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Celebrating Hampshire Historians

Dewar, Hubert Stephen Lowry

May 1892 – December 1976

Stephen Dewar was born at Andover, the third child of Albemarle O’Beirne Willoughby Dewar and Florence Wilhelmina Rose, née Matthews.  Dewar was the great grandson of David Dewar, who is listed as an awardee in the 1830s, for compensation for manumitted property for the Dewar’s estate* on St Kitts, in the West Indies.

The family used their overseas wealth to acquire property in Britain and at the time of his birth, Dewar’s parents were living at Doles, Hurstbourne Tarrant, Andover.  His great-great grandfather had purchased the property in 1782 and had also procured Finkley Farm, to the east of the town.

Between 1905 and 1928, Dewar investigated the ‘Field Archaeology of Doles Wood’, which he describes as 4.85 square miles in extent. This was not a straightforward project, however.  In 1912 he continued  the colonial tradition of the family by heading to Assam as a tea planter.  The Great War then saw him serve as a 2nd Lieutenant in the Indian Army, at the end of which he married Orrie Curran Franklin, in Hyderabad.  She apparently assisted him in his Doles Coppice excavations in 1919, when they were home from abroad.

In his Field Club article (1929) Dewar enlisted the help of his brother, Willoughby, to compile introductory historical notes on the Coppices and Common in the area, ranging from the grant of land by Henry III to the Nunnery of Tarrant in Dorset, to the Hurstbourne Tarrant Common Award of 1820.  Dewar then divided the field archaeology into several categories, the most distinctive being three ‘Barrows’ and five ‘Camps’.  Of the barrows, the example in Blagdon Copse, dug into in 1905-06, contained a ‘richly-furnished cremated interment’.  The full significance of this rare Late Iron Age bucket burial was not realised until later (see Hawkes & Dunning; Stead below).  Of the other two barrows, the example in Rag Copse was later re-examined by Group Capt Knocker. The ‘camps’ have also excited later interest, from subsequent landowners, the Andover Archaeological Society and the RCHM(E) and work is still underway in bringing the results of these investigations to full publication.

In his paper, Dewar regrets his ‘lack of training’ to ‘do…justice’ to the sites he was excavating, but he quotes O G S Crawford, discusses matters with J P Williams-Freeman and was familiar with the terminology and standards of the time.  It seems probable that he might have done more, but when he returned home permanently from India, in 1945, it was to live in Somerset and, eventually, Dorset.  He made his mark there with work on the Somerset Levels, the Low Ham Roman villa, with its five panels illustrating the fourth book of Virgil’s Aeneid and by producing a host of papers on subjects as varied as the Cerne Abbas Giant, ancient roads, lake villages and archaeological apparitions.

In a brief obituary in Somerset Archaeology & Natural History120 (1976) C A Ralegh Radford praises Dewar’s pioneer work, undertaken with care and accuracy and also his ‘kindness and friendship, qualities experienced by all who came into contact with him’.

*The Dewar’s Estate can still be identified on St Kitts and is described as ‘2 acres of landscaped perfection…with spectacular views of the Caribbean Sea’.  At the time of writing, it is up for sale, with an asking price of $1.3m

Sources

Hampshire Field Club

Somerset Archaeological Society

Portrait

Contribution to county’s history

Dewar undertook one of the first ‘area field studies’ in the county, building on the work of Williams-Freeman and Crawford. It may have been a protracted process – and battled against fairly unforgiving terrain (clay with flints) and vegetation (woodland and coppice) but his first discovery, that of a Late Iron Age princely burial, could be reinterpreted with some confidence twenty-five years later.  

Relevant published works

  • Dewar HSL (1929) The Field Archaeology of Doles, Proc Hants Field Club 10, Part 2, 118-126

  • Dewar HSL ed (1965) The Thomas Rackett Papers, 18th-19th Centuries

  • Dewar HSL & Brown T (1969) Ghostly gold & goblin tunes, Archaeological apparitions & traditions

  • Hawkes C & Dunning G (1930) The Belgae of Gaul and Britain, Archaeological Journal 87 (esp 304-9)

  • Stead I M (1968) Excavations in Blagden Copse, Hurstbourne Tarrant, Hampshire, 1961 Proc Hants Field Club 23, Part 3, 81-9

Critical Comments

By his own admission, Dewar was not an experienced archaeologist, but his discoveries and observations were well recorded and conserved, such that they were able to inform later researchers

Other Comments

Contributor

Dave Allen, November 2023

Keywords

Hurstbourne Tarrant, Late Iron Age burial, Doles Wood

Any queries or further suggestions for this part of the list should be addressed to celebrating@hantsfieldclub.org.uk.

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