When Brian Hope-Taylor died on 12 January 2001, Diana Murray – one of his former students and, at the time, Deputy Curator at the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland, a predecessor of Historic Environment Scotland (HES) – mounted an operation to salvage the archives stored at his home in Cambridge. Diana was later to report that, by the time she arrived at the property, a house-clearance firm had already disturbed the contents, which were destined to be consigned to a waiting skip. Worse, more than half of the recovered material had been stored in a very damp garage where it had suffered from water damage and mould.
Even so, Diana was able to rescue more than 156 boxes of artefacts and organic samples, as well as 31,027 drawings, photographs, notebooks, and letters. Half of this material relates to Hope-Taylor’s personal life, and half is concerned with the 25 excavations that he led, including his celebrated work at Yeavering, as well as at Lindisfarne, Doon Hill (Dunbar), Bamburgh Castle, York Minster, the Devil’s Dyke in Cambridgeshire, and the early medieval palace site at Old Windsor in Berkshire.
English Heritage showed little interest in acquiring the archive (even though its predecessor, the Ministry of Public Buildings and Works, had commissioned some of the excavations) so Diana, by now Secretary of the Royal Commission, took it to Edinburgh, where the paper archives and photographs were stabilised, conserved, and catalogued. They now form part of the Brian Hope-Taylor Archive, curated by HES, and can be consulted via the online catalogue: trove.scot.
Living among ruins