Ralph Pinder-Wilson

The following obituary first appeared in The Times on 10 November 2008. 

Ralph Pinder-Wilson was a distinguished Persian scholar, Islamic archaeologist and museum curator.

He was born in 1919 in Wimbledon. His family had historical connections with the East India Company, and his father, a naval officer, compiled several pilot’s guides to the West African and South American coasts. He was educated at Westminster School and in 1937 he was elected Westminster Scholar at Christ Church, Oxford, where he read history and was granted a war emergency honours degree.

On the outbreak of war he was attached to the Indian Army and posted to India, where he learnt Urdu. He was later posted to Tripolitania (in what is now Libya) and Egypt, and served in Palestine, Jordan, Italy and Greece, ending the war as a captain. On demobilisation he returned to Oxford to read Oriental languages, Arabic and Persian.

On graduating in 1949 he joined the Department of Oriental Antiquities in the British Museum, first as assistant and then as deputy keeper, and remained there till 1976. India, Oxford and the British Museum were the three loves of his life.

The department in his time, and the neighbouring Department of Prints and Drawings, was full of larger-than-life characters, with a fair degree of eccentricity, as well as outstanding scholarship. Though modest and self-effacing by disposition, Pinder-Wilson was admirably suited for the post, having as sharp an eye for objects as he had for people. Like his colleagues, the Indianist Douglas Barrett, the sinologist William Watson and Basil Gray during his long keepership, he was of a time when scholarship was defined not by narrow specialisation but by a comprehensive knowledge of art and artefacts from the whole of what, in those innocent days, was known as “the Orient”.

One of his outstanding exploits was, with Douglas Barrett, the identification of a long-lost masterpiece of Islamic art, the Vaso Vescovali, a silver-inlaid Persian bronze of the early 13th century which had been published by the Vatican librarian, Michelangelo Lanci, in 1845 but had then disappeared. It is now one of the treasures of the British Museum and was published by Pinder-Wilson in the British Museum Quarterly in 1951.

His skill as an epigraphist made him a valued colleague on excavations. He spent a season (1959) on Storm Rice’s excavations at Harran in southeastern Turkey, a site that in Late Antiquity had been notorious as a stronghold of the star-worshipping Sabaeans who nevertheless achieved prominence in the Baghdad Caliphate in the ninth century. In 1966 he took part in the first season of the British Institute of Persian Studies’ excavations at Siraf on the Persian Gulf, a port that had flourished in the early centuries of Islam as a commercial centre rivalling medieval Basra and controlling the rich trade between the caliphate in Baghdad, the Indian sub-continent and the Far East. He dug for several seasons at Fustat (Old Cairo) and later in his career took a close interest in the British excavations of the late 1970s of the citadel of Kandahar in Afghanistan.

It was not merely his wide expertise, however, that made him so welcome as a colleague: he had an on-the-spot knowledge of much of the Middle East, he had an enviable command of the languages, he submitted to the hardships of excavation life without complaint and by his example did much to maintain morale in campaigns that frequently provoked controversy and at times may have appeared to lack direction.

In 1976 Pinder-Wilson was appointed Director of the British Institute of Afghan Studies in Kabul. It was a return to the Greater India that he had come to love during the war. He cannot, however, have had many illusions. Afghanistan, which was already showing signs of instability, has always struck travellers as immensely odd and distinctly reminiscent of the North-West Frontier under the Raj. Movement within the country was still largely unrestricted, however, and he exploited thoroughly the opportunities his position afforded of travel to its remotest corners. Among the chief achievements of his time as director were the restoration of the Buddhist stupa at Guldara and surveys of Ghaznavid and Ghurid monuments in Afghanistan, which were particularly dear to his heart.

The situation changed radically with the Russian invasion of 1979 and the establishment of a puppet Government under Babrak Karmal. In these conditions it is doubtful that the institute could have continued to operate satisfactorily for long, but he remained as one of the few Westerners in Kabul. Matters were brought to a head by its closure early in 1982, on the ground that it was a cover for espionage, and his trial and a ten-year prison sentence on a trumped-up charge of attempting to smuggle Afghans out of the country. He shared his cell with a stool-pigeon, a taxi-driver from Panjhir, with whom he would converse to improve his already impressive command of the Afghan Persian dialect, Dari. His captors, trained in the already outmoded techniques of brain-washing, tried to make him incriminate himself by writing confessions of guilt, which because his offences were imaginary, and his imagination inevitably failed him, all displeased them. He was not conspicuously ill-treated, though once, he said, in the course of an interrogation that was going nowhere, the interrogator threw a piece of chalk at him. In later years he was quite ready to speak of his experiences but he was never heard to utter any complaint about his ordeal, proof of exemplary fortitude, in ultimately ludicrous but frightening and depressing conditions.

His family and friends campaigned energetically for his release. The effectiveness of any riposte by the British Government — which did not recognise the Karmal regime — was hampered by the lack of information, which had mostly to be gleaned from the Soviet news agency, Tass, and the Kabul press, and by the refusal of consular access to him, while protests through official channels were simply ignored. Freedom came unexpectedly. The MP, George Galloway, who was about to go to Kabul, was asked to raise the case with the authorities. His intervention was successful, and Pinder-Wilson was released on July 15, 1982.

For the first six months of 1968 he had been a visiting Fellow of All Souls, working on a monograph on Islamic glass. After his return to England from Afghanistan he also spent a profitable year (1982-1983) as visiting Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, and the year after a semester as Regent Professor at UCLA Berkeley.

The following two decades were especially fruitful. He was much in demand as an examiner and although he did not hold a teaching position he put his great knowledge and experience at the disposition of colleagues and countless graduate students.

He continued to work on some of the more recondite aspects of the Islamic arts — ivory, jade, rock-crystal and glass — of which he had in the course of his career made a speciality, though, sadly, his important work on monuments and memorials in the Khalili Collection remains incomplete.

He was a valued consultant on Islamic art at Christie’s, the auction house, and to the collection of Shaykh Nasser al-Sabah in Kuwait. But, rather than these activities and his written works, his true memorial is his unfailing kindness and generosity to so many friends and colleagues.

He was an enthusiastic chamber musician, playing both the violin and the clavichord, in an ensemble directed by the ebullient Teddy Croft-Murray, the former Keeper of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum. He converted to Catholicism at the age of 18 and remained a devout Catholic for the rest of his life.

Ralph Pinder-Wilson, Persian scholar, Islamic archaeologist and museum curator, was born on January 17, 1919. He died on October 6, 2008, aged 89.