Guestbook for 2014-2015
Your Comments or Memories

30 April 1914
Friederike Hammer
This is a really great website! welcome everyone after 40-odd years!!! Easy to handle and find what one wants - great job done.

6 May 2014
Friederike Hammer
The photos get better and better. What a LOT we were in the 1980s...

8 May 2014
Thanuja Simmons (nee Madanayake)
Thanks for scanning all the DUA newsletters, they bring back so many memories and also things I'd completely forgotten about like setting up a Netball team.

16 June 2014
Peter James
Hi everyone. What a wonderful site! It brings back so many good memories.
Thanks, Ian, for telling me about it. (Good to be working with you again, by the way, after all these years!)

27 July 2014
Graham Troilett
Bleedin' 'ell. How in god's name did we survive? We not only worked like stink, we played hard, too. I particularly remember rugby matches in the park followed by fine dining at Biba and then a long journey home covered in filth, the upside of which was that you often had several seats to yourself on the tube. And not an H&S nazi in sight. Those were the days.

27 July 2014
Graham Troilett
Well bugger me. This is brilliant. I do like Jamie's dictionary. I have three shots from Popular Archaeology, April 1980, although the shots are from '73/4. They are used to illustrate Dr John Hunter's article, Archaeology at the Crossroads. In one I'm kneeling in prayer, in the other I'm working, without a helmet, directly below a JCB thing on very dodgy ground. I think the other guy, sensibly wearing a helmet, might be Peter Ellis.
To bring you up to date, I just kept on digging and the colour shot is of me finally emerging, after 30+ years of heroic trowelling, from the Earth's exit wound in Western Australia a couple of years ago.
Best wishes to all 'The Heroes' wherever they may be.

27 July 2014
Graham Troilett
Maybe the curse inside one of the photo scales made for Trevor Hurst got him. Happy days indeed. A toast to all 'The Heroes' wherever they may be.
Cheers, Gustav.

13 Nov 2014
From HH to Lez Watson
Hi Lez, Hope all is well. A question for you - do you remember the name of the young lady who was photographed cleaning the mosaic on Milk Street? She is on one of The London Archaeologist front covers. John.

14 Nov 2014
Lez Watson to HH
I remember her well but can't think of her name. I'll ask Mike.

16 Nov 2014
Lez Watson to HH
Ha, too late the 'hero'. I see the mystery was solved earlier, elsewhere. Val should have been in the photo; SHE was the hero.

26 feb 2015
Trevor Brigham
A great website, always brightens up my day when new photos go on! Now there's a cunning plan afoot to knock the old MoL down and move it to Smithfield Market, the times really are a-changin'...perhaps the new museum could have a DUA Gallery with an animatronic Brian Hobley at the entrance taking your cash.

23 Mar 2015
Clare Wilkinson
Now an anthropologist, but have done archaeology in France and India. Got my start as a teenage volunteer at GPO site, Trig Lane, and Milk Street.

23 Mar 2015
Andrew Hoaen
This is great, thanks to Clare for introducing it. Worked from late 87 to later 88. Great place to work great colleagues and great memories.

23 Mar 2015
Clare Wilkinson-Weber
Hello,

I think one of the best internet discoveries I've made in the past few days has been Hobley's Heroes, all stemming from on an off-the-cuff comment on someone's FB page about an archaeologist I remembered from my volunteering days at the GPO site in 1974.

I don't have any photographs to share sadly, and as a mere teenager I was peripheral to much of the real "action." But in case you would be interested in what I remember about it, I'd be happy to let you know. I went on to volunteer at Trig Lane and Milk Street.

I do want to mention that when I volunteered at Trig Lane, Gus Milne was very kind to me, and something of a mentor. He encouraged me to go into archaeology, which I did (at Durham University). Unfortunately I found I liked excavating more than I liked reading site reports and I ended up in anthropology. But now I'm an anthropologist in the US, where archaeology is part of anthropology, and I've kept my hand in archaeology more than I might have anticipated. Anyway, I owe him a lot.

Best, Clare

24 Mar 2015
Gustav Milne
Dear John,
Thanks for forwarding this message:
Much appreciated!
Do you have any memories of Clare, or any pictures?
All the best as ever, gustav

23 Mar 2015
Clare Wilkinson
Dear John,

As a matter of fact I do remember you at Trig Lane (and a specific incident when you were kind to me). I'm attaching a string of other recollections below. I was a bit player in the Hobley's Heroes saga of course, and I'm not even sure how accurate my memories are, since I'm very aware that they were the product of a young mind! But some rudimentary "triangulation" should probably sort most of it out.

