Martin Robertson

Robertson worked between 1911 and 2004 across classical archaeologist, university teacher, poet, art historian and archaeologist and 2 further recorded occupations. Every statement below returns to a source shown in the evidence panel; where the record is silent or divided, the article says so instead of resolving it.

Martin Robertson studied at Trinity College. The recorded working language is English, Latin and Ancient Greek. The field of work recorded is archaeology, art history and poetry. Employment is recorded with University College London, University of Oxford and British Museum. Distinctions recorded are Kenyon Medal.

• Birth Name — Charles Martin Robertson • Born — 11 September 1911 • Birthplace — Pangbourne, United Kingdom • Died — 26 December 2004 • Place of death — Cambridge, United Kingdom • Education — * The Leys School, Cambridge • Trinity College, Cambridge • Workplaces — British Museum University College London University of Oxford • Notable Students — Lisa French • Father — Donald Struan Robertson • Mother — Petica Coursolles Robertson • Resting Place — Cambridge City Cemetery • Discipline — Classics • Sub Discipline — Ancient Greek art • Notable Works — A History of Greek Art (1975) • Relatives — * Agnes Arber (aunt) • Margaret Hills (aunt) • Giles Henry Robertson (brother) • Children — 6, including Stephen Robertson and Thomas Dolby

Charles Martin Robertson was born in Pangbourne, Berkshire, on 11 September 1911. He was the eldest child of Donald Struan Robertson and Petica Coursolles, Jones. His mother maintained a literary salon; his father was a classicist, who had been appointed as an assistant lecturer at the University of Cambridge in the year of Robertson's birth and became the university's Regius Professor of Greek in 1930. Robertson was known as "Martin" throughout his life. Robertson attended The Leys School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read classics. His university contemporaries included the art historian Dale Trendall and the politician Enoch Powell, as well as Kim Philby, later a spy for the Soviet Union within the British Secret Intelligence Service, who became Robertson's friend. Robertson visited the British School at Athens (BSA) and attended his first excavations in 1930, in the summer before his matriculation at Trinity, at Perachora in the Corinthia, under the directorship of the archaeologist Humfry Payne, the BSA's director. He graduated from Trinity in 1934 with a First in part two of tripos, having achieved relatively poor results in his first year and a Second in his second. Later, in 1934–1936, Robertson moved to Athens as a student of the BSA, still under Payne's directorship. His colleagues at the BSA included Romilly Jenkins, Nicholas Hammond, Robert Cook, Peter Megaw and Thomas Dunbabin. While in Athens, he worked on Iron Age material from the excavation of Ithaca. He published a short article in The Journal of Hellenic Studies in 1935, on a skyphos painted by the fifth-century BCE Pan Painter: his father had introduced him to the vase, and both Robertsons had independently identified it as the painter's handiwork.

