, and aware of the threats, both actual and potential, posed to historic buildings in Jerusalem by the occupation, the School’s Council decided to initiate a project already being considered by its then chair, Dr Kathleen Kenyon, to undertake an architectural survey of the standing medieval fabric of the Old City. With the active encouragement of the Supreme Muslim Council and the Department of Islamic Waqfs, between July 1968 and May 1969, with a break for the Christmas period, an eight-month pilot survey was carried out by Archibald G. Walls, a recent graduate of the Edinburgh College of Art, together with the photographer Charles Edwards. Amongst other things this resulted in the surveying of Turbat Barakat Khān (containing the Khalidiyya Library) and Turbat al-Jalqiliyya in Ṭarīq Bāb al-Silsila (Street of the Chain). Asked in 1969 to nominate someone who could continue the survey during his planned absence to study for an MSc in urban conservation, Walls suggested Michael, who had only just graduated and, like Walls himself, had spent his final year specializing in historic buildings.

Michael arrived in Jerusalem in early September 1969, but owing to a heightening of local tension in Ṭarīq Bāb al-Silsila following a bomb incident, the military occupation of the Madrasat al-Tanqisiyya and an arson attack on the Aqṣa Mosque, the focus of the survey was shifted several streets to the north. There Michael, assisted for a short while by Walls, recorded the portals and external features in ʿAqabat al-Takiyya (Khāṣṣakī Sulṭān) and Ṭarīq Bāb al-Nāẓir (ʿAla al-Dīn), later continuing the work in Ṭarīq Bāb al-Hadīd until the end of the year (see Levant 3 (1971)). The following year, Michael finished surveying the façades in Ṭarīq Bāb al-Hadīd between August and October (see Levant 5 (1973)) and between November 1970 and May 1971 Walls returned to work in Ṭarīq Bāb al-Silsila. Thereafter Walls continued working on his own until the summer of 1972, when Michael, who by this time had begun doctoral research in Oxford on Jerusalem’s Mamluk architecture, was able to return with a travel grant from the School to continue his earlier work on the Ribāṭ Kurt/Madrasat al-Jawhariyya complex in Ṭarīq Bāb al-Ḥadīd. The need for this had now become more urgent, following the collapse of part of the Ribāṭ Kurt in December 1971 as a result of undermining by the Israel Ministry of Religious Affairs and the announcement of proposals, later abandoned, to clear the area in order to expose another section of the western wall of the Temple. Michael returned in November 1973 to complete his work on these two buildings (see Levant 6 (1974)).

Michael continued his studies in Oxford over the next two years, under the supervision of Dr Michael Rogers, visiting the Middle East when necessary. In 1974 he married his long-standing friend, Lynda Crombie, who had briefly acted as School secretary when the post was vacant in 1972. In April 1975, he took over from Walls as leading architect on the project and returned with Lynda to Jerusalem. Over the next few years, with additional funding for the project, the pace of survey work increased, with one or more students from the Mackintosh School of Architecture in Glasgow, the Department of Architecture in Cambridge University and other architectural schools assisting for two or more months each summer. Dr Christel Kessler, who had recently retired from the American University in Cairo, also took a leading role as part-time advisor and Michael’s doctoral supervisor. The survey teams were, as before, accompanied by Mr ʿAbd al-Jawād al-ʿAbbāsī (Abū Muḥammad), whose quiet diplomacy ensured ready access to local people’s homes and places of work and prayer. For his final two years of doctoral work (1977–79), Michael returned with Lynda to Magdalen College, Oxford, while Richard Brotherton continued surveying in Jerusalem.

