Concordia

Concordia Winter 2019 17 Concordia Winter 2019 16 Archive We are lucky enough to be contacted regularly by descendants of OMTs looking to donate material to the school collection. Most recently we received two notebooks from the daughter of OMT, Ionwerth Eiddon Stephen Edwards, who attended Merchant Taylors’ from 1920-1928. One volume was dedicated to Hebrew Grammar, while the other was a collection of translations from Egyptian hieroglyphs. This prompted further research to discover more about the life of I.E.S. Edwards. Later known as Eiddon Edwards, he joined the School in 1920, under the Head Mastership of John Arbuthnot Nairn, a great Classical scholar of his time. Merchant Taylors’ was located in Charterhouse Square, and Edwards a member of Clive House and the ‘Classical Side’. This meant that he specialised in Latin and Greek, rather than French and German. In the Sixth Form, Edwards studied Hebrew as an extra subject under the Rev. Francis John Padfield and it is perhaps during his lessons that the notebook presented to the school was written. Edwards describes Rev. Padfield in his memoirs as “a man to whom I owe a tremendous debt for enabling me to live the kind of life that I have done.” Outside the classroom, Edwards was a leading member of the Archaeological Society, giving lectures to other pupils and showing an early enthusiasm for museum practice by completely rearranging the exhibits in the Archaeological Collection. This made 1928 “one of the most successful so far as the Museum is concerned”. During his final year at the school he obtained the position of Prompter and his name can be found at the school, carved on the Prompters’ Bench. He delivered ‘The Hebrew Oration’ on Speech Day, where he discussed the visit of King Amanullah and the excavations at Ur of the Chaldees. He was awarded the annual Hebrew prize ‘The Montefiore Medal’ for his achievements in the subject, along with an £80 exhibition from the school for four years to Cambridge. In addition he was awarded an open scholarship of £100 a year for three years from Gonville and Caius College and a further scholarship from Cambridge University for £60 a year. At Cambridge, Edwards obtained First Class honours in both parts of the Oriental Languages Tripos in Hebrew and Arabic, and was awarded Mason and Tyrwhitt Prizes. After graduating in 1931, he undertook research in comparative semantic grammar and Arabic literature and was awarded the prestigious William Wright studentship in Arabic in 1932. He then joined the Inner Temple for a short while because of an interest in Muslim law but left in 1934 to join the Department of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities of the British Museum, where he began to study and research the language of Ancient Egypt. It seems probable that the second notebook on Egyptian hieroglyphs dates from this period and perhaps it related to his translations of Egyptian texts for the catalogue of the British Museum exhibition of sculpture in the collection of G.S. Gulbenkian. Edwards went on to become the first Keeper of Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum from 1955-1974, and organised the large Tutankhamun exhibition in 1972, for which he personally selected objects to be loaned from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. During his career at the British Museum he wrote over 80 publications; the most notable of these was ‘The Pyramids of Egypt’ (1947), one of the most widely read books on ancient Egypt, combining readability, popular appeal and scholarly accuracy. He maintained an interest in Egyptology in his retirement years and was especially proud of serving on the combined Unesco and Egyptian Ministry of Culture Committee for saving the monuments of Philae (for which the funds were partly raised by the Tutankhamun exhibition in London). We are very grateful to Lucy Constantine, Eiddon Edwards’ daughter, for donating these notebooks to the MTS Archive. If you have any material from the schooldays of OMTs please do get in touch with the Archivist, Sally Gilbert, sgilbert@mtsn.org.uk . A New Addition to the MTS Archive