When R A Gilbert was looking at the Golden Dawn
Members’ Roll preparing the list of members for his book The Golden Dawn
Companion, several people’s handwriting - squeezed into the small space
available - gave him trouble. He decided
that one member who joined the GD in 1900 was named Archibald Cameron Cresswell
Keppel. I spent quite a lot of time
searching for this person and coming up with nothing and eventually, in
desperation, I tried arranging his names in a different order. I can now say that man’s correct name was Keppel
Archibald Cameron Creswell. He was
initiated into the GD’s Isis-Urania Temple on 29 November 1900 and took the
Latin motto ‘Sic itur ad astra’. Unlike
with Archibald Cameron Cresswell Keppel, the web had plenty of information on
Keppel Archibald Cameron Creswell. In
his profession, although not particularly in this country, he turned out to be
very well-known indeed. I have leaned
very heavily in this short account of his life on R W Hamilton’s
Keppel
Archibald Cameron Creswell 1879-1974, published by the British Academy in 1975. However, Hamilton had not done a great deal
of work on his subject’s early life.
In
1878 Keppel Creswell, from a Nottinghamshire family but working in the City of
London, married Margaret Henderson, the daughter of a solicitor. Keppel Archibald Cameron Creswell, their
elder child, was born in London in 1879 and named after his father though he
was always known as Archie.
In
1881 Archie’s father was working as an underwriter. Until 1892 he was employed at Baring Brothers
and Company’s bank, in their insurance department, but in the wake of the run
on Barings and the firm’s near-bankruptcy in 1890-91, he left, and went into
partnership with his brother, Alfred Augustus Creswell, who was already in
business as an insurance broker with offices at 28 Cornhill. The new firm was called A A Creswell and
Company and it was still in business in the 1920s. Alfred Augustus Creswell was already a member
of Lloyds Register, which listed firms which insured shipping. Keppel Creswell joined the Register around
1905.
The
Creswells had moved into 12 Regent’s Park Road in north London by 1881 and Archie’s
parents were still living there in 1911; in my researches on the GD members I’ve
discovered that living so long in one house was rare amongst them. The family was a small one - Archie’s only
sibling was Margery, born in 1881. They
were the only household at the address but the household was a modest one. In 1881 the Creswells employed one general
servant and a nurse; in 1901 their only employee was a housemaid - meaning, I
think, that Archie’s mother did a great deal of the housework herself helped,
as she grew older, by Margery.
Margaret
Creswell was a Roman Catholic. However,
Archie was given a Church of England-based education and - according to people
who knew him later in life - did not have any strong religious views. Archie was at Westminster School from
1891-96. There he showed an aptitude for
maths, especially geometry; though he also won prizes for English. On leaving school he studied the new subject
of electrical engineering at the City and Guilds Technical College at Finsbury
and worked for several years for Siemens before changing career to become a
clerk at the Bank of England, where he was in 1901, still living at home. By 1914 he was working, again as a clerk, for
the Deutsche Bank in its London office.
Archie
became a member of the Golden Dawn at a time during a difficult period for the
Order - it was not a good time to begin your studies in magic with the GD. A very junior member and aged only 21 when he
was initiated, Archie took no part in the debates that were tearing the GD
apart. On the other hand, he wasn’t
listed as a member of any of the daughter Orders that were set up in 1903. He did continue to investigate ancient
Egyptian magic, but on his own, and published one article comparing Egyptian
magical texts with the Kabbalah, in Occult Review.
R W
Hamilton suggests that the foundations of Archie’s interest in Islamic
architecture were laid while he was a childl: for his 12th birthday
he was given a book with pictures of Middle Eastern buildings in it; and he
also won a copy of George Rawlinson’s The Seventh Great Oriental Monarchy. Archie himself later attribributed his
passion for eastern culture to Rawlinson’s monumental work. He had several other interests: he was a good
photographer; he was a fitness freak; and he was interested in the Kabbalah -
finding his way into the GD as a result of it and also writing his first
published work: A Comparison of the Hebrew Sephiroth with the Paut Neteru of
Egypt, which appeared in Occult Review in 1912. However, by 1914 his interest in Islamic
architecture was becoming his main focus.
He had read Flinders Petrie’s Methods and Aims in Archaeology
(published 1904), a reference work for those doing survey work on ancient
buildings, which (amongst other things) promoted the use of photographs to
record architectural detail. He had
started out on one of his life’s works - the compiling of a bibliography of all
the existing works on Islamic architecture.
And in May of that year he had applied for a job with the Archaeological
Survey of India.
