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The Prehistoric Society: From East Anglia to the World

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 February 2014

Grahame Clark*
Affiliation:
36 Millington Road, Cambridge CB3 9HP

Extract

It is doubly appropriate that the Prehistoric Society should celebrate its jubilee in Norwich. The Society was born in the Castle on 23 February 1935 of a parent conceived improbably enough in the Public Library at a meeting held on 26 October 1908 to inaugurate an East Anglian Society ‘for the study of all matters appertaining to prehistoric man’. The question I want you to consider in this address is how the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia developed so rapidly to the point at which it achieved national status as The Prehistoric Society. Let me begin by removing one misapprehension. My hands are not dripping with East Anglian blood nor have I just wiped them clean. The Prehistoric Society was not the outcome of a revolutionary putsch. It stemmed from nothing more dramatic than a recognition that the Prehistoric Society had long ceased to be East Anglian. When we met at Norwich Castle for our Annual General Meeting in 1935 and passed the resolution which eliminated the words ‘of East Anglia’ from our title we were merely recognizing a fact, that we had long ceased to be East Anglian in anything but name. There were no dissentient votes.

The two men who between them set the Prehistoric Society on its feet came from different but complementary backgrounds. W. G. Clarke was Norfolk born and bred and earned his living as a working journalist in Norwich, while cultivating a wide-ranging interest in natural history and prehistoric archaeology.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Prehistoric Society 1985

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