Two pleasing coincidences this weekend. Firstly, Catherine and I were unable to spell Chattanooga and hence made solving the Observer crossword significantly harder than it deserved to be - then that evening perchance I was taken on a stroll with Jonathan Raban through the pages of said town.
The other concerns Augustus Pit Rivers. No sooner had I finished reading all about him in Bill Bryson did I find John suggesting we go to the museum full of all the bric-a-brac he'd "liberated" in that warm, cuddly, imperial way of the beloved Victorians.
Bill paints a cracking picture of Pitt Rivers: "Notoriously mean-spirited" - his wife once threw a party for the villagers from her large estate and was broken-hearted when not a single soul turned up. What she didn't know was that hubby had sent a servant to lock the gates. Add in a bit of loinfruit banishment and flagellation, and the large scale eviction of elderly tenants and you have one of the fathers of archaeology in all his glory.
On the plus side he seems to have invented typology and his labels are still attached to all the items of his in the museum which is rather fun. He also was the first to arrange protection of ancient monuments, without which we wouldn't have wasted half of our younger years wandering around stately homes bored out of our fucking brains.
("In the early 1870s the London and South Western Railway announced plans to run a line right through the heart of the Stonehenge site. When people complained a railway official countered that Stonehenge was 'entirely out of repair and not the slightest use to anyone now'." - see how compulsive it is reading Bryson ?).
Anyway, we didn't have nearly enough time to do the place justice, especially as his original 20,000 pieces have swelled to half a million, but it was an enjoyable swish through time and place.
However, it wasn't a patch on the greatest Victorian museum, the much-missed Potter museum of stuffed animals at Arundel...
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