Peter Drinkwater

 

my obituary of this eccentric genius should really be in the odds-n-ends section; it was written in 2014 for the Bulletin of the Scientific Instrument Society, whose members knew of Drinkwater as an authority on the geometrical construction of sundials and doubtless realised (from his publications) that he was a bit eccentric, but I imagine had little idea just how

 

 

Peter Drinkwater – Learnèd in Esoteric Subjects and with a Long Forked Beard


Peter Drinkwater, who died suddenly on July 25, 2013 aged 65, was someone unashamedly out of tune with his times, studiedly unconventional and unhurried, and very fond of rabbits. He was also a great authority on the geometrical construction of sundials and related instruments. A lifelong resident of the small English town of Shipston-on-Stour, latitude 52° 42′, he was known there as a ‘much-loved eccentric who took a rabbit with him everywhere’ – including to church, his rabbits being devout Catholics,

 

He started as a Methodist, becoming an odd combination of English ‘Liberal Puritan’ and medieval monkish polymath. In spite of his high intelligence he worked in a factory as an unskilled assembly-line worker until he was made redundant, after which he set himself up as a small publisher. He also did gardening for neighbours, played the church organ (and composed music for it), and went for long walks with a shepherd’s crook (and a rabbit).

 

Locals were well aware that he had hidden intellectual depths – if you stopped for a chat it might as easily embrace Proust or Comenius as local history or the weather – but they can hardly have suspected that his name was esteemed in sundial circles throughout the world, and that his book The Art of Sundial Construction was admired less for its quaintness than for its wealth of accurate geometrical and constructional detail. First published in 1985, privately of course by Drinkwater himself, it went through four editions in little more than a decade. He attributed the ‘enormous sales’ to the fact that it was championed by Charles Aked and Chris Daniel, and with a different sort of modesty wrote in a preface to the third edition ‘it is a disgrace that this little book is still called for’. What he meant was not so much that more or better books were needed, but rather that the principles on which the design of sundials is based should be taught in school, as they were in the eighteenth century.

 

Largely self-taught himself (in all his skills – including calligraphy and book design), he thought school geometry (in his day anyway) was ‘either so inconsequential as to be a waste of time; or it is treated as a mere jumping-off point for Mathematical Abstractions which have no practical application’. One practical application of course is instruments – but the value of instruments is how they embody real ‘understanding’ of the astronomical and geometrical concepts. He believed ‘a Child of 8 to 10 should easily be able to cope with’ the basics – perhaps a little generous, but the approach allowed him to attempt to construct ‘a sure Foundation upon which a genuine understanding of the Art [of Dialling] can be developed’. The regard in which his book is held by the sundial and instrument community speaks for itself.

 

After a lifelong fascination with sundials, he plunged into purer historical research around 1980, reading original 16th- and 17th-century dialling books in the Oxford libraries and museums, usually on Saturday mornings as he still worked full-time. The Art of Sundial Construction is not a history book, but one of its unique qualities is that it is infused with authentic period detail and antiquarian sympathy – it is in the true tradition of Foster, Stirrup, and Fale (though he disliked Leybourne!). His other publications include an interesting pamphlet about Kratzer’s dials, and versions of Oronce Fine’s ‘Solar Horology’, while to the fourth edition of The Art he added a fascinating interpretation of Dürer’s Melancholia.

 

Peter Innocentius Drinkwater (1947-2013) described his personal status as ‘a chaste Bachelor’, though he had ‘beloved Female Friends’ and included feminism among his interests, along with theology, astronomy and astrology (his own italics), and mediaeval (he refused to spell it medieval) philosophy and scholarship. In his autobiographical introduction to the Kratzer pamphlet (1993) he wrote: ‘As a child my double ambition was to be learnèd in esoteric subjects and to have a long forked beard: both of these I have achieved and in that I am content’. A small number of his designs and models, including a beautiful wooden astrolabe made in 1982, will be preserved in the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford. His shepherd’s crook was buried with him.


