Wiltshire Archaeological & Natural History Magazine, vol. 95 (2002), pp. 300-3 



Obituaries 



Maurice Gilbert Rathbone, archivist, died 26 

 March 2001. He was born 17 January 1917. 

 Maurice was born in Birmingham, and after a 

 grammar school education joined the staff of 

 Birmingham Public Libraries in 1934. In the 

 following year he was appointed to the Manuscripts 

 Section at the Central Reference Library under 

 Cecil H. Thompson. 



During the Second World War he served as a 

 clerk in Bomber Command at various stations in 

 East Anglia from 1941 to 1946. He returned to 

 Birmingham briefly, then on 1 January 1947 he 

 became the first County Archivist of Wiltshire, 

 starting so entirely from scratch that, as he would 

 recount, he was on his first morning shown into a 

 room completely empty except for a perpetual 

 calendar, the same one still used in the main search- 

 room today. He remained in Wiltshire until his 

 retirement in 1981, probably the longest serving 

 county archivist in one post. 



During that long period he handled with tact 

 and enthusiasm the many challenges which faced 

 archivists in developing their services. He 

 established links with the dioceses, setting up for 

 Salisbury a separate office in the city, subsequently 

 closed on the removal of the records to Trowbridge. 

 In 1971 accommodation at County Hall had 

 become inadequate, and the records were moved 

 to a converted factory nearby, with search-rooms 

 sufficient for 50 readers at once. This was just in 

 time for the avalanche of records after the changes 

 of 1974; the setting-up of records management 

 systems for both the county and the new district 

 councils followed soon after. An unusual activity 

 which he began was to exercise the powers given to 

 county councils to inspect and supervise the way 

 in which the records of civil parishes were cared 

 for. He compiled a printed Guide to the county's 

 fine series of Quarter Sessions records. 



He was a founder member of the south-west 

 region of the Society of Local Archivists, and was 

 long associated with the work of the Wiltshire 



Record Society, for which he edited a volume on 

 borough records. He sat on the Society's Council 

 for many years. His staff valued him both as an 

 efficient archivist and as a friendly and considerate 

 chief. He had a long and happy married life; he 

 leaves a daughter and a son and four grandchildren. 



KENNETH ROGERS 



Alison Mary Borthwick, archaeological con- 

 sultant, died about 2 1 April 200 1 . She was born 8 

 September 1951. 



Alison was born in Chester, and spent her childhood 

 at Tarvin, near Chester, Send near Guildford, and 

 later at Box in north Wiltshire. Her parents had 

 met at art school, but the war intervening they had 

 not pursued careers as artists, and her father John 

 (who predeceased her by less than a month) was in 

 business, latterly as a director of the Bath and 

 Portland Stone Firms. At Stonar School she was 

 inspired by an outstanding teacher, Philip Curnow, 

 to begin her lifelong enthusiasm for archaeology, 

 and she and a friend Richard (now Professor 

 Richard) Hodges, with wonderful teenage 

 precociousness, founded the Box Archaeological 

 and Natural History Society. The society still 

 flourishes more than thirty years on, with her its 

 much-loved president at the time of her death. 



From school she went to Birmingham and later 

 to Cardiff University to read archaeology. She dug 

 on the famous BBC excavation at Silbury Hill under 

 the direction of the late Richard Atkinson, and later 

 worked for Brian Philp's Kent Archaeological 

 Research Unit based in Dover. At the start of 1975 

 she returned to Wiltshire, as assistant to Roy 

 Canham, to develop and run the county council's 

 archaeology service. Nowadays local authorities' 

 archaeological functions are taken somewhat for 

 granted, but then it was all quite new, and for a 

 dozen years she directed excavations, went on aerial 

 photography sorties, helped to create the 



