Grace Crowfoot

Molly's first thirty years, 1879-1908

Born in Lincolnshire, England, in 1879 into a family of the minor landed gentry Grace Mary Hood was the oldest of 6 children—two girls and four boys.

Her grandfather collected Egyptian antiquities, which were displayed in a wing added for the purpose to the main building of Nettleham Hall. The family interests put her in contact with many archaeologists, among them William Flinders Petrie, and she became lifelong friends with Petrie's wife Hilda.

Molly's earliest venture into archaeology was in 1908-1909 when she excavated the prehistoric remains in the cave at Tana Bertrand, above San Remo on the Italian Riviera where her family often stayed. She found 300 beads and signs of early occupation. The work would not be published until 1926.

In 1908, determined to make a useful contribution to society, Molly trained to become a professional midwife at Clapham Maternity Hospital in London. The contacts made then proved invaluable later when she was living in the Sudan.

Life and work in Egypt and Sudan

In 1909 Molly finally married John Winter Crowfoot, whom she had met years before in Lincoln. He was now the Assistant Director of Education in Sudan and she joined him in Cairo where their eldest daughters were born: Dorothy, Joan and Elisabeth. One who became acquainted with the Crowfoots during their years in Sudan, Babikr Bedri, refers to Molly as "that gracious, unassuming, well-educated lady".

Molly's activities

She learned photography and her photographs illustrate the first of several botanical volumes she produced during their years in Egypt, Sudan and Palestine. In subsequent publications she reverted to line-drawings of her own, feeling that photographs could not represent with sufficient accuracy and clarity the detail of particular plants and flowers. (After her death many of her field drawings of wild plants from North Africa and the Middle East were deposited with Kew Gardens in London.)

In 1916, in the middle of the First World War, Molly and John moved to the Sudan, far from the fighting and remote from the expatriate society of Cairo. There were few white people in Khartoum, none of them women. John was in charge of education and antiquities in the region, becoming Director of Gordon College (today Khartoum University). Molly immersed herself in the life of the local women across the Nile in Omdurman.

To engage them in conversation she took up the spinning and weaving that occupied much of their time and became a proficient weaver herself, learning to weave cloth on primitive looms. Later she published two papers on this topic. At the request of Flinders Petrie, she compared these methods with the model illustrating Ancient Egyptian methods of spinning and weaving then recently discovered in an 11th dynasty tomb. The techniques and equipment, she found, had changed little since those times.

An early campaign against FGM

Learning their handicrafts was Molly's way of getting to know the Sudanese women and understand their lives. Through these contacts she also learned, with horror, of the local tradition of Female Genital Mutilation which in Sudan took the most severe form, infibulation.

Always quick to respond, she considered how an outsider, someone related to the colonial government, might best intervene. The result was the Midwives' Training School. It was set up in the early 1920s to train local midwives, improve conditions of childbirth and, at the same time, begin to tackle the practise of FGM. To head the school she summoned two fellow pupils from her Clapham days, the midwife sisters "Bee" and "Gee" (Beatrice and Mabel) Wolff.

The family re-united

Following the birth of their fourth daughter Diana and the end of World War I Molly and John Crowfoot returned for some months to England, where they were re-united with their three older girls and took a lease on a house in Geldeston, Norfolk. It was to be the family home for the next sixty years. Soon John and Molly returned to the Sudan.

Life and work in Palestine, 1926-1935

In 1926 John was offered the Directorship of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem. During his time there he ran a number of major excavations at Samaria-Sebaste, 1931-3 and 1935; the Jerusalem Ophel in 1927; and early Christian churches in Jerash, 1928-1930.

Molly was in charge of living and feeding arrangements on site for large, mixed groups that contained archaeologists from the UK, Palestine and US universities. She and her husband John were admired for their diplomatic and organisational skills in the smooth running of these collaborative ventures. Molly took a keen interest in the finds and was among the authors and editors of the final three large volumes on Samaria-Sebaste.

While living in Jerusalem Molly gathered folk-tales with her friend Louise Baldensperger, whose missionary parents had settled in the country in 1848. Together they produced From Cedar to Hyssop: A study in the folklore of plants in Palestine (1932), an early work of ethno-botany. (Many years later the tales gathered by the two women were translated back into Arabic and re-published.)

An active retirement

Molly and John returned to England in the mid-1930s, in time to see their two eldest daughters married and the arrival of the first of their 12 grandchildren.

The family home in Geldeston, the Old House, had a great many visitors over the next twenty years. One would be Yigael Yadin, the son of their friend and collaborator on the Samaria-Sebaste excavations, the Jewish archaeologist Eleazer Sukenik.

Molly always took an interest in village activities on their long summer visits in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1925 she set up a local branch of the Girl Guides. She remained actively involved in her retirement and, as well as being a regular churchgoer, served as wartime secretary of the new Village Produce Association (see "Digging for Victory"), and post-war chairman of its Labour Party.

In 1949 she attended the House of Commons when questions were raised about the continued prevalence of FGM in Sudan. Molly approached the Colonial Secretary and the veteran Labour MP Leah Manning to inform them of her experience and views on the subject. An outright ban would merely drive the practise underground, she believed, and undo over two decades of careful work by the Midwives' School to reduce its incidence and harmful effects among Sudanese women.

During Molly's last years she was often bed-ridden as she battled, first, childhood tuberculosis and then leukaemia.

Her daughter Elisabeth helped her examine and analyse the numerous textile samples sent to the Old House from a variety of excavations. As doyenne of the study of ancient Middle-Eastern textiles, Molly was invited in 1949 to examine the linen wrappers of the Dead Sea Scrolls. A vivid preliminary account was published in 1951; a full description and analysis appeared in 1955.

She died in 1957 and is buried, with her husband John, next to the tower of St Michael's parish church, Geldeston.

Papers, photos and textile collection

Botany

Textiles, other crafts and folk-tales

1. North Africa and Middle East

2. Europe and British Isles

About Molly Crowfoot