Tony Simcock
Museum of the History of Science
Oxford OX1 3AZ

 

[from Bulletin of the Scientific Instrument Society, 2014]

 

A Dodo in the Ark

 

this unconventional biography of the founding curator of the Museum of the History of Science explores the origins of the Museum – not the tedious business of its immediate foundation but its deeper roots in aspects of R. T. Gunther’s earlier life down to about 1920; it was written to accompany an unpublished history of the Old Ashmolean by Gunther (edited, cobbled together, and annotated by me) which started with Noah's Ark and ended with an account of the founding of the Museum in 1922-25, and they were published together as Robert T. Gunther and the Old Ashmolean in 1985; it was also in some measure a sequel to my tercentenary history of the scientific aspects of the Old Ashmolean, The Ashmolean Museum and Oxford Science 1683-1983 (1984)

coming shortish

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Francis Maddison

 

this is an unpublished obituary which I set about writing partly because I’d written and published biographical accounts of all previous heads of the Museum – Robert T. Gunther, Frank Sherwood Taylor, C. H. Josten (obituary in The Times, 1994) – and partly, more immediately, because it seemed likely I’d be asked to do one; obituaries duly appeared – several, if I remember correctly, written by Anthony Turner – but since obits spawn obits (bandwagon effect) I still expected somebody would end up asking me, even if they were barrel-scraping; the call never came, and it remained unpublished; the advantage is, I didn’t have to rein it in, neither for length nor for diplomacy, so you get the warts-and-all version

 

 

Francis Maddison obituary

 

Francis Romeril Maddison, who died in France on July 12, 2006 aged 78, was a historian and museum curator whose formidable expertise on Islamic astrolabes (the paragon of early scientific instruments) arose not from intense specialisation but from an unusually broad concept of historical and linguistic scholarship that rejoiced in what Renaissance scholars called ‘particulars’, whether they were linguistic, cultural, technical, bibliographic, folkloric, musical, or even to do with the meal he was eating or the car he was driving.

 

Born in Hounslow on July 27, 1927, he was educated at the independent grammar school there and at Exeter College, Oxford, where he changed from French to modern history, but was most actively interested in archaeology. He graduated in 1949. He worked on some archaeological digs, and then as an archivist (1950-53), before becoming assistant curator of the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford, where he remained for the rest of his working career (41 years). In 1964 he became curator of the museum (the post is now called director), and he retired in 1994.

 

He was a fellow of Linacre College, Oxford; of the Society of Antiquaries; of the International Academy of the History of Science; honorary member of the Société Internationale de l’Astrolabe; sometime chairman of the British National Committee for the History of Science; and president of the Society for the History of Medieval Technology and Science.

 

He was twice married: firstly to Audrey Kent, with whom he had a daughter and a son (the marriage was dissolved; she died in 2004); and to Patricia Brown, who survives him, and with whom he had a son.

 

He was the elder son of Dr R. E. W. Maddison (1901-1993), the distinguished historian of science and biographer of Robert Boyle, who was an industrial research chemist by profession, and also a musician, linguist, book collector, and librarian. His mother Adelaide Romeril Verdier was of French extraction, the daughter of Revd Louis Verdier, a Huguenot minister in London. Much of Francis Maddison’s intellectual breadth and cosmopolitanism derived from these sources, and his earliest paper on history of science was co-authored with his father (in 1956). His love of antiquarian scientific books and his relish for languages (his father knew at least six and taught Russian at one time) had the same origin. An effect of this was that he became a historian who was entirely comfortable with science, at a time when interest in history of science was largely confined to those trained as scientists.

 

Even so, his entering the history of science as a profession came about by chance. In 1953, working at Warwick record office, he had the simultaneous opportunity of returning to Oxford to work either for the University Press, which was setting up a museum and archive of printing history, or at the Museum of the History of Science. The curator of the latter, Dr C. H. Josten, earnestly head-hunted him as successor to his able assistant curator Kathleen Higgins.

 

Within a couple of years Maddison the archivist had supplied one of the museum’s most pressing needs by doing the first catalogue of its interesting collection of scientific manuscripts; Maddison the curator/archaeologist had introduced a professional accession-numbering procedure to the museum; and Maddison the scholar/linguist had tackled the most challenging component of the museum’s collection, the astrolabes engraved in Arabic script, learning Arabic for the purpose of studying and re-cataloguing them.

 

He also took over the cataloguing of the private collection of J. A. Billmeir from Josten, who had rather tersely catalogued the original collection. The over-modestly entitled Supplement to the Billmeir catalogue of 1957 was a highly erudite catalogue raisonné which, as has often been remarked, set new standards for the serious description and contextualisation of early scientific instruments. In the wake of Maddison’s Supplement Billmeir presented his collection to Oxford.

 

About this time L. A. Mayer’s Islamic Astrolabists and their Works was published, and Maddison became acquainted with Mayer and began to collaborate with him on a revision and extension of his book. Mayer’s death shortly afterwards (in 1959) was a great blow; and a more ambitiously conceived continuation of his work was a driving passion of Maddison’s ever after, becoming the Répertoire of Islamic astrolabists’ works compiled jointly with his friend Alain Brieux, the Parisian scholar-bookseller.

