A Giant!

By Welbourn Tekh

Born in the West Country in 1901, Thomas Charles Lethbridge came from a family that had spawned soldiers, explorers, Members of Parliament and churchmen, many of whom were renowned for their eccentricity. It was in fact, Hanning Speke, Lethbridge’s great uncle, who had first discovered the source of the Nile. At the end of the First World War, he was seventeen and believed, like many, that the ‘Great War’ was the war that would end all conflict and decided to go to university rather than join the army. His family had been traditionally educated at Oxford, but Lethbridge had no understanding of Greek and therefore chose instead to go to Cambridge. Here he became bored and spent his time reading books on archaeology and making drawings of ancient brooches at the local museum. It was here that he met the curator Louis Clarke, who, after Lethbridge had completed his degree, invited him to work as a voluntary digger on archaeological sites.

Lethbridge accepted Clarke’s offer, but he also had a private income and this enabled him to be a ‘free-spirit’ in terms of his vocation. However, this new responsibility would eventually lead to him becoming the keeper of Anglo-Saxon Antiquities at the Archaeological Museum in Cambridge. Apart from one brief spell where he and his second wife Mina tried to set up a cattle farm on one of the Western Isles, he remained in Cambridge, until disillusioned, he left in 1957. For the 30 years during his time in Cambridge, he had held the posts of Director of Excavations for the Cambridge Antiquarian Society and Director of the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, but he eventually became bored with what he called “the academic trade-unionism” that existed within his profession. During his time at Cambridge, he wrote a number of well-received books based on his passion and understanding of aspects of British history. However, he is probably better known for the extraordinary series of books that he wrote at his home in Branscombe in Devon, from 1961 up until his death in 1971. Here then is a brief review of the published work of one of the most intuitive but underrated minds of the twentieth century.

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