Bloody Old Britain: O.G.S. Crawford and the Archaeology of Modern Life [Paperback]

Osbert Guy Stanhope Crawford, a British archaeologist, was the original Grumpy Old Man of the 1930s. His manuscript, Bloody Old Britain, was not just an attempt to apply archaeological methods to the study of contemporary society - it was also, says Hauser, a "long howl of indignant frustration" at capitalism and its inefficiencies, irrationalities, snobbery and class distinction, where everything is badly made and nothing works. Unpublished because it was too bitter and unpatriotic as war loomed, Bloody Old Britain combined comedy with polemic, Basil Fawlty with Karl Marx.

Crawford huffed against grim hotels, adulterated food and poorly designed teapots, and he puffed against money-driven town planning, the destruction of archaeological sites, a car-based society ruining the countryside, the commercialisation of sport and the plague of advertisements.

Capitalist production, he said, was little more than an attempt to cheat the consumer of value, from coal tongs, fire pokers, soup spoons and drinking glasses which placed appearance over functionality, to cinema seats which sacrificed leg room to pack in the punters. Shoddiness was profitable, planned obsolescence a fast-track to riches.

Whilst many of Crawford's conservative middle class readers (as editor of the journal, Antiquity, he had a few) would have nodded in agreement at many of his complaints about the degeneration of standards of workmanship and service, the difference was that, for Crawford, the solution was socialism.

Crawford was born in British-ruled India in 1886, and looked set to follow his father on the path to colonial service - through Marlborough College (whose savage bullying and forced games made his time as a prisoner in a German POW camp in the first World War seem preferable), to Oxford, the army and then the Civil Service.

The first World War, however, taught Crawford two things. First, that reason and intelligence should replace religion, nationalism and war, and that science should be the foundation of a new `universal brotherhood'. Second, that the higher the vantage point (he conducted wartime aerial photography as a Royal Flying Corps observer) the better the view of general patterns. He applied this perspective scientifically and professionally as a pioneer of aerial archaeology, and politically as a Marxist analysing broad historical processes and social forces.

Like many other progressive intelligentsia, before the reality of Stalin's betrayal of the Russian revolution had sunk widely in, a trip to Russia (in 1932) reinforced his socialist commitment. Pre-disposed to view the Soviet Union positively, Crawford did not observe the human costs of Stalin's rapid industrialisation and forced collectivisation, the Terror and repression.

This sanitised view of Soviet Russia further soured Crawford on a Britain where religion, private property, slums and advertising increasingly seemed to be the artefacts, rituals and remains of a dying society which he set about photographing to produce a modern archaeological record which would document human evolution from Stone Axe to Five Year Plan. For Crawford, capitalist culture would now be subject to the museological scrutiny usually reserved for other cultures which were safely distant in time and space.

His dreams were hit, however, by a Luftwaffe bombing raid on the Ordnance Survey offices in Southampton where he worked, destroying much of the historic resources for his politically-inspired archaeological vision. Crawford retired soon after the war, his hopes in the Soviet Union abandoned but still well-known as a socialist until his death in 1957.

Hauser's book shows us another fascinating character - a scientist, a socialist, a Grumpy Old Man - plucked from obscurity but it also comes with the fashionable debunking of socialist ideals. Crawford's problem, in Hauser's post-modernist view, is that he was a man of faith - a socialist faith that the past is knowable, that history has a pattern and that the future is shapeable and therefore bright, a vision "both heroic and foolish", says Hauser, for whom Crawford's "big picture" socialist idealism is "alien to us", the preserve of eccentrics.

Despite Hauser's political scepticism, however, we only have to replace Old with New in Crawford's Bloody Old Britain to have a book that is still relevant to a world where production is in the cause of profit, where commercialism runs roughshod over nature, and where war and race lord it over universal botherhood.

Teacher and writer Kitty Hauser has written a fascinating biography of the British archaeologist O. G. S. Crawford (1886-1957). Crawford was one of the pioneers of field archaeology, cycling all over the country to dig into the mounds and ditches of rural England.

During the First World War, he flew missions over the Western front photographing German trenches and gun placements, learning the new skills of reading the earth from above. This led to his later, original work in aerial photography, whose invention was for archaeology what the invention of the telescope was for astronomy.

Crawford's sensitivity made him a good observer and also a good photographer. He took thousands of photographs of everyday things, adverts, horse-drawn carts, graffiti, churches and other buildings, as well as of archaeological sites and finds.

At the Ordnance Survey, he collected archaeological data county by county. He had "a faith in evidence, a faith in consequences, a faith that history had a pattern, and a faith in our ability as camera-wielding human observers to make that pattern out." He played a big role in turning archaeology into a profession.

He became a friend of the Soviet Union, and believed in a future socialist Britain. Like the scientist J. D. Bernal though, he thought that the advance of science, not class struggle, would end capitalism. Lacking any knowledge of Britain's trade unions, and with no concept of workers' nationalism, he took a negative attitude to Britain, hence the title of his unpublished manuscript of the late 1930s, from which Ms Hauser took her title.

Unfortunately, Ms Hauser shows little sense of why so many people respected the Soviet Union. The book would also have benefited if she had a better grasp of archaeology, and if she had included a proper bibliography of Crawford's writings. So this is a good introduction to this intense, awkward and original man, but not a definitive biography.