 

Maddison was seconded for a time to the National Maritime Museum, where he assisted and learned from Commander D. W. Waters, the historian of navigation. Navigation and its instruments were another abiding interest, and one of his most valuable publications is his substantial Coimbra monograph on the development of navigational instruments in the great era of exploration (1969).

 

He also became involved in Josten’s long-term project on the life of Elias Ashmole (the Museum of the History of Science being situated in the historic seventeenth-century Old Ashmolean). In fact Maddison’s degree of involvement in Josten’s work, a piece of grand antiquarian scholarship of the old sort (five volumes, three of which print the source materials for Ashmole’s life in extenso), has not been sufficiently appreciated. The book was so complex that it took six years from its completion in 1960 to its publication, during which time Josten (for personal or family reasons) resigned as curator and returned to Germany, leaving Maddison (the obvious choice as his successor) to nurse the book through the press in Oxford. Much of the vast amount of minute and difficult proof-correcting is in Maddison’s hand.

 

Even before this stage, as a by-product of Josten’s Elias Ashmole, Maddison had researched the entire history of the Ashmolean Museum from original archival sources, compiling a detailed chronological record-card file, and also painstakingly reconstructing a list with biographical details of all staff of the museum since its foundation. At this time there were no general histories of the Ashmolean Museum, and Maddison’s pioneering researches have been drawn upon by Josten, R. F. Ovenell, myself, and several other writers, and are still in use.

 

One of the triumphs of Maddison’s curatorial career was his identification in 1962 of an object shown him by one of the auction houses, as a spherical astrolabe, an instrument known from medieval literature but no extant example of which had been seen in modern times. He then, of course, had to acquire it for the museum, which meant raising outside funding as the museum had virtually no purchasing power of its own at that period. It remains the only complete example known, and Maddison’s paper on it the classic study.

 

In the 1950s and 1960s he was much involved in the international community of history of science. In particular he presided for a time over the world inventory of historic scientific instruments promoted by the International Union for the History and Philosophy of Science. He was always keen to encourage and help colleagues in eastern Europe at a time when they laboured under great disadvantages. He gave much support to the Polish inventory, and distributed it (on microfilm) from Oxford.

 

He was also busy with various teaching and educational activities. A diploma in the history of science with a strong instrument component taught in the museum seems (in retrospect) to have been very successful and influential, its alumni including Anthony Turner and David Bryden; though it was short-lived. He did a stint as examiner for the science and technology option of the Museums Association diploma. He also wrote material for a number of teaching courses and for popular encyclopaedias.

 

In the 1970s he was involved in the detection, and as an expert witness in the prosecution, of a notorious case of forgery of antique scientific instruments. After this experience, and aware that older fakes (made in Victorian times) have long since entered our museum collections and perhaps been misinterpreted, he became increasingly concerned about this problem, and inclined to err on the sceptical side. His controversial refusal to accept the Regiomontanus astrolabe, which came on to the market in 1989, at least encouraged other scholars to study it further and defend its authenticity robustly.

 

His friend and pupil Anthony Turner has characterised Francis Maddison in Thomas Hardy’s line, ‘a man who used to notice such things’, someone perpetually delighting in a myriad of details, not only in his professional work but in ordinary life. His favourite variety of rose, an elegantly designed telephone, the right kind of pen (he wrote in a beautiful calligraphic hand) were extolled and pursued, or lamented if the philistinism of the market-place deprived one of them. He designed his own house near Oxford (at a time when such a thing could be done economically), and it combined modesty with a tasteful, sensible elegance. He loved all things French, from cars to the beret he always wore. To seek his advice, whether about publication or plumbing, guaranteed a sweeping lesson in history and taste, as well as exasperating delays while he sought to find you the perfect typeface or a particular design of tap.

 

His linguistic aptitude and knowledge of historical philology gave him a scholarly edge in studies that were perforce cosmopolitan. But he wore it lightly, and tended to convey more the sheer enjoyment of language and its quirks. He became especially interested in minority languages, such as Catalan and Georgian, and attended classes in Armenian.

 

Maddison was the exponent and embodiment of a style of scholarship that, while quietly admired and envied, sits ill with the modern world’s targets and projects and performance monitoring, and the strangle-hold of dumbing down. The activities of his museum only a decade after his retirement are almost unrecognisable. It changed rapidly, as for quite a while before he retired Maddison was holding back the floodgates of change, for which some admired him and some did not. Privately, on his retirement, he said ‘Après moi le déluge’ and meant it. Publicly, welcoming his successor (Dr Jim Bennett) in his retirement speech, he translated this with his usual charm, self-effacement, and realism into what was taken as an endorsement of the need for change. And perhaps it was.

