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Scott Anthony, Bloody Old Britain: O.G.S. Crawford and the Archaeology of Modern Life. By Kitty Hauser., Twentieth Century British History, Volume 20, Issue 2, 2009, Pages 258–260, https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwp006
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Kitty Hauser's Bloody Old Britain: O.G.S. Crawford and the Archaeology of Modern Life, is a partial biography of the central protagonist of her earlier Shadow Sites: Photography, Archaeology and the British Landscape 1927–1951. In the thought-provoking Shadow Sites, you sometimes felt that the book's overarching thesis failed to keep hold of its fascinating collection of eccentric characters. In contrast, Bloody Old Britain uses OGS Crawford, Shadow Sites’ Eccentric in Chief, to centre a number of learned historical, cultural and political digressions. Among other things, Bloody Old Britain tracks the development of archaeology, technology and the inter-war path of reformist social visions.
The utility faculty historians draw from Hauser's book will depend on their attitude to partial biography. Without ever becoming a formalized genre, partial biographies have been steadily increasing in number since James Shapiro's 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare won the Samuel Johnson prize in 2006. They remain a publisher-friendly form useful for wafting intellectual air into lives, issues and eras where debate has become musty. The strength of partial biography is that it encourages improvization, crucial if you are interested, as Hauser is, in fluid currents of thought, embryonic stages of development or notions that are still to coalesce. Yet there are some problems of significance with the form as applied in Bloody Old Britain. Crawford was no Shakespeare, and it is arguable that he was too individual a character to be glibly representative of anything other than what Hauser describes him as, a solitary man with a colossal range of enthusiasms. However, he also occupies an anomalous position that problematizes typical generalizations about the character of early twentieth-century British attitudes towards political, social and cultural progress in interesting ways. While the ‘fellow travelling’ section leans rather heavily on David Caute's creaking The Fellow-Travellers: A Postscript to the Enlightenment, Bloody Old Britain is a well-crafted, vivid and original investigation into the innovations and amateurism of a British cultural and scientific avant-garde of sorts.
