Elaine Paintin

Article published in the Times on 28 December 2010

Historian, antiquary and former Head of Art at the British Library who helped to frame new laws on the finding and reporting of treasure

When Elaine Paintin joined the Department of National Heritage (now the Department of Culture, Media and Sport) in 1993, there was little enthusiasm on the part of the Government for a reform of the arcane and archaic law of Treasure Trove. It was thanks to her efforts that government opposition to the Earl of Perth’s Treasure Bill changed to active support, leading to the passage of the Treasure Act in 1996 and to such important developments as the establishment of the Portable Antiquities Scheme, which registers, and where appropriate rewards, those who find and report ancient treasures.

She recognised that Treasure Trove, defining who owns buried gold and silver objects when rediscovered in terms of the imputed intention of the original concealer, was under strain because of the surge in popularity of metal detecting. New procedures were needed capable of coping not with the occasional find pulled up by the plough, but with thousands of finds a year. She and her colleagues, including Roger Bland at the British Museum and the archaeologist Lord Renfrew of Kaimsthorn in the House of Lords, cared most about the loss of information when archaeological finds disappeared into private collections or into secretive antiquities markets.

Paintin played a central role in persuading John Major’s Government not only to back legal reform but also to fund the Portable Antiquities Scheme, with its regional network of finds liaison officers, which has transformed formerly hostile relations between detectorists and museum specialists into a fruitful and friendly collaboration. A measure of its success is not just that spectacular treasures, such as the Staffordshire Hoard unearthed last year, now end up in public ownership, but that even non-treasure artefacts, such as the rare Tudor vizard mask of velvet and silk, found in a cavity of a sixteenth-century wall in Daventry and once used to protect delicate faces from sunburn, now get reported and studied.

It was Paintin’s forensic mind, piercing intelligence and practical approach that enabled her to steer the Treasure Act into law, and these qualities were equally in evidence during her time at the British Library (BL) to which she transferred in 1976 as Head of Exhibitions, Education, Loans and Publications, after joining the British Museum in 1975 as Curator of Archaeology as part of Sir John Pope-Hennessy’s innovation of attaching education curators to the major departments. At the BL she was responsible for mounting the major exhibitions of the late 1970s and early 1980s, including the Virgil 2,000th anniversary exhibition in 1983.

In 1987 she became Head of Art at the BL at a time when Colin St John Wilson’s new building, intended to house the major BL collections in a single building for the first time, was slowly taking shape on Euston Road. She raised the funds for the works of art for the new building, including Bill Woodrow’s Sitting On History, purchased for the British Library by Carl Djerassi and Diane Middlebrook in 1997. Her firm grasp of the artistic process enabled her to work creatively with the architect, and with Eduardo Paolozzi and Antony Gormley to produce the gates to the library and the bronze forecourt statue based on William Blake’s study of Isaac Newton, as well as the R B Kitaj tapestry, If Not, Not, that hangs in the main entrance, works on a suitably monumental scale to match the ambitions of the building.

It was at this time that she wrote her book on The King’s Library (1989) at the British Museum, as part of an ultimately unsuccessful campaign to keep George III’s book collection, given to the nation by George IV, in the magnificent purpose-designed room in the British Museum, rather than see it moved to Euston Road. She also edited Bookshop of the World: The Role of the Low Countries in the Book-Trade 1473—1941 (2000), and for more than a decade contributed to the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Elaine Margaret Paintin was born in Oxford in 1947. She read history (1966—9) at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, and then spent three years as Editor of the Journal of African Law. She returned to Oxford in 1972 to do a Diploma in Prehistoric Archaeology, before spending two years as Senior Editor for Archaeology at the publisher Elsevier Phaidon and then joining the British Museum. A true antiquary, her hunger for knowledge about the past knew no disciplinary boundaries, and was fed by a succession of inspiring teachers, including Mary Price, the legendary headmistress at Milham Ford School, and Humphrey Case and Barry Cunliffe at Oxford. Her radical streak was in evidence from an early age: she was secretary of the Oxford Young Liberals and a staunch supporter of the CND, and later in life she was a tireless upholder of the rights of her colleagues as Chair of the British Library Branch of the First Division Association, the top civil servants’ trade union, as well as a member of a community health council in Westminster.

Because she had herself mastered so many different branches of knowledge, Paintin was a firm opponent of those who tried to define anyone by their ‘specialism’. She was especially disdainful of those who made a mystique out of development and fundraising, believing that personality, aptitude and commitment to the cause were the best qualifications, a belief that was triumphantly borne out by her own success in this field. For on taking early retirement in 1997 she threw herself into pro bono work, most notably for the Institute of Historical Research (IHR). With the IHR Director, our Fellow Sir David Cannadine, she launched a huge fundraising campaign to safeguard the institute’s future, drumming up support from former historians now enjoying careers in banking, the law and accountancy, and raising £12 million in the process. At the time of her untimely death she had just been appointed to the IHR’s Advisory Council, and the institute now plans to set up the Elaine Paintin Memorial Fund in her memory.

She was also vigorous in her work as a trustee of the BL Friends, trustee and director of the Cartoon Art Museum, committee member of the King’s Library Advisory Group and a member of council and deputy chair of the Development Committee at the Society of Antiquaries of London, of which she was elected a Fellow in 2006.

Her expertise on treasure meant that in 2000 she was asked to conduct the first, and so far the only, review of the Treasure Act as a consultant in heritage law to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, and her recommendation, that the definition of treasure be extended to cover prehistoric base-metal hoards, was accepted by the Government, meaning that a much wider range of objects can now be saved for the nation.

From 2002 she was also director of the Marc Fitch Fund, a charity funding research and publication in the fields of archaeology, the history of art and architecture and cognate subjects. As such she made a huge difference to countless publishing projects through her strategic application of small sums of money that made the key difference between projects going ahead or not, from small publications by independent scholars to large national projects, such as the Victoria County History.

Her sudden death in St Thomas’s Hospital, London, having suffered a heart attack on December 6, took everyone by surprise: petite and always immaculately dressed, she never seemed to suffer illness, and was always full of energy. Sharp-witted and funny, she had a remarkably wide circle of friends, many of whom shared her passion for music and for history. Perhaps none was closer to her than her own daughter, Isabel, born in 1986; Paintin had separated from Isabel’s father not long after the birth and was a selfless, loving and supportive single parent. Her daughter survives her.

Elaine Paintin, heritage advocate, museum educator and charity administrator, was born on October 21, 1947. She died on December 9, 2010, aged 63.