Thanks for responding to my message. I've had a great time this afternoon looking at the website! I also just got an email from Ian Blair. I'm actually in London at the moment on sabbatical, and won't be going back to the US until the beginning of May. If you'd found enough heroes to have a beer together, I'd love to be part of that! All the best, Clare

I first worked on the GPO site in 1974. I went along with at least one other friend from my school, having been told about the volunteering opportunity by our Latin teacher (!) My jobs were making tea and washing bones. Making tea was of course a huge responsibility, mainly because we had to make so much of it - the teapot was the largest I'd ever seen. There were no loos on the site, at least not for women, and we had to troop off to the commercial development adjacent to St. Paul’s Cathedral and use the toilets there. This became the subject of some complaints at one point as a female archaeologist whose name I’ve forgotten became irritated that there was insufficient appreciation of how much time it took to go and come back (cutting into break time I suppose). It may have been Julie Flude, based on looking at the photographs on the Hobley’s Heroes site but I can't be sure. I also have a very clear memory of being told a story about Alan Thompson. He was away from the site for several days, and apparently a phone call had come in for him which someone answered saying (in all honesty) that he was away in Turkey. The caller said “I didn’t know he was in Turkey …. and I’m his wife!” Whether this is true/indiscreet I don’t know – you be the judge.

I did a few stints at Trig Lane. There with Gus Milne's encouragement, I did some excavation and a bit of finds drawing (of an ampulla). I seem to remember that I found the ampulla but this is probably me retrospectively inflating my own importance. Most likely I was simply there when it was found. I looked at it for so long and so carefully that I have a clear image of it in my head, and a few years ago I was looking at the Museum of London website and came across it. I knew immediately what it was.

I remember both rain and sunshine at Trig Lane; all the wood beams of course; a long pipe that ran from a public viewing point to a wheelbarrow below, with a sign asking for contributions to support poor archaeologists; unearthing soles of shoes and also lots of shellfish remains; going to get tea at the building site next door (where they were building an MOD installation??) and running the gauntlet of crude navvies (John Burke-Easton was nice enough to walk beside me and comment that “I’m sorry about this, you’d think they’d never seen a woman before.”)

Milk Street was the most compact and busiest site. I was on tea duty there, but also spent some time in excavating a trench with I think Lez Watson. Lez was a self-declared exponent of “kitchen rock” (i.e. not punk rock) based on the fact that instead of having chains hanging from his belt, he had a variety of excavation tools like spoons and sieves. The pit was a bit of a challenge to make sense of, unfortunately. At one point, Steve Roskams (who was much envied for his having an archaeological job in what I was told was Alexandria but I’ve read since was Carthage) came up to us and said, “Can’t you tell the difference between this black and that black?”

An image that has always stood out in my mind is of looking at a horse’s jawbone that had been tagged and was lying on a table. The jawbone had on it several celtic knots doodled by someone from before it was deposited (well obviously). I was explaining the find to my parents that evening and began to draw the knots for them on a piece of paper. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up as I realized that in a way I was repeating what that person had done several hundred years before – visualizing and re-creating a form on a convenient surface.

One weekend at Milk Street a few volunteers, including me, were asked to “clean up” a rather puzzling feature for photographing. This feature comprised several large chalk boulders arranged in a semi-circle (this is as best as I remember). Another, older volunteer who was set this task took the idea of “cleaning up” a little too far, and decided to physically remove the boulders, smooth the edges, and then put them back in their sockets. John Schofield and another person (again I don't remember who it was) walked up, took this all in, and were surprisingly stoical about it, all things considered.

That’s about it for specific recollections, although names and faces from the website ring lots of bells for me. All this started because I was on Facebook today where an archaeologist friend posted something about cheese, which led to a comment in which Andy Boddington was mentioned, and then I googled Andy Boddington, and found my way to the Hobley's Heroes site (amazing but true). Speaking of Andy Boddington, I remember a conversation in which someone (maybe me, maybe someone else) said that he reminded them of the man in the cornetto advert who is serenading a woman on a gondola before stealing her ice cream.

About the only other thing that occurs to me now is that everyone hated Southwark’s archaeology department but I honestly don’t remember why (they were south of the river, but was it really that simple?!) [Probably something to do with the darts team - HH]

31 Mar 2015
Jonny Mills
1987-91, a lot of fun

4 April 2015
Lez Watson
Most impressed with the updated DUA Faces. "We are the Face!" We could add a page to show what the ravages of time have done to us all. I'd be willing to kick off with young digger as an old man (good title for a rock album/novel).

I'm equally pleased that H-H goes from strength to strength, with lots more stuff added each time I call in. Good work ye all.

7 Jul 2015
Jo Higson
Jo Higson. Roman Pottery Analyst 1986-1990. Southwark and Lambeth. alongside Roy Stephenson and Sue Degnan.

31 Aug 2015
Lez Watson
Wot about the great Milk Street 40th anniversary p*ssup?
Good grief, is it that long?

Anyone out there interested in making an odyssey to a City pub of repute to celebrate the excavation?

Date: sometime in 2016
Place: somwhere in the city, or maybe The Globe, Southwark
Ticket price: free to those with bono fides

13 Nov 2015
Al Mackie
best of times, worst of times.
DGLA and then DUA 87-90. Many great times on site and in office, but last 3 months were spent telling people they were laid off. Still an archaeologist, in western Canada.