9 - Vere Gordon Childe

Summary

‘The British prejudice against suicide is utterly irrational,’ the occupant of No. 22 Lawn Road Flats, Vere Gordon Childe, wrote before taking his own life in 1957. Childe committed suicide in his native Australia, by hurling himself 1,000 feet to his death below Govetts Leap at Black-heath in the Blue Mountains, New South Wales, on 19 October 1957. ‘To end his life deliberately,’ he wrote, ‘is in fact something that distinguishes homo sapiens from other animals even better than ceremonial burial of the dead.’ Many theories have been put forward to explain Childe's suicide not least his own fear that his intellectual powers were failing him. A pre-historian of great skill and reputation, his most popular book What Happened in History (published in 1942) has been described as ‘probably the most widely read book ever written by an archaeologist’. According to David Russell Harris, a former director of the Institute of Archaeology at University College London, Childe had a unique vision of evolution at a time when other archaeologists had only ‘chronology charts’.

A Marxist who never joined the Communist Party, Childe gained a reputation amongst his colleagues as the ‘Red Professor’. Agatha Christie's husband, Max Mallowan described him as ‘a man of brilliant intellectual capacity, whose writings were admired far beyond the archaeological circle. Gordon was a professed Marxist,’ he wrote, ‘and intellectually dedicated to the cause, but the Party was too clever ever to admit him intellectually: outside it he was an invaluable ally, from within he would have been a menace.’