Stanley Casson

Stanley Casson (1889 – 17 April 1944) was an English classical archaeologist. He published widely on the history, culture, art and archaeology of Greece, and conducted excavations in Greece and in Constantinople. He served as a staff officer during the First World War and in military intelligence during the Second World War.

Educated at Ipswich School and at Merchant Taylors' School in Hertfordshire, Casson attended Lincoln College, Oxford, on an exhibition, where he studied both archaeology and anthropology. He continued his studies at St John's College, Oxford, and the British School at Athens (BSA), where he pursued a then-unusual interest in modern Greek historical anthropology. During the First World War, he served as an officer in the East Lancashire Regiment, and was wounded on the Western Front in 1915. He subsequently transferred as a staff officer to the Macedonian front under George Milne, where he undertook archaeological excavations at Chauchitza and helped to establish the rules and procedures for heritage protection in the area during wartime. He also served in Turkestan, was one of the first Allied officers to enter Constantinople after the Ottoman surrender of November 1918, and was mentioned in despatches.

Following his demobilisation, Casson became the assistant director of the BSA from 1919 until 1922, took a fellowship in 1920 at New College, Oxford, and lectured widely in person and on BBC radio on archaeological matters. During the inter-war period, he carried out excavations on behalf of the British Academy in the Hippodrome of Constantinople, and held temporary posts at the University of Bristol and at Bowdoin College in the United States. He returned to military service shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, joining the Intelligence Corps as an officer and instructor. He was almost captured during the German invasion of the Netherlands in May 1940, and was subsequently posted to Greece as the chief intelligence officer of No. 27 Military Mission, the British reporting mission to the country. In Greece, he served on the staff of Henry Maitland Wilson and was again almost captured during the Battle of Crete in May 1941. He subsequently joined the Special Operations Executive (SOE), and was serving as the SOE's liaison officer in Greece when he was killed in an aircraft crash on 17 April 1944.

Casson's academic interests and publications were eclectic: outside the archaeology of Classical Greece, he published the earliest major English work on Thrace, and wrote widely on Byzantine art. He published articles in both the scholarly and the popular press, and wrote ''Murder by Burial'', a detective novel with archaeological and anti-fascist themes, in 1938.

Early life and education

Stanley Casson was born in 1889. His parents were William Augustus Casson, a civil servant and barrister, and his wife Kate Elizabeth (). He attended Ipswich School, a private school in Suffolk, from 1899 until 1901, when he moved to Merchant Taylors' School in Hertfordshire. He subsequently won an exhibition to study at Lincoln College, Oxford, where he matriculated in 1909. He was taught by the classicist Lewis Richard Farnell and the ethnologist Robert Ranulph Marett, who became important influences upon him. Casson began his time at Oxford studying archaeology, but developed an interest in anthropology during his degree, and eventually transferred to studying the subject. He was a founding committee member of Oxford University's anthropology society, and part of the Oxford University Officers' Training Corps.

Casson subsequently received a senior scholarship towards postgraduate study in classics at St John's College, Oxford. In the 1912–1913 academic year, Casson attended the British School at Athens (BSA) on a Craven scholarship. Against the then-current trend at the BSA for the study of Aegean prehistory, Casson's studies there focused on the Greek National Awakening of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While at the BSA, he was given responsibility for editing the second volume of the BSA's catalogue of the Acropolis Museum in Athens.

First World War

On 15 August 1914, Casson was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the third battalion of the East Lancashire Regiment. He served briefly on the Western Front, where he was wounded in 1915. He was promoted to lieutenant on 15 May 1915, and sent upon his recovery to the Macedonian front. He was assigned to staff duty on 1 March 1916, and served on the General Staff of George Milne, the commander of British forces in the theatre. During his time in Macedonia, he was a leading figure in the largely ''ad hoc'' British archaeological work taking place alongside the military advance, and worked with local Greek officials to establish rules and procedures for excavation and heritage protection in the theatre. In December 1917, he hastily excavated the prehistoric site of Chauchitza, which had been discovered during the construction of military dugouts.

