Dorothea Gray

Dorothea Helen Forbes Gray (1905– 3 July 1983) was a British classicist. For almost all of her career, she taught at St Hugh's College, Oxford, where she became known for her advocacy of pre-classical Greek archaeology (then known as "Homeric") in a period when the discipline was out of favour at the university. In addition to her college work, she worked for the British government during the Second World War and took part in excavations at Mycenae, Smyrna, on Chios and at Myrtou. Her students included the philosopher G. E. M. Anscombe and the archaeologists Richard Hope Simpson and Mervyn Popham, who both followed her into the study of the Aegean Bronze Age.

Biography

Dorothea Helen Forbes Gray was born in 1905. As a child, she suffered an attack of polio which rendered her lame for life. She was educated at Bournemouth High School, a private girls' school, before receiving a scholarship in 1924 to study classics at Somerville College, Oxford. She subsequently spent a year conducting research on a Gilchrist Scholarship, followed by five years teaching at St Leonards School in St Andrews, Scotland.

In 1934, Gray was appointed as a tutor in classics at the all-women St Hugh's College, Oxford. She was promoted to fellow in 1935, and later served as vice-principal of the college. In 1940, during the Second World War, she temporarily left her post to work for the British government: she worked as a temporary assistant secretary for the Board of Trade and the Ministry of Production (created in 1942) before a posting between 1943 and 1945 in Washington, D.C., with the Combined Production and Resources Board, an inter-governmental agency regulating the economic resources of the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada. She was awarded the Order of the British Empire for her wartime work.

In 1947, Gray returned to St Hugh's, taking the post of University Lecturer in Homeric Archaeology. Among her students were G. E. M. Anscombe, who arrived at St Hugh's as Gray's tutee in 1937; Richard Hope Simpson, who studied under her for the diploma in classical archaeology in 1954–1955; and Mervyn Popham, who studied it in 1959–1960. In 1950–1951, she received a Woolley Travelling Fellowship, for which she worked on excavations at Smyrna in Asia Minor and Mycenae in Greece, where she excavated in the south-east extension of the Prehistoric cemetery. She was also part of both seasons of the excavations at Myrtou on Cyprus, under Joan du Plat Taylor, which ran between 1950 and 1951, and on the Aegean island of Chios: excavations there were conducted by the British School at Athens between 1952 and 1955.

Gray was elected to the Society of Antiquaries of London on 2 May 1963. She retired in 1973, and died on 3 July 1983. Rachel Trickett, who was principal of St Hugh's at the time of Gray's death, recalled her as one whose students "knew that she would hide their delinquencies, cover their shortcomings, scold and them and sympathise with them: and they knew that she was always on their side". John Boardman, in 1985, credited Gray with " eepingaloft the banner of Homeric archaeology", alongside Popham and Hilda Lorimer, at a time when pre-classical Greek archaeology was disfavoured by the university. In 2002, Maria Stamatopoulou and Marina Yeroulanou listed her, alongside Lorimer and their successors Susan Sherratt and Helen Brock, as part of the "exceptional contribution to the archaeology of early Greece" made by Somerville College, Oxford. In 2007, Robin Nisbet and Donald Russell wrote of her as "the patron goddess of Homeric archaeology".

Published works

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Gray, Dorothea

1905 births
1983 deaths
20th-century British archaeologists
Alumni of Somerville College, Oxford
British women archaeologists
Fellows of St Hugh's College, Oxford
People educated at Bournemouth High School