World
War I prevented his job application from being taken up but sent his working
life in a completely new direction. He
doesn’t seem to have been one of those who volunteered to fight in 1914 or
1915, but he was called up in April 1916, after the first conscription acts
became law and - no doubt due to his technical training - made a Lieutenant in
the fledgling Royal Flying Corps. By
1918 he had been promoted to Captain.
There’s some debate about exactly when he arrived in Egypt but all sources
agree he was there by 1918. In the wake
of the Armistice, Great Britain was handed Palestine to rule and Archie was
given the job of Inspector of Monuments, Occupied Enemy Territory and asked to
survey all the ancient monuments of Syria and Palestine. The survey occupied 1919 and 1920 and formed
the basis for his academic career.
Demobbed from the air force by 1922, he didn’t return to England, he
stayed in Egypt and invented the academic discipline of the study of Islamic
architecture.
In
the course of the next 50 years or so Archie Creswell wrote many books on
Islamic architecture, both academic tomes and guides for the interested tourist
or art historian. However, the work on
which his reputation rests is his Early Muslim Architecture, which he
got King Fu’ad I of Egypt to fund, and which appeared in several exhaustive
volumes between 1932 and 1940. His
particular interest was the architecture built by members of the (Muslim)
Fatimid dynasty which ruled Egypt from 969 to 1171; there are many splendid
examples in Cairo.
In
1931 Archie was again called on by King Fu’ad, this time to establish a
programme of study at the King Fu’ad University of Cairo. Although Archie did not have a university
degree he was still the best qualified, by practical experience, to head this
programme and he was appointed the university’s first professor of Islamic and
Archaeology, a post he held until 1951 when he seems to have been sacked, or
stormed off, for reasons that are still not clear. A hiatus followed, during which time (I think
it was during this period) Archie spent some time at Princeton University,
before being appointed to another professorship in Egypt in 1956, this time at
the American University. 1956, of course,
was the year of the Suez Crisis, during which anyone with English connections
had a hard time in Egypt. Archie was all
prepared to leave the country until he found he would not be allowed to take
his books with him. The American
University in Cairo stepped in to offer a home for the books, and Archie stayed
on in Egypt. By this time he had been
living outside the UK for over 30 years, and from some of accounts of his work,
particularly those that have been written by Arabic scholars, I get the impression
of a man forgetting that time had moved on: a man always impeccably dressed in
a suit in the manner of a colonial official; hostile to Jews and to the policy
of allowing West Indians into Britain (mind you, he wasn’t alone in having
those attitudes); a man bellowing at the staff in restaurants when the food
wasn’t good enough.
His
work has also been criticised, for concentrating too much on the mathematical
and design aspects of architecture and not considering the social and economic
reasons why a building might have been designed like it was. His emphasis on chronology is now thought to
be a rather limiting approach. And as
did not learn to read Arabic he was unable to study some original texts. I do feel that some of these criticisms are
rather harsh - after all, the man was inventing an entire new academic
subject. And all modern scholars seem to
agree that Archie’s body of work will be the classic texts on their subject for
some time to come.
Riding
out the difficult times of Suez, Archie Creswell continued to live and work in
Egypt until his failing health finally required him to have more nursing
care. He returned to England in 1973 and
died in Twyford Abbey Nursing Home in Acton, west London, on 8 April 1974.
BASIC
SOURCES I USED for all Golden Dawn members.
Membership
of the Golden Dawn: The Golden Dawn Companion by R A Gilbert. Northampton: The Aquarian Press 1986. Between pages 125 and 175, Gilbert lists the
names, initiation dates and addresses of all those people who became members of
the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn or its many daughter Orders between 1888
and 1914. The list is based on the
Golden Dawn’s administrative records and its Members’ Roll - the large piece of
parchment on which all new members signed their name at their initiation. All this information had been inherited by
Gilbert but it’s now in the Freemasons’ Library at the United Grand Lodge of
England building on Great Queen Street Covent Garden.
Family
history: freebmd; ancestry.co.uk (census and probate); findmypast.co.uk;
familysearch; Burke’s Peerage and Baronetage; Burke’s Landed Gentry; Armorial
Families; thepeerage.com; and a wide variety of family trees on the web.
Famous-people
sources: mostly about men, of course, but very useful even for the female
members of GD. Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography. Who Was Who. Times
Digital Archive.
Catalogues:
British Library; Freemasons’ Library.
Wikipedia;
Google; Google Books - my three best resources.
I also used other web pages, but with some caution, as - from the
historian’s point of view - they vary in quality a great deal.
