Simon Denison talks to Bob Bewley
This was supposed to be an interview in the air, looping the loop and chasing crop-marks with one of the young guns of British air archaeology. But it didn't turn out that way.
Instead, we were grounded. Bad weather? No. Some other credible reason? No. An engineer, who had been servicing the English Royal Commission's only plane, had unexpectedly gone off on holiday for a fortnight, leaving the plane a heap of oily bits in a hangar somewhere. The sun was shining low, casting long, raking shadows across the nearby Wessex Downs, and - who knows? - crop marks of long-lost prehistoric sites were probably bursting out all over the land. Meanwhile, air photographer Bob Bewley and I were stuck on the ground with nothing but his toy model of Concorde to play with.
Many readers of British Archaeology will know of the cash crisis in air photography, and this seems an illustrative tale. Despite being the Government's chief agency for air photography, the English Royal Commission's HQ in Swindon has the use of only one plane (which it doesn't even own). To buy a backup plane, to sort out glitches such as this one, would cost UKP30,000 tops - peanuts for a private company of any size, but seemingly impossible for a great public service. Hard times indeed that we live in.
Bob Bewley, Head of Aerial Survey at the Commission, shrugs these problems off. A get-down-to-the- job kind of practical northerner, he has never been heard to whinge about his own straitened budget or grant-giving capacity. A bit of a showman, he recently gave a talk to a gravely-worried meeting of air photographers dressed in canoeing helmet, life jacket and paddle. `We are going through rapids,' he said, `but we'll come through.'
A less pompous, more easy-going man, in fact, it would be hard to meet. We are sitting in his back garden (stone village house in Wiltshire), shoes off, completely relaxed. Wife Jill, a merchandiser and `village newshound' for the local paper, brings out an extraordinary spread of sandwiches, cakes and tea. `I'm just amazed anyone should come all this way, just to speak to Bob,' she says.
Born in Cheshire and brought up in the Lake District, he is now 40 - which is surprising since he looks not a day over 34. Both parents were professional musicians (members of the Psalli String Quartet), but in Bob's case musical ability was not passed down in his DNA - he tried to learn piano, violin, cello, trumpet, and guitar, but was terrible at all of them. He was more interested in sport - running, canoeing, above all cricket (which he still plays on Sundays), as well as black and white photography (a pointer to his future career).
He became interested in archaeology at school; but his careers adviser told him to forget archaeology and become an accountant. The adviser then admitted he didn't know anything about archaeology. `So I told him, either find out about it or leave me alone. So he left me alone. I was cocky even then . . . ' The story may or may not be quite true, but - straight-up, dry and amusing - it is typical of the man to tell it.
He went to university at Manchester in the mid 1970s (archaeology and ancient history), where a course on air photography inspired him to take flying lessons, part-time throughout his three college years, with the RAF (Cadet Pilot Bewley, Sir!). It sorted out his student hairstyle, if nothing else. Later, he did post-grad research at Cambridge in prehistoric archaeology based on air photos, followed by jobs as an inspector at English Heritage, and later in air photography. `I was walking up the stairs with Geoff Wainwright [Chief Archaeologist],' he tells me, `and I said I'd like to take over responsibility for the regional flyers. And Geoff stopped, and he said, Bob, are you all right? Do you really want to take over the regional flyers? And I said yes, so he said OK.'
The regional flyers were later transferred to the Royal Commission and he moved over in 1987.
Bob Bewley buzzes about on an ancient Honda 400 motorbike which looks as though it's stuck together with elastoplast, but his 40th birthday present (from Jill) is to be a 24-hour hire of `any motorbike in the shop'. A friend in the village, who has just had his 50th, received the same present from his wife; so the two men will soon blast off together into the sunset, leaving children and mortgages behind. Let the cynics mock; to me, it shows tremendous joie de vivre.
As the funding crisis in air archaeology deepens, Bob Bewley will need all his steadiness and laid- back charm to fend off the complaints of regional flyers, who are also grounded most of the time nowadays (and with whom he fully sympathises). But after the `canoeing' gambit of the last meeting, how will he face them next time? `Next time,' he said, `I'm wearing a suit of armour.'
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