Obituary: Kenneth J. Barton 1924–2018

Ken at home (reproduced by courtesy of Marilyn Barton)

Ken Barton died peacefully on 28th August 2018. He had had a distinguished career in museums and a lifelong passion for medieval and post-medieval pottery. Having been a founder member of the Society for Medieval Archaeology in 1957, he with John Hurst, and with the encouragement of Alan Warhurst, was instrumental in founding the Post-Medieval Ceramic Research Group in 1963, and was active in the process of its transformation into the Society for Post-medieval Archaeology.¹ He served as our President from 1976 to 1978 and one of our two Vice-presidents from 1979 to 1981. Perhaps his greatest achievement whilst an officer of the society was organising our first joint conference with the Society for Historical Archaeology in Bristol in 1980.

He was born in Liverpool on 7th August 1924. It was not until 1949, after leaving school at the age of 14 and taking a variety of jobs including active war service with the Irish Guards, when he realised that his life-long passion would be archaeology. He remembers the precise moment, 2.30pm on Thursday 7th September, when he volunteered to work on an archaeological site at Goss Street, Chester, under the direction of Graham Webster who was to guide his career for the next ten years. Under Webster’s tutelage, Kenneth progressed from learning his trade as a digger to constructing model Roman buildings for a new gallery at the Grosvenor Museum and to the conservation of the small finds from the excavations. From then on he also strove to obtain the educational qualifications he would need to further his ambition.

Ken’s experience of running his own fieldwork started in 1954 with a special committee of the Flintshire Historical Society to investigate the recently closed Buckley potteries,² then in London with the Thurrock Historical Society and in 1960 while at Bristol with the Axbridge Caving Group and Archaeological Society at Star Roman Villa³ followed by other local sites in collaboration with Philip Rahtz. It was excavating in Bristol that was to deepen his interest in medieval and later pottery. If it was Webster who provided the inspiration to take up archaeology and conservation and kindled his interest in pottery, it was Gerald Dunning, Uncle Gerald as Kenneth affectionately remembered him, who encouraged his passion for ceramics. In the 1950s medieval and later pottery was as often as not discarded and disregarded. Gerald Dunning and Professor EM Jope showed how important it was as archaeological evidence. Kenneth began by publishing a group of medieval jugs from the Castle Well at Bristol in 1959 ⁴. The excavations at St Nicholas’s Almshouses (1960)⁵ provided a mid-17th-century benchmark for ceramics then current in the city and demonstrated how important the pottery would be understanding the archaeology of Bristol and the city’s region.⁶ He went on to publish the evidence for the post-medieval manufacture of 18th-century yellow slipwares and salt-glazed stonewares within the city and of the distinctive hand-built medieval pottery at Ham Green on the south bank of the Avon downstream of Bristol.⁷ The find of a fine Saintonge ware jug from south-west France at Back Hall triggered further adventure.⁸ Ken relates, ‘At Gerald’s instigation I took my Vespa and went to Saintes – such revelations! Chester may have been my road to Damascus but Saintes was my Mecca’.⁹ Thereafter followed a stream of publications mostly resulting from fieldwork carried out locally to wherever he was working at the time but also including further visits to France to define the sources of many types of pottery imported into England and including reports on excavated pottery in Canada. In all he published over 60 papers¹⁰ and three books: the first one of the most readable guides to Pottery in England; the second, Medieval Sussex Pottery, the result of 12 years research and analysis for some of which he also received his MPhil at the University of Southampton in 1972; the third, The Archaeology of Castle Cornet, St Peter Port, Guernsey, the culmination of an association with the Channel Isles of Jersey and Guernsey that started in 1971.¹¹ The latter is also a reminder of his substantial contribution through excavation to our knowledge of military fortifications of the past 500 years. He was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1967.

This is a remarkable record but the more so in that Ken’s chosen career was in conservation and museums. On the basis of the excellent impression given by his diligence and eagerness to learn working for Webster in Chester, he was accepted as a Technician at the archaeological conservation laboratory of the Ministry of Works at Lambeth Bridge House under Leo Biek. From there in 1956 he progressed to Assistant Curator (Technical) at Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery to set up and run the archaeological conservation laboratory. In 1961 he moved to be Assistant Curator at Worthing Museum and Art Gallery. His exceptional managerial and organisational abilities came to the fore when in 1963 he was appointed Keeper and later Director to supervise the establishment of a new museum based on the Tickenhill collection at the former bishop’s palace at Hartlebury Castle. This opened in May 1966 and subsequently was developed as the hub of the Worcestershire County Museums Service. He took the concept of providing a comprehensive museums service to the community further when he moved to be Director at Portsmouth City Museums in 1967, then briefly at Tyne and Wear in 1975 and lastly at Hampshire in 1976. Here he developed, through partnerships between the County Council and district councils, a network of eleven museums across the county and a schools education service supported from a new headquarters at Chilcomb House just outside Winchester. At both Portsmouth and Hampshire he was responsible for instigating further excavation and field work carried out by his staff for example at Basing House. He retired from the museum profession in July 1988 and moved his family to Cretteville in Normandy to be nearer his work in the Channel Islands.

Ken took an active part in the affairs of the Museums Association, being elected a Vice-President in 1982–4. He chaired the Technical Training Sub-committee which led to the initiation of the Technical Certificate and ultimately access to the award of the Diploma itself. It is not surprising that at a point in 1977 when the Association was unable to cope with the growing pressures on museums from changes in the way that archaeology was done in Britain, he helped give voice to the concerns of archaeologists working in museums by being a founder and first chair of what is now the Society for Museum Archaeology.¹² This was at a time when much of the archaeological fieldwork in Britain was coordinated and run on behalf of their local communities by museums.

Ken was a great collector of the ordinary day-to-day pots that with general changes in lifestyle in Europe are still fast disappearing. He deliberately intended the collection as a memorial ‘to show the end of products of a centuries-old tradition, to marvel at its persistence and tenacity, to admire the abilities, skills and intelligence of their makers’.¹³ The collection was first exhibited at Guernsey Museum and Art Gallery in 1982 and later at Somerset County Museum when in 1996 he generously gave it to the museum as a reference collection for our benefit and enjoyment.

Graham Webster remarked, ‘Such a career is quite astonishing when one thinks of the lowly academic base on which it was built. It was all achieved by sheer hard work and an iron determination. Inevitably Kenneth made enemies with his forthright manner, but he won friends as well and as the earliest of these I can but admire such gutsy will-power and capacity for work from first-hand acquaintance at Chester’.¹⁴

Ken is survived by his wife, Marilyn, his children Oliver, Tabitha and Ben, by his children of his earlier marriages and by many colleagues, friends and acquaintances who owe so much to him and his generosity of spirit for inspiration and encouragement.

Notes

1 Barton 1977.

2 Barton 1956.

3 Barton 1964a.

4 Barton 1959.

5 Barton 1964b.

6 Barton 1965.

7 Barton 1961; Barton 1963.

8 Barton 1960, 261, no.8.

9 Barton 2000.

10 For complete bibliography see Dawson 2018 121-124.

11 Barton 1975; Barton 1979; Barton 2003.

12 Concerns reflected in Barton 1974; founded as the Society of Museum Archaeologists.

13 Barton 1982, 2; Dawson 2005.

14 Webster 1991, 6.