Archie
Creswell’s father KEPPEL CRESWELL
Seen
via the Times Digital Archive: Times Monday 1 February 1892 p11b in The
Money Market column: a reference to Keppel Creswell, describing him as “late
manager of Messrs Baring Brothers and Co’s insurance department”. Creswell had now gone into partnership with
his brother A A Creswell of 28 Cornhill.
A A Creswell was an insurance broker.
The partnership would be known as A A Creswell and Co.
Some
information from Wikipedia on the run on Baring Brothers: Wikipedia says that
the bank had got over-exposed in the 1880s to debt incurred by the governments
of Uruguay and Argentina. In 1890 there
was a financial crisis in Argentina during which its government fell and the
nation nearly defaulted. What’s often
referred to as the Panic of 1890 and which involved the run on Barings began
during Novemver 1890; the bank had to be rescued by a consortium led by the Bank
of England. The bank was turned into a
limited company; the Baring brothers lost their partnerships and their personal
fortunes. The Bank did pay its debts -
it took 10 years - but has never been
the same since.
Lloyd’s
Register of British and Foreign Shipping volume 2 1898 p769 list of annual subscribers
includes Alfred Augustus Creswell of A A Creswell and Co, with “Date of
election 1879".
Lloyd’s
Register of Shipping volume 2 1912 p986 has Keppel Creswell of A A Creswell and Co listed
(which he wasn’t in 1898), with a date of election I couldn’t quite read on
Google’s snippet; it might have been 1905.
The
Post Magazine and Insurance Monitor volume 87 no 1 p28 issue of 2 January 1926, A A
Creswell was still in exist then.
ARCHIE
CRESWELL AND THE OCCULT
This
is the only item I found. At www.austheos.org.au/indices/OCCREV.HTM
there’s an index to articles published in Occult Review between 1905 and
1948; I searched to mid-1927 and found only one by Archie Creswell. Occult Review volume 16 1912, issue
of December p49: Creswell’s A Comparison of the Hebrew Sephiroth with the Paut
Neteru of Egypt.
ARCHIE
CRESWELL AS A HISTORIAN OF ARCHITECTURE
The
Isma’ilis: their History and Doctrines by Farhad Daftary 1992 p254 which descibes Archie as “the
leading modern authority on the Fatimid monuments”. And a note from Wikipedia on what that means:
the Fatimid Period refers to Egypt 969 to the death of the last Fatimid caliph
in September 1171, so that it includes the early Crusades, Saladdin etc.
Modernism
in the Middle East eds Sandy Isenstadt and Kishwar Rizvi 2008, p10.
Times Sat 13 April 1974 p24a death
notices: K A C Creswell had d “on 8th April, 1974" at Twyford
Abbey Nursing Home. And the obituary on
p14f.
Who
Was Who 1971-80
p183.
Bibliography
of the Architecture, Arts and Crafts of Islam AUTHOR.
It gives a more personal account of Archie Creswell, who it describes as
a small man, always impeccably dressed no matter what the circumstances or
temperatures. He could not abide any
form of cruelty: the author relates a tale of Archie’s determination to make
the Cairo police arrest a man who was beating a donkey, leaping from his car
and dislocating all the traffic. However
it also says of him “To his last day, Creswell was unaware of the demise of the
British Empire”. CBE 1955. Fellow British Academy. Gold medal Royal Asiatic Society. Knighted 1970.
Whose
Pharoahs? By
Donald M Reid 2003 p17.
My
main source:
Muqarnas:
An Annual on Islamic Art and Architecture Volume 8 is called K A C Creswell and His
Legacy. Editor Prof Oleg Grabar of
Harvard University. Published Leiden: E
J Brill 1991
p128-133
biography of Creswell by R W Hamilton. Plus an editorial on the impact and
legacy of Creswell p3 by Grabar as editor of this issue. Grabar praises Archie for being the first
scholar to see how much the quality of the photographs taken mattered in this
kind of survey work. Grabar first met
Archie in 1953. He describes him as “feisty,
opinionated, at times prejudiced”. His
personality was such a strong one that it tends to come out even in the
supposed neutrality of scholarly publications.
However, he could be very kind to young scholars. Grabar actually sees Archie as quite a
vulnerable character, and a very passionate one. P2 Archie’s emphasis on linear chronology now
seen as a methodological flaw. However,
the work that he did has still not been rendered obsolete by anything done
since.