Casson also served in Turkestan, was one of the first Allied officers to enter Constantinople after the Ottoman surrender of November 1918, and was mentioned in despatches. During his service with Milne, he was promoted to temporary captain. Casson later defended the importance of the Macedonian front in his 1935 memoir, ''Steady Drummer'', arguing that the Allied breakthrough there in September 1918 had "opened the way to the Danube and Austria, and so brought about the collapse of the entire opposing front." He wrote poetry during his wartime service; poems from his notebooks were first published in 2022.

Inter-war academic career

In 1919, Casson became the assistant director of the British School at Athens, a position he held until 1922. While at the British School, Casson began the work of constructing a monument to the poet Rupert Brooke on the island of Skyros, where Brooke had died in 1915. In the spring of 1921, he excavated in Macedonia, alongside Walter Abel Heurtley, at Chauchitza. Casson's volume of the Acropolis Museum catalogue was published in 1921. He resigned from the BSA in 1922, and was succeeded as assistant director by Heurtley.

In 1920, Casson became a fellow of New College, Oxford, where he lectured in archaeology. He also delivered lectures for Oxford University's Ashmolean Museum, and programmes on archaeology for the BBC. He married Elizabeth Joan Ruddle, the daughter of the brewer George Ruddle, on 9 August 1924, shortly after the death of Casson's father, William. Casson's ''Macedonia, Thrace and Illyria'', a work of historical geography, won the university's Conington Prize in 1924 and was published as a book in 1926. He was the tutor of the archaeologist (and second husband of Agatha Christie) Max Mallowan; Mallowan credited a letter from Casson with securing his acceptance by Leonard Woolley to excavate with him at Ur in 1925.

Casson was promoted to university lecturer in 1927, as the first holder of Oxford's Readership in Classical Archaeology, a post created to support the Lincoln Professor of Classical Archaeology and Art (then John Beazley). In 1927–1928, he excavated on behalf of the British Academy in the Hippodrome of Constantinople, where he discovered hydraulic channels proving that waterworks had once been built into the track's central divider, and that the Serpent Column and the base of the Walled Obelisk were once converted into fountains. This was the only archaeological fieldwork he undertook during his lectureship at Oxford. In 1928, he served as one of the university's proctors. By 1928, he was a regular archaeological correspondent on BBC radio; he also became the first archaeologist to be featured in the BBC's '' The Listener'' magazine, authoring a six-part series on Greek archaeology in March–April 1929. In 1931, he was appointed as a special lecturer in art at the University of Bristol. In the same year, his only child, Jennifer, was born.

During the 1933–1934 academic year, Casson held a visiting professorship at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, during which he catalogued the objects in the college's Warren Collection. He was funded in his time at Bowdoin by Frank Gifford Tallman, and may have obtained his appointment through his connections to Beazley. In 1938, he published ''Murder by Burial'', a detective novel in which an archaeologist excavating the palace of Cymbeline is murdered by a fascist, Colonel Cackett, who wishes to build a statue of the Roman emperor Claudius on the site. The confrontation between them becomes an allegory for Britain's national identity, its relationship with its Roman past and its relations with Mussolini's fascist Italy: in Shakespeare's play, Cymbeline resists the Roman occupation of Britain. In 1935, he published ''Steady Drummer'', a memoir of his First World War experience called "brilliant and caustic" by Casson's obituarist John Myres. In February 1939, he was considered by the BBC to front a new series of talks on archaeological heritage: he was ultimately passed over, with a note that he was perhaps "too highbrow" entered against his name by the BBC's Vincent Alford.

Second World War and death

Before the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, Casson had joined the Army Officers' Emergency Reserve; he was posted to the Intelligence Corps later in 1939. He was in the Netherlands during the German invasion of May 1940, and was almost captured.

In August 1940, Casson was serving as an instructor at the Intelligence Training Centre at Smedley's Hydro in Matlock, Derbyshire, to which newly-commissioned officers of the Intelligence Corps were posted. Following the Italian invasion of Greece in October 1940, the British Chiefs of Staff Middle East formed No. 27 Military Mission to travel to Greece and report on its military situation. Casson was recruited by the mission's commander, Thomas George Gordon Heywood, as its chief intelligence officer. In 1940, he recruited the future author Patrick Leigh Fermor, then serving with the Intelligence Corps and a former student of Casson's at the Intelligence Training Centre, for the mission. In his notebook, Leigh Fermor described Casson as "donnish, witty and slightly disreputable"; Casson spoke to him entirely in Greek. Another of Casson's protégés was his former Oxford archaeology student, the future diplomat David Hunt.