Robertson unsuccessfully applied to be made a fellow of Trinity in 1936: he was required to submit written work in support of his application, and did so on the material from Ithaca, but his examiner mistakenly sent Robertson's file to the Oxford art historian John Beazley, who was supporting Dale Trendall's competing application. Robertson instead took a post in September 1936 as Assistant Keeper in the Greek and Roman department of the British Museum, cataloguing the pottery from the excavations at Al-Mina in Syria led by Leonard Woolley in 1936–1937. In 1937–1938, staff in the department carried out an aggressive cleaning of the Elgin Marbles, using copper tools and abrasive silicon carbide, at the request of the entrepreneur Joseph Duveen; Duveen wanted the sculptures, originally painted, to look whiter for their display in a new gallery which he was funding. Three members of staff left the museum's employment as a result; Robertson was not involved, and so kept his job (leaving him as the only member of the department). He was, however, demoted in seniority. As a consequence of the departures, Denys Haynes was recruited as an Assistant Keeper, and the art historian Bernard Ashmole, the Yates Professor of Classical Art and Archaeology at University College London, was brought in on a part-time basis to run the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities. Haynes and Robertson became lifelong friends, and Robertson later wrote of the "precious apprenticeship" he gained from working with Ashmole. Robertson attended a classical conference in Berlin in August 1939, on behalf of the British Museum; he was recalled shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. From 23 August, he took part in the removal of material from the museum to London Underground stations and country houses, so as to protect the artefacts from bombing. In 1940, he enlisted in the British Army as a member of the Royal Signals, but was soon transferred to the Intelligence Corps and trained to work in cryptanalysis at Bletchley Park. Sparkes later wrote that his military service was largely unsuccessful and characterised by "mind-numbing boredom". In late 1942, shortly after the end of the Second Battle of El Alamein in November, he was moved to the Secret Intelligence Service and sent to Cairo to work with Alan Wace, a fellow archaeologist and former director of the BSA, who had requested Robertson's assistance in carrying out intelligence work in the British embassy there. Due to an administrative mistake, Robertson was transferred to Naples rather than to Athens in 1943–1944, and later served in Salonica in Greece alongside Philby. Robertson left military service in 1946, and returned to the British Museum, where he assisted in returning the evacuated collections to the galleries. He resigned in 1948 to succeed Ashmole as Yates Professor at UCL. During his tenure in London, he began to grow a beard, but was ordered to stop by his superiors: his obituarist Brian Sparkes wrote that they were concerned that he was displaying "arty" inclinations considered unbecoming of a professor. He was a visiting fellow of the BSA for the 1957–1958 academic year. He published his first book, Greek Painting, in 1959. It used the surviving Greek paintings on vases and other artistic works to reconstruct now-lost frescoes described by ancient authors. Between 1959 and 1968, he was chair of the governing council of the BSA. In 1961, Robertson again succeeded Ashmole, this time as Lincoln Professor of Classical Archaeology and Art at the University of Oxford, in which role he served until his retirement in 1978. He edited the second volume of the BSA's excavations at Perachora in 1962, following the deaths of Payne (who had conducted the excavations) and of the editors initially appointed to publish the work. In 1968–1969, he was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey; he also held a visiting appointment at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles in 1980. In 1992, he published The Art of Vase-Painting in Classical Athens, continuing and concluding his scholarly interest in Athenian painting. From 1994, Robertson suffered from Guillain–Barré syndrome and myasthenia gravis. He died of cardiovascular disease and bronchopneumonia at home in Cambridge on 26 December 2004, and was buried in Cambridge City Cemetery.

As a poet Robertson published various collections, including Crooked Connections (1970), For Rachel (1972), A Hot Bath at Bedtime (1975), and The Sleeping Beauty's Prince (1977). Boardman described his poetry as "personal, often witty and sensitive, [and] much admired by many". He also published translations of Greek poetry, including one of a fragment of an erotic work by Archilochus discovered in 1974.

Robertson's mother was killed in 1941 while serving as an air-raid warden in Cambridge. His paternal aunt, Agnes Arber, was a botanist: she was the third woman and the first female life scientist to be granted membership of the Royal Society. Another paternal aunt was Margaret Hills, a suffragist organiser and the first woman to sit on Stroud Urban District Council. His brother, Giles Henry Robertson, was a professor of art history at the University of Edinburgh. Robertson married Theodosia (known as Cecil; Spring Rice) on 4 September 1942: the couple had six children, including the computer scientist Stephen and the musician Thomas Dolby. Their first child, Lucy, was born while Robertson was posted to Cairo, and raised by Cecil in Iken in Suffolk. While in Suffolk, the Robertsons became friends with the composer Benjamin Britten and his partner, the singer Peter Pears. Cecil died in an accident in 1984. Robertson remarried in 1988, to Louise Berge (née Holstein), who had been his graduate student at Oxford in the late 1960s. She was diagnosed with tongue cancer shortly after Robertson's death, and died in February 2022.

* * * * * * * * *

* * * *

Martin Robertson was born on 11 September 1911 in Cambridge. Robertson held the nationality of United Kingdom. Robertson was educated at Trinity College. Married to: Theodosia Spring Rice and Louisa Holstein. Recorded father: Donald Struan Robertson. Recorded mother: Petica Jones. Recorded child: Lucy Petica Robertson, Stephen Robertson, Matthew Nicolas Robertson, Catherine Julie Robertson, Dominick Henry Robertson and Thomas Dolby. Recorded sibling: Giles Robertson. Robertson worked as classical archaeologist, university teacher, poet and art historian, and the authority record catalogues a further 3 occupations under the same name, among them archaeologist, translator and writer. Robertson was employed by University College London, University of Oxford and British Museum. Robertson worked