MEN

There is a type of person one reads about in the sociography of the interwar years, or sees depicted in the films of the period, who represents in an unobvious but profound way the national tragedy of that era. It is the former minor public schoolboy whose social position peaked shortly before he left the cloisters of academe and whose learning and talents were never subsequently put to the use that he believed, possibly quite rightly, they should have been. Life was destined to be a series of tribulations where he was bossed around by idiots and had to confront, with horrid frequency, the stupidity of his intellectual inferiors. It was enough to drive one mad.

That is not to say that O G S Crawford, the subject of Kitty Hauser's fascinating and inspired book, was mad: well, not completely. Crawford was not merely one of the pioneers of field archaeology - a discipline vital to the process of understanding history, but long viewed with contempt by academic institutions - but was also one of the inventors of aerial archaeology. To explain the need for this discipline he took a photograph - reproduced in this book - of the pattern of a carpet as a cat would see it, and contrasted it with the pattern from a human point of view. That, he explained, is the difference between literally standing in a field and trying to see any clue to what the ground beneath your feet may hold, and flying over that same field and suddenly seeing the traces of earlier settlements clearly.

He was born in 1886 and orphaned quite young: his father had been a judge in India. He was put in the care of maiden aunts near Newbury, in a prehistoric landscape not merely at that stage largely untouched but also largely unrecognised. Crawford set about exploring it, whether as a boy at home, or at nearby Marlborough College (which he detested). It was only after he left Oxford that he became seriously engaged in archaeological work. Geography in those days was seen as a radical discipline, with a strong element of sociology. Inevitably this caused Crawford to make the acquaintance of free-thinking people from the political left, far outside the milieu in which he had been brought up. All went swimmingly for a time, and the spring of 1914 found him in the Sudan on a dig funded by Henry Wellcome. He returned home in June that year planning to return after the summer heat had abated, but ended up enlisting in the army at the outbreak of war. Not the best of soldiers - he started one day, by accident, to shoot at his own side - he was invalided home early in 1915 with a combination of flu, frostbite and malaria picked up from the Sudan. He applied for a commission and was transferred to a division making maps of the Western Front. From there it was a short step to the Royal Flying Corps, in which he flew as an observer making his maps with ever more attention to detail. Indeed, the detail was so good that one of his superiors thought he must have invented much of it. There were various close shaves and scrapes, and eventually his luck ran out: landing by mistake behind enemy lines, Crawford spent the last seven months of the war in a prison camp. He later reflected it had been one of the happier times of his life.

Demobbed, and wishing to pursue archaeology as a career, Crawford started to contribute information to the Ordnance Survey and was soon (and it seems somewhat grudgingly) offered a post at their headquarters in Southampton. There then began a tale of minor officialdom and petty bureaucrats unable to gauge what a genius they had in their midst. It was some time before Crawford was given a proper salary. It was not until he had worked there for eighteen years - in 1938 - that he was allowed to have an assistant. Initially, the room he was allocated did not even have a chair for him to sit on. Yet the work suited him perfectly. It was not just that he could spend time in the field putting details that had hitherto been ignored on maps. He was by temperament a loner and an eccentric, and weeks on end spent on his bike in isolated parts of England were exactly what his soul required.

That he enormously enhanced the intellectual rigour of mapping, and increased our historical knowledge of barrows, lynchets and other ancient features immeasurably, is without question. Yet this was not the half of it. He founded a widely respected journal called Antiquity and, with it, a community of contributors and correspondents who pooled and grew their knowledge of the past. Such people also helped supply information for the maps. And he contributed greatly to the commercial success of the Ordnance Survey: something for which he appears to have received no gratitude, not even of a grudging kind, from his masters. This first era of popular motoring made hitherto hidden England accessible. A stream of topographical books appeared in the interwar years to cash in on this trend. Yet the country written about by the likes of H V Morton and Harold Massingham, and detailed in the lavishly illustrated Batsford series, could only be properly explored with the maps enhanced and improved by Crawford.

However, Crawford's employers were more concerned about his work with Antiquity, failing to see the distinction it brought upon the Ordnance Survey, and about what they considered to be his long absences from the office: how he was supposed to make maps simply by sitting at his desk in Southampton was not clear. When he started to take light aircraft to improve his understanding of the landscape they complained about his extravagance. Thus was the hatred of authority properly established in Crawford's mind.

During the Great War he had corresponded with H G Wells, and by about 1930 had become a committed socialist. Living alone with his cats in a village near Southampton, he started to think about the need for revolutionary change. He was one of the many useful idiots who went to Russia in the early 1930s to be shown - highly selectively - the wonders of collectivisation and the Soviet system. He was completely taken in, for a time. As Hauser points out, it was lucky for Crawford that Victor Gollancz declined the honour of publishing his monograph on the glories of Stalinism, written on his return. When Crawford came to write his autobiography twenty years later, after the purges and the terror, he devoted but a sentence to his trip to Russia, on the grounds, perhaps, of least said, soonest mended.

Yet on his return to England he took up once more a hobby that had been important to him until the war: photography. Hauser says, with some justice, that he had been a good photographer, not least because he had the geographer's trait of knowing how to see properly. Having decided that Britain was about to be swept by a Soviet-style revolution, he determined to photograph the everyday scenes around it (and elsewhere in Europe when he travelled there) for posterity. A cache of 10,000 photographs was found recently in Oxford and, together with the manuscript of another of his unpublished books, Bloody Old Britain, it has formed the raison d'être for Hauser's book. Bloody Old Britain was written in the winter of 1938-9, mainly in boarding houses as Crawford loped around Britain. It is a part grumpy-old-man, part Swiftian attack on the ghastly state of almost everything in the country at the time, from the food to the cutlery via the greediness of the servant class and the proliferation of advertising hoardings. That Crawford was naive is clear from his impressions of Russia; that he actually had no coherent political philosophy is apparent from his attacks on almost everything he comes into contact with. He offered the book for publication after the outbreak of war, and it was declined on the grounds, as one publisher put it, that it would be 'kicking a man when he was down'. While much of it appears to be rant, some of what Hauser quotes suggests a sharp understanding of a society in decline: hardly good for morale in 1940.

The ultimate act of stupidity by Crawford's masters was their refusal to ship the Ordnance Survey's records, books and maps to a safer location before the Blitz - as a port, Southampton was a prime target for the Luftwaffe. Crawford eventually took the matter into his own hands, and had much that was vital shipped out surreptitiously to his village home. Two final vanloads of his most personal papers were waiting to be driven out one evening when the drivers were called to a 'dental parade'. The vans and their contents were obliterated that night in the bombing, a blow from which Crawford seems never properly to have recovered.

He found happier work towards the end of the war when he was seconded to an outfit photographing buildings for a national register; but he retired in dismay from the Ordnance Survey as soon as he could, in 1946, so disillusioned that he would not even brief his successor. He died in 1957, alone with his cats, querulous and bitter. In some obvious respects his life and achievements were important. In less obvious ways, though, he symbolises the defeat of a generation and a class that survived the Great War. Kitty Hauser has performed the best possible service not just to O G S Crawford's memory, but to the memory of thousands like him, in writing this absorbing and highly original book.