Casson was the first member of No. 27 Military Mission to arrive in Greece, reaching Athens shortly after the fall of the Albanian city of Korçë to the Greek counter-attack on 22 November. He was subsequently attached to the Hellenic Army, and served on the staff of the British Expeditionary Force to Greece (also known as W Force). His relations with Henry Maitland Wilson, the general commanding W Force, were poor: Wilson brought across a Colonel Quilliam from GHQ Middle East to act as his own intelligence chief and so to bypass Casson. Casson was at Wilson's headquarters as a major on 6 April 1941, when the German invasion of Greece began. He was on the Greek island of Crete during the German airborne invasion of May 1941, and once again came close to being captured.

Casson was back at Smedley's Hydro, as a lieutenant colonel and the school's assistant commandant, in June 1942. In 1943, Casson wrote ''Greece and Britain'', a work which expounded upon the historical connections between the two countries in order to emphasise the importance of the wartime alliance between them. After the foundation of the Allied Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program (MFA&A, or "Monuments Men"), which began operations in August 1943, Casson was appointed to direct the MFA&A branch of the British forces in Greece. He was appointed on the recommendation of Leonard Woolley, by now the archaeological advisor to the British War Office.

Casson later became a member of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), and was appointed as SOE's liaison officer for Greece. He was killed on 17 April 1944 as a passenger on the Vickers Warwick aircraft BV247 of No. 525 Squadron RAF, which crashed into the sea near Newquay in Cornwall while bound for Brindisi. Two other SOE agents, Stephen Maitland and Ivan Watkins Bert, as well as the MI9 attaché George Lionel Dawson-Damer, were also killed in the crash. Casson was buried at Fairpark cemetery in Newquay: the details of his death were suppressed owing to the classified nature of his work. The Greek government organised a requiem mass in his memory at Saint Sophia Cathedral, London: Casson was the first British officer to receive this during the Second World War.

Assessment and honours

Casson was elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, made an honorary member of the Bulgarian Archaeological Institute, and awarded the Greek Order of the Redeemer. He was also elected an honorary associate of the Royal Institute of British Architects. His 1926 ''Macedonia, Thrace and Illyria'' was described by the Thracian archaeologist Nikola Theodossiev as the first major English scholarly work on Thrace; Myres described it as Casson's "most extensive contribution to learning". Theodossiev wrote in 2020 that it remained a "seminal work" in its field.

A 1933 review of Casson's ''Artists at Work'' described him as "one of the foremost authorities on Greek sculpture", and judged that "if more critics would acquaint themselves with art in the making, as Mr. Casson has done, we might hope for a sounder interpretation." In 2015, the archaeologist David Ridgway wrote that Casson had contributed "incisively" to many areas of Greek scholarship.

In 1936, Casson's Oxford colleague Isaiah Berlin described him in a letter to the poet Stephen Spender as "an absolutely unimportant, unlearned, persecuted little buffoon who calls himself a communist and raises laughs at New College." The historian Antony Beevor has judged him as "brilliant... utrather out of touch" in intelligence work during the Second World War. The novelist Evelyn Waugh, who attended one of Casson's intelligence briefs during the period, called him a "beastly don".

Casson was a long-serving member of the Authors' Club: in February 1944, shortly before his death, he was invited to join the club's executive committee. After Casson's death, the club's committee commissioned his wife, Elizabeth, to compile a bibliography of his writings in his memory, and hosted a reception in his honour on 29 November 1945 alongside the Anglo-Hellenic League at the Dorchester hotel in London. At the reception, money was collected towards the foundation of a library of English-language books in Greece.

Selected publications

As author

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As co-author

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As editor

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Footnotes

Works cited

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Casson, Stanley
1889 births
1944 deaths
20th-century British archaeologists
Alumni of Lincoln College, Oxford
Alumni of St John's College, Oxford
British Army personnel killed in World War II
British Special Operations Executive personnel
Fellows of the Society of Antiquaries of London
People educated at Ipswich School
People educated at Merchant Taylors' School, Northwood
Special Operations Executive personnel killed in World War II
Victims of aviation accidents or incidents in 1944
Victims of aviation accidents or incidents in England