Tony Rook (1932‒2023)

Tony Rook founded the Society in the 1960s. He was Director of the group until 2009, some 49 years! He passed away in September 2023. Reproduced below is an obituary for Tony, versions of which have appeared in Herts Past and Present, the newsletter of the St Albans and Hertfordshire Architectural and Archaeological Society, and in Hertfordshire Archaeology and History.

It is with much sadness that we record the recent death of Tony Rook, a leading light in the development of archaeology in Hertfordshire, particularly in the Welwyn area. Tony was born on 16 July 1932 at Burnt Barn Farm, Leeds, Kent, to Reginald and Cecilie Rook, universally known as Curly and Haggis. As a schoolboy aged sixteen, he helped Shepherd Frere excavate in the bomb-damaged areas of Canterbury. The following year, he worked on the first season of the excavations at Lullingstone Roman villa. Tony won a Higher Exhibition and wanted to use the award to study archaeology, but was told that ‘boys were expected to study something useful,‘ so instead he joined the RAF and was trained as a radar fitter, posted to the Black Forest in Germany. On leaving the RAF in 1954, he obtained a place at Leicester University to study Maths, Chemistry and Physics. It was there, in his first term, that he met Merle. After graduation in 1957, Tony obtained a post in Southall undertaking building research for George Wimpey, at that time the largest building contractor in the world. Merle and Tony married in 1959, and in 1960 he was offered a post with CLAIRA, the Chalk, Lime and Allied Industries Research Association, based in Welwyn. Thus began Tony and Merle’s long association with Hertfordshire.

As soon as Tony moved into the area, he began looking for, and finding, archaeology. At the time, the post-war New Towns movement was well underway and there were large areas under construction. His first find was in April 1960, when he discovered a Roman corn-drier next to the new Welwyn by-pass. Later that year he found Roman tiles eroding out of the banks of the Mimram. This was the first indication of what is now known as the Dicket Mead Roman villa.

The villa became the focus of a group which coalesced around Tony and Merle. It was at first informally known as the “Welwyn Archaeological Group” and started to hold lectures in 1965. It was not formally constituted until later in 1965, when they found an open safe abandoned in a chalk pit near Hern’s Lane in Welwyn Garden City. The group were given a reward, but could not cash the cheque without a bank account, which required a formal constitution. The new Society was christened the Lockleys Archaeological Society (renamed the Welwyn Archaeological Society in the 1970s). Tony remained Director of the Society until 2009.

Tony and Merle’s first daughter, Kate, was born in 1962. In the following year, Tony was offered the post as Head of Science at Sherrardswood School, Lockleys, Welwyn and moved into the Lodge of Lockleys House. In 1964 their second daughter, Sylvia, was born in the study at the Lodge.

During the 1960s and early 1970s, Tony and the LAS/WAS members undertook a series of ‘rescue’ excavations on sites in Welwyn Garden City: Crookhams, Grubs Barn, Nutfield, Welwyn itself and others, returning to excavate at Dicket Mead in between. In 1965 Tony and the group were instrumental in the initial identification and rescue of the Welwyn Garden City chieftain burial, now in the British Museum. In 1967 the Society rescued some of the burials from the Grange cemetery in Welwyn, destroyed by the building of the link road to the new by-pass. The work that Tony and the Society undertook at that time is fundamental to our understanding of the archaeology of the area. As Isobel Thompson noted, we know almost nothing about the archaeology of other new towns in the region such as Stevenage and Hemel Hempstead due to the lack of a ‘Tony’ undertaking recording as they were built.

In the early 1970s, when the line of the new A1(M) was surveyed, Tony found that it ran right through the site of the Dicket Mead villa. The relaxed training excavation turned into a race against time to excavate as much as possible. The bath house of Building 2 was particularly well preserved, and Tony managed have it conserved in a vault under the new motorway, where it can still be visited today. The grander baths of Building 3 were discovered late in the day. Only ten days was available for their excavation. Thanks to a cooperative construction team, however, they are preserved in a layer of clean sand under the motorway embankment.

In 1973, he began his MPhil at the Institute of Archaeology on the building technology of Roman bath-houses, supervised by Donald Strong. He was awarded his MPhil in 1975, and for the next seven years taught extramural classes for University College London. He also ran distance learning courses for Cambridge and Essex. In that same year, the Rook family moved to Mill Lane in Welwyn, which became the hub of the activities of the Society, and where Tony lived until recently.

After Dicket Mead, the Society’s work focused on the area between Datchworth and Watton-at-Stone. Over the next forty years, the Society excavated a medieval chapel, a Roman cremation cemetery and several Iron Age and Roman enclosures, amongst other things. Notable finds include the handle of the Aston Mirror, the plate of which had been found by a local farmer, and the Aston Cockerel, both now in the BM. Tony’s work illustrates the strength of a long-term involvement in a piece of landscape.

Tony was a prolific author. He wrote many popular booklets on a wide variety of local history and archaeology topics, as well as The History of Hertfordshire (1984/1997), Roman Baths in Britain (1992), Welwyn Garden City Past (2001), Roman Building Techniques (2012) and The River Mimram (2014). Tony also edited the Hertfordshire Archaeological Review, which ran from 1970 to 1975.

Tony was an incredibly industrious person, always working on something, be it his vegetable garden or his latest book. He was a popular lecturer and presented hundreds of talks to dozens of local groups and evening classes. He made archaeology accessible to all and the range of his work is remarkable. Tony passed away on the 11^th September 2023, and he will be much missed.