--
A
note on the book by Rawlinson that Archie won as a school prize: George
Rawlinson 1812-1902, Camden Professor of Ancient History, Oxford University
1861-89. The Seventh Great Oriental
Monarchy covers the Sassanian (also known as Sassanid) empire; published
1875, the last in a set on the ancient history of the Middle East. Just in case Archie read the others, the
first 5 in the set were published between 1862 and 1867; the 6th
covers the Parthian empire, published 1873. A footnote from Wikipedia: the
Sassanid empire was the last pre-Islamic empire in the Middle East, 224-651AD,
succeeding the Parthian Empire and of course it wasn’t in the Roman empire.
Cairo
University and the Making of Modern Egypt by Donald Malcolm Reid 2002 p41 in a section
noting that World War 1 “brought into the open the ties between orientalism and
imperialism”. Creswell ended up in Egypt
through his work with the Royal Flying Corps.
He was University of Cairo Professor of Islamic Architecture from 1931
to 1951. Malcolm records that Creswell’s
“contempt for Egyptian nationalism and his uncompromising imperialism were
legendary”.
In
a Sea of Knowledge: British Arabists of the 20th Century by Leslie J McLoughlin 2002
p62 describes Creswell as a very good example of an Arabist who fell by chance
into this field of expertise. He was in
France in 1916 with the newly-founded Royal Flying Corps and was transferred to
Palestine in 1918.
However
Architectural History vol 50 2007 p207 the article ‘C R Ashbee’s
Jerusalem’ says Creswell had begun to study Muslim architecture in 1910. He was posted to Egypt in 1916 with the Royal
Flying Corps. Both these books can’t be
right
ARCHIE
CRESWELL AS A PHOTOGRAPHER
Maadi
1904-1962: Society and History in a Cairo Suburb by Samir W Raafat. Published Cairo: The Palm Press 1994. P36 describes Creswell as a friend of one of
Maadi’s most prominent residents, Mrs Henriette Devonshire. Creswell let her use photographs he had taken
of the Maadi district to illustrate her book Rambles in Cairo. The book contained very detailed descriptions
of Cairo’s Islamic buildings and a chronology of Islamic buildings in the
city. P35 Henriette Devonshire was the
wife of p36 barrister p35 Robert Devonshire 1870-1921; she was née Vulliamy,
born in France, 1860-1949. She organised
and led tours by horse and carriage of Islamic Cairo, showing tourists the
Fatimid monuments; all tours began at 2.30pm at the Continental Savoy Hotel. P11 Maadi was a suburb of Cairo, p13 to the
west of the railway line p18 developed by the Delta Land and Investment Company
in years after 1905. A lot of European
residents lived there.
Muqarnas:
An Annual on Islamic Art and Architecture Volume 8 is called K A C Creswell and His
Legacy. Editor Prof Oleg Grabar of
Harvard University. Published Leiden: E
J Brill 1991
P117
article on Archie’s library by Gloria Karnouk, who was its librarian at the
time when this volume was being written.
Karnouk says that Archie was influenced to make use of photography when
doing field excavations by Flinders Petrie’s Methods and Aims in Archaeology,
published 1904. In his Will Archie left
all his photographs to the Library - about 1000 of them, but with no index!
Archie
met Flinders Petrie:
Flinders
Petrie: A Life in Archaeology by Margaret S Drower.
University of Wisconsin Press 1st edition 1985; this is from
2nd edition 1995. P348 their
first meeting was in Cairo in late 1919 when Flinders Petrie and wife Hilda
arrived for the digging season. Flinders
Petrie was 86 but still going strong.
Creswell met the Petries through mutual friends the Sobhy family. Drower describes Creswell as an “eccentric
and delightful personality”.
Archie’s
publications: the British Library has quite a few by him but these are the ones
I saw mentioned most often in discussions of his work:
1932,
1940 Early Muslim Architecture
in 2 volumes Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Part 1: the Ummayyads
622-675
Part 2: the early
Abbasids 751-905
1958 A Short Account of Early Muslim Art
Penguin Books; further editions 1968, 1989
1959 The Muslim Architecture of Egypt in 2
volumes Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Vol 1: Ikshids and
Fatimids 939-1171
Vol 2: Ayyubids and
early Bahrite Mamluks 1171-1326
1973 Bibliography of the
Architecture, Arts and Crafts of Islam.
Cairo: American University in Cairo Press.
And
there are these as well:
1922 A Provisional Bibliography of Painting in
Muhammadan Art. London: Reiach.
1924 A Provisional Bibliography of the Moslem
Architecture of Syria and Palestine.
1926 The Evolution of the Minaret focusing
on its history in Egypt. London:
Burlington Magazine.
1952 Fortification in Islam Before AD1250. Reprinted from Proceedings of the British
Academy volume 38.
1953 Problems in Islamic Art. New York: Art Bulletin.
Copyright
SALLY DAVIS
14
July 2012