In 1979, after presenting his DPhil thesis, ‘The Architectural Development of the Haram in Jerusalem under the Bahri Mamluks’, Michael returned to Jerusalem with Lynda towards the end of September to see through the final stages of the project. Under a new director of the School, the Rev. John Wilkinson, fresh impetus was given to completing and publishing the project and a search began for funding to achieve this. Michael spent the autumn semester of 1981–82 as Visiting Aga Khan Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lynda joined him for the latter part of his stay and while the two were visiting friends in Montreal their daughter Katherine was unexpectedly born ahead of time, delaying their return. Around this time, through Wilkinson’s efforts, the School finally negotiated an agreement with the World of Islam Festival Trust in London for sufficient funding to complete the project, with targets being set for finishing the manuscript and illustrations by June 1984 and publishing the resulting volume the following year. The number of surveyors was increased and for the whole of 1983 the distinguished Arabist Donald S. Richards stayed at the School, together with his wife Pamela, while undertaking research in local libraries and archives, including the Shariʿ Court, on the medieval Islamic institutions that had built and used the buildings documented in the survey. In July 1984, with the active fieldwork complete, Michael, Lynda and Katherine returned to Scotland, where, after a brief spell at the University of Tübingen, working with Klaus Bieberstein on a historical map of Jerusalem in the Crusader to late Ottoman periods, Michael settled down to complete the text of Mamluk Jerusalem in the relatively tranquil Highland setting of Spean Bridge, near Fort William, while others worked elsewhere preparing the publication drawings. After a final few weeks spent in London at the home of Brian Johnson, the chair of the BSAJ’s Architecture Committee and overseer of the final production process, Mamluk Jerusalem was eventually submitted and emerged in print in 1987.

With the conclusion of the Mamluk Buildings project, which had occupied him for some 16 years, Michael set up, in 1986, an architectural consultancy in Edinburgh, Hamilton Burgoyne Architectural Services, producing that year a report on the historic buildings of Nāblus for British Council. The same year he was also appointed to a two-year lectureship in Islamic Architecture at the Mackintosh School of Architecture in Glasgow. In 1989, however, he joined Historic Scotland in Edinburgh as a Senior Architect, a position which he held for the next quarter-century. There his work involved visiting and advising on the conservation of historic buildings and ancient monuments throughout the whole of Scotland. On his retirement on 31 March 2014, just before his 70th birthday, in recognition of his long service, his colleagues in the Inspectorate of Ancient Monuments presented him with a framed document scheduling him as an ancient monument, which he kept proudly displayed in the bathroom at Morningside Terrace.

Despite holding a full-time civil service position, Michael maintained his connection with the Palestinian architectural heritage and with the BSAJ and its successor body, the CBRL, delivering a course in architectural conservation for the British Council and the Riwāq Centre for Vernacular Architecture in Ramallah in 1992–93 and undertaking surveys of a number of buildings, including the wall of the Ḥaram al-Sharīf for the Ottoman Jerusalem project in 1993–94, the White Mosque in Ramla for the Ramla Project in 1998 and, with Mahmoud Hawari, the late 18th-century Bayt al-Hawwarī in Sabastiyya for the Medieval and Ottoman Buildings Survey in 2000. From 2006 onwards he also surveyed, with Professor Bentley Layton and the photographer Joe Rock, the 5th-century church in the White Monastery (Dayr al-Anbā Shinūdah) near Sohag in Egypt, a study yet to be published as part of Yale University’s Monastic Archaeology Project.

Michael was a person of many talents. Although trained as an architect and with professional accreditation to the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA, 1976) and the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland (ARIAS, 1978), he also embraced the intellectual challenge posed by the medieval monuments that he encountered in Jerusalem, acquiring the necessary academic skills required to understand them more fully, including a knowledge of Arabic and epigraphy. He was also a fine draughtsman, although to appreciate this it is necessary to look at the illustrations in his early articles in Levant, rather than Mamluk Jerusalem itself, where the work of individual surveyors is not identified and the drawings have been adapted to conform to a standardized presentational format. In addition to his lifelong support for Ayr United Football Club, he was also well known for his passion for motor cars, again dating from his youth, when he participated in rallies at the wheel of a Mini Morris, with his brother John acting as navigator. Tidying up after his departures from the BSAJ usually entailed disposing of numerous discarded motor car parts, while former colleagues in Historic Scotland relive the experience of being driven to site meetings by him with emotions ranging from sheer terror to gratitude at having arrived safely and in good time.

Michael’s wife Lynda died in 2013 and his brother John a month before he did. He is survived by his daughter Katherine, a St Andrews graduate in Art History now working in Canada.