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note on 13 January 1934 simply records, emphatically, ‘Stewarts both left’. 21
    Jim made detailed notes of the work at ’Ajjul and the experience gave him the opportunity to boast of having worked with one of the great men of archaeology. Later he would claim that Lady Petrie had hoped he would return to the site to re-investigate it, 22 but there is no way to know whether this is true, and correspondence between Sir Flinders and Lady Petrie makes no mention of Jim. Many years later Jim admitted that Petrie ‘poured scorn’ on him and was a harsh teacher and critic. But in time he was grateful for this training and acknowledged that it was Petrie who impressed on him the need for a broad understanding of the Near East by encouraging him to study not just the prehistoric past, but Crusader, Byzantine and Islamic history. Jim maintained that Petrie was one of those with an ‘intuitive grasp’ of the past. ‘In archaeology, as in any human subject,’ Jim said, ‘there are facts that one can master by instinct, but that are not at the time capable of proof. And this instinct can only be acquired by wide knowledge’. 23 ’Ajjul was to be important in Jim’s archaeological development and he always claimed that his later work on Cyprus was aimed at solving chronological problems first encountered there.
    Jim and Eleanor were engaged in April 1934, two months before Jim’s final exam results were published in The Times . In Jim’s class of twenty students completing Section A of the Archaeological and Anthropological Tripos, only Glyn Daniel was awarded first class Honours and Jim always claimed that he would have done better had he not spent so much time at the weekends courting Eleanor. Jim’s father possibly met Eleanor around this time because he certainly travelled to England late in 1933. 24 Jim and Eleanor married on 1 July 1935 and lived in a house they both loved, Park Cottage, in Somerset. 25
    In 1935 and 1936 Jim received the Cambridge University’s Wilkins fellowship 26 to support continued archaeological work or, as the Kings ‘old boy’ reported, he went abroad ‘to Palestine or somewhere in the neighbourhood’. 27 It was on this trip that he encountered the young, genial Alfred Westholm of the Swedish Cyprus Expedition and made his first recorded visit to Cyprus. This visit set in train all that followed.
    Before taking up the fellowship, and a month after their wedding, Jim and Eleanor sailed for Australia. This was Eleanor’s first trip to Australia and no doubt she was keen to meet her husband’s family, but according to Jim the visit was not a success. Jim’s father had remarried and Jim complained about the ‘female avariciousness’ of his step-mother Hope who, he believed, had ‘annexed’ his mother’s china and silver. He and Eleanor were ‘hard at it restoring lost prestige etc.’ Their (or was it only his?) problems made them both more determined to ‘stay as archaeologists’. 28 Jim reported to his Cambridge lecturer Alan Wace that they had both decided they could not ‘under any circumstances’ live in Australia, which at least ‘clears the field’. 29 On the other hand they used the visit to collect household things for England and also discovered that Australia was an excellent place to buy camping gear, acquiring equipment in preparation for fieldwork. At the same time they investigated Leica camera gear so they could experiment with ‘photomerography’ as a way of distinguishing types of pottery, fabric and design. They began to prepare what they grandly called a ‘Corpus Vasorum’ for their reference. Simply put, this was a ‘scrapbook’ of photographs of objects taken from existing publications to use later as a reference in the field.
    In the 1930s it was possible to imagine that the whole of the past could be understood. Few