 

But a museum curator in a time of rapidly changing priorities is a difficult beast to commend to posterity. For the core achievements of his career may already have been swept away, his core values already made to seem old-fashioned. Maddison designed bespoke display cases in the 1970s that solved the problem of displaying astrolabes so that both sides of the instrument could be viewed. They are gone. With Anthony Turner he created a new horological gallery and reconciled within it the two somewhat incongruous focuses of the museum’s clock collection, scientific horology and locally-made Oxfordshire clocks. It no longer exists.

 

For several decades Maddison ran the museum, which is a department of Oxford University but also open to the public free of charge, with its sights firmly fixed on the pursuit of post-graduate level scholarship and advanced research, himself as the academic figurehead. That is what his employers the university expected of him. Even before he retired the university itself was openly criticising the limitations and lack of relevance it now perceived in the museum’s role, and Maddison’s reputation has unfairly suffered from this volatility in his employer’s priorities.

 

I think he increasingly saw the world around him, including his own academic and professional milieux, as hyperactive, shallow, and evolving in ill-advised directions. He came to feel that, in university museums for instance, education and popularisation, elements of a museum’s role that he had once embraced, had become a threat to sound academic scholarship and not the happy concomitant they once seemed. Funding and the criteria for funding have of course been important factors in these changes. Maddison was never very comfortable with fund-raising activities; but the primitive nature of the university museums’ funding structure, and more often than not the complete lack of funds in his day, conspired to exaggerate the inertia that he was criticised for.

 

One of the highly applauded achievements of his successor at the museum has been to build useful and architecturally discreet extensions at the rear and underneath the front of the museum’s sensitive historic building (the Old Ashmolean is the oldest purpose-built museum in the world). In fact Maddison (and also an earlier head of the museum in the 1940s, Frank Sherwood Taylor) tried several times to interest the university in such a development, and the answer was always that it was impractical and prohibitively expensive.

 

The other negative thing about Francis Maddison’s career that might be mentioned is his reluctance to publish. He was prolific in his early research; and he was always brimming with topics he wanted to look into and articles he thought of writing, or commended to others to write. Sometimes they materialised after many years of gestation; more often they did not. He found the business of getting things finished and published ‘tedious’, and enjoyed the minutiae of scholarly detail too much ever to be entirely satisfied – there was always a linguistic nicety, a recondite bibliographical reference, a finely-tuned footnote that he thought should be added. He once told me he was lazy, but it was not intellectual laziness but a growing impatience with the irritations and compromises attendant upon academic publishing.

 

This exasperation increased as he grew older, but was characteristic of him all along. His work on the staff of the Ashmolean Museum was accepted for publication in Annals of Science in 1964, requiring only minor typographical adjustment; he seems never to have bothered. A paper on John Greaves and his 1630s journey to the Levant, combining science, instruments, linguistics, and oriental culture, never lost its fascination for him, but was nonetheless never published (though he wrote the excellent entry for Greaves for the new Dictionary of National Biography, perhaps his last publication). A study of Islamic astrolabes drafted as early as 1955, and several subsequent generations of the ever-lengthening descriptions displayed with the museum’s astrolabes, never achieved published form, in spite of frequently-expressed demand.

 

Better known among his unpublished works and unfinished projects, because they have been used and cited so often by other scholars, are the substantial catalogue he wrote with Anthony Turner in connection with the Festival of Islam (1976), and his long-cherished and very ambitious Répertoire of all known works of Islamic astrolabe makers, which he was still putting finishing touches to during his retirement.

 

Francis Maddison was an affable and charming person, rather formal but entirely approachable, and generously helpful to enquirers, students, and colleagues who sought his advice or shared his interests. His influence by that means alone, especially in the fields of astrolabe and scientific instrument studies and history of Arabic science, has been important in bringing history of science and technology to maturity as a discipline, encouraging its focus on instrument studies and on linguistic epigraphy, and at the same time broadening its cultural and scholarly terms of reference.

 

Such personal influence, like the tolerance, intellectual breadth, and scholarly rigour he infused into the daily life of the museum for over 40 years, are real enough but intangible. The importance of a number of his publications will endure more obviously, and presumably (as in his lifetime) some of his unpublished material will continue to be used by specialised scholars. And hopefully, however much fashions in the practice of scholarship and the priorities of museums keep changing, much of what Maddison did for the collections, documentation, and intellectual spirit of the Museum of the History of Science, and of historic scientific instrument studies generally, will quietly endure.

 

TS 2006