Rupert Bruce-Mitford

Bruce-Mitford's paternal great-grandparents, George and Elizabeth Beer, sailed to the Godavari River Delta in India to work as missionaries in 1836; "poor unordained Baptist missionaries" when they left, in the words of Anthony Norris Groves, they went on, according to Groves's biographer, to "stand amongst the most tenacious Christian workers of all time".

Their two sons, John William and Charles Henry, continued the calling, while their two daughters married school teachers in the area.

In 1866 John Beer married Margaret Anne Midford, the daughter of an English family living in Machilipatnam.

They had five children, including in 1871 Herbert Leonard and in 1875 Eustace, Rupert Bruce-Mitford's father.

The family returned to Devon in 1884, when John Beer fell ill.

He died shortly after arrival; his wife returned to India, but died there four years later.

Eustace Beer, Rupert Bruce-Mitford later wrote, was "himself twice orphaned while still a small boy".

By 1891 he was in England, having either returned or never left following his father's death.

After studying in Exeter he taught English and Classics at Blackburn Grammar School, but then sailed from Genoa in 1901 to teach at the "School for European Boys" founded by his brother Herbert in Weihaiwei, China.

He left less than nine months later, however, departing to Japan.

As Rupert Bruce-Mitford later wrote, he departed "with ambitions to set up his own school, and devise its curriculum and ethos according to his own ideas".

Shortly before his 1902 departure to China, Eustace Beer adopted the surname Bruce-Mitford—perhaps indicative of his desire to separate himself from his family's missionary past.

"Mitford" was a take on "Midford", his mother's maiden name, and perhaps not unintentionally, that of the unrelated Algernon Freeman-Mitford, 1st Baron Redesdale, whose name carried respect in the British expatriate community in Japan.

"Bruce" may have been taken from Major Clarence Dalrymple Bruce, an acquaintance who commanded the Weihaiwei Regiment.

In Japan Eustace founded the Yokohama Modern School, which targeted the sons of English, or English-speaking, businessmen and missionaries.

In 1903, and likely on the basis of his book and articles on Weihaiwei, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society; he subsequently became interested in geography and vulcanology, writing additional works on the country.

Eustace Bruce-Mitford had met Beatrice Allison on his ship to Yokohama, and soon after founding his school recruited her as an assistant teacher; they married on 27 July 1904, at Christ Church, Yokohama.

She was the eldest daughter of early settlers of British Columbia, Susan Louisa (née Moir) and John Fall Allison, an explorer, gold prospector, and cattle rancher.

In 1908, however, by which time the family had three sons, William Awdry, the Bishop of South Tokyo, announced from the pulpit of Christ Church that "certain marriages of British subjects celebrated in Japan" might not be legally valid, and if so "the couples ... will find that they have been and are living together ... in concubinage and that their children are 'illegitimate'".

He was taken on as an assistant editor by Captain Francis Brinkley, owner and editor of the Japan Mail, though by 1911 had returned to England as a freelance journalist.

Rupert Bruce-Mitford was born three years after his family returned from Japan.

Three years later, his father left for India to work as an assistant editor at the Madras Mail.

Though a legal technicality, and one which was remedied by an Act of Parliament in 1912, the announcement disgraced the Bruce-Mitfords, and Eustace lost his leadership of the Yokohama Modern School.

Rupert Leo Scott Bruce-Mitford (14 June 1914 – 10 March 1994) was a British archaeologist and scholar.

He spent the majority of his career at the British Museum, primarily as the Keeper of the Department of British and Medieval Antiquities, and was particularly known for his work on the Sutton Hoo ship-burial.

Considered the "spiritus rector" of such research, he oversaw the production of the monumental three-volume work The Sutton Hoo Ship-Burial, termed by the president of the Society of Antiquaries as "one of the great books of the century".

Though Bruce-Mitford was born in London, the preceding two generations had lived largely abroad: his maternal grandparents as early settlers of British Columbia, his paternal grandparents as missionaries in India, and his parents as schoolteachers recently returned from Japan.

When Bruce-Mitford was five, his father, who had returned to Japan two years earlier, died.

His mother was left to raise the four sons, of which Bruce-Mitford was the youngest, on a tiny salary; the stresses were substantial, and Bruce-Mitford was fostered for a time after his mother had a breakdown.

Rupert Leo Scott Bruce-Mitford was born on 14 June 1914 at 1 Deerhurst Road, Streatham, London.

Following Terence, Vidal and Alaric (Alex), he was the fourth of four sons born to Charles Eustace and Beatrice Jean Bruce-Mitford; a daughter did not survive.

Family tradition has it that Rupert's brothers were responsible for his given names, selecting them from their reading: Rupert from Anthony Hope's Rupert of Hentzau, Leo from Rider Haggard's She, and Scott from either Robert Falcon Scott's diary, or his "Message to England".

Bruce-Mitford attended preparatory school with the support of a relative, was admitted to the charity school Christ's Hospital five years later, and, in 1933, was awarded a Baring Scholarship in History to attend Hertford College, Oxford.

Recommending him for a museum curatorship in 1936, the University Appointments Board noted that he "has an exceptional gift for research, a sphere in which he could do work of outstanding merit".

After spending a year as an assistant keeper at the Ashmolean Museum, during which he produced "the first serious study of medieval pottery", in December 1937, Bruce-Mitford was appointed to the British Museum's Department of British and Medieval Antiquities.

The ship-burial was excavated in 1939, weeks before the outbreak of the Second World War; Bruce-Mitford spent 1940 to 1946 in the Royal Corps of Signals, and returned with a warning from the department's Keeper: "You will also be responsible for Sutton Hoo. Brace yourself for this task."

Bruce-Mitford spent much of the next four decades focused on the subject, publishing dozens of works, studying contemporary graves in Scandinavia (excavating a boat-grave in Sweden and learning Swedish and Danish along the way), and leading a second round of excavations at Sutton Hoo from 1965 to 1970.

In his other duties, Bruce-Mitford excavated at the Mawgan Porth Dark Age Village, published significant works on the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Codex Amiatinus, as well as the posthumous opus A Corpus of Late Celtic Hanging-Bowls, translated P. V. Glob's book The Bog People into English, and oversaw the acquisition of the Lycurgus Cup and Courtenay Adrian Ilbert's collection of thousands of clocks and watches, considered "the greatest collection of horology in the world".

He also founded the Society for Medieval Archaeology, and served as secretary, and later vice-president, of the Society of Antiquaries.

After his retirement from the British Museum in 1977, he served as Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Cambridge, a visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford and, finally, a Faculty Visitor in the Department of English at the Australian National University.