The Congress of Roman Frontier Studies

In August 1939, Eric Birley was in Berlin participating in the 6th International Congress of Archaeology. This was a particularly interesting conference because, for the first time, the programme had been extended to include Roman provincial archaeology. Hitherto, only Classical archaeology – that is, the study of ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome – had been embraced. This was a significant step forward. It was not surprising, therefore, that Birley, together with his German colleague Kurt Stade, were planning to go even further and hold a Congress of Roman Frontier Studies. These discussions were prematurely halted by the receipt of a coded telegram purporting to come from Birley’s wife, but actually from the War Office, summoning him home to join Military Intelligence, to which he had previously been recruited owing to his fluent German and knowledge of the Roman army. Within days, he was in uniform and was to stay in uniform for the next six years.

The proposal in Berlin had been to hold the first Congress of Roman Frontier Studies in Britain as an adjunct to the decennial Pilgrimage of Hadrian’s Wall in 1940. War prevented both meetings being held. After the War, Birley returned to his earlier plan. He rearranged the 1940 Pilgrimage as the Centenary Pilgrimage in 1949, held exactly 100 years after the first in 1849, and attached to it the first meeting in Newcastle of the Congress.

One purpose of the meeting was to renew links between British and Continental scholars and rebuild international harmony. A sign of the times was Kurt Stade’s inability to attend this first Congress as he remained a prisoner of war in Russia. One participant was the 19-year-old Norman McCord. He still remembers the occasion. ‘I was not long out of school, still living at home in a North Shields house much damaged by bombing and with affectionate memories of close neighbours and friends as Blitz victims. I was – with many others – astonished to see Germans and Italians welcomed at that first Congress in the way they were. I feel pretty sure that the first Congress was a useful lesson to me in more than one respect!’ Birley had achieved his aim. It was not until the 1957 Congress, however, that all German POWs had returned home and were able to attend.