Harold McCartet Taylor, C.B.E., T.D., M.A., M.Sc., Ph.D.

Harold Taylor was born on 13 May 1907, in Dunedin, New Zealand. He was educated at Otago Boys' High School and the University of Otago, where he took a first in mathematics and physics. He came to Clare College, Cambridge, in 1928; was Wrangler with Distinction and settled down to a period of research in theoretical physics, publishing his first paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society in 1931. He was appointed lecturer in mathematics in 1934. Taylor had been commissioned in the New Zealand Territorial Army at the age of eighteen and continued his service in England. He was called up into the Royal Artillery on the outbreak of war, ending it as Senior Instructor in Gunnery at Larkhill with the rank of lieutenant-colonel. In 1946 he was the first non-regular officer to be awarded the J. H. Lefroy Gold Medal for `furthering the science and application of artillery'. Taylor was appointed Treasurer of the University of Cambridge on demobilization in 1945 and Secretary General of the Faculties in 1953. His interest in Anglo-Saxon architecture, which he shared with his first wife Joan, matured during this period, and he lectured regularly to undergraduates studying archaeology and anthropology. After leaving Cambridge in 1961 to become Principal of the University College of North Staffordshire, he was appointed the first Vice-Chancellor of the emergent University of Keele in the following year. Keele was fortunate in having such a wise and able administrator to order its affairs during these early years, and Taylor earned the respect of colleagues and students. The Vice-Chancellor's fund to help members of the university in need and the counselling service (the first of its kind in England) covering educational, vocational and personal problems were innovations typical of Taylor's humanitarian, essentially Christian, approach to his office. Nevertheless, he was happy to retire in 1967, on reaching the age of sixty. The student population worldwide was up in arms, to the detriment of their studies, and he had suffered a grievous blow with the death of his wife in 1965 only weeks after the publication of the first two volumes of their joint work, Anglo-Saxon Architecture. For thirty years they had travelled the country recording more than 400 churches containing traces of Anglo-Saxon origins, and the work has long been accepted as a classic of its genre. On retirement Taylor returned to Cambridge, having married his personal assistant in the previous year, and together they embarked on the production of the third and final volume of Anglo-Saxon Architecture, in which they hoped to expound `a more precise system of dating than has hitherto been possible for pre-Conquest churches'. The volume appeared in 1978 but, innately cautious, Taylor concluded that `the time is not ripe for firm pronouncements about the dates of more than a handful of the buildings described in the first two volumes'. Retirement afforded Taylor time to excavate and, a lean, athletic figure, skilled in mountaineering and skiing, he continued to do so well into his eighties, first at Deerhurst with Professor Philip Rahtz, F.S.A., and Dr. L. A. S. Butler, F.S.A., and then with Martin and Birthe Biddle, FF.S.A., at Repton. Taylor was president of the Royal Archaeological Institute 1972-5, a member of the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments 1972-8, and a Vice-President of the Antiquaries 1974-7. He and Professor Charles Thomas, F.S.A., were jointly awarded the first Frend Medal for services to early Christian archaeology in 1981. Taylor died on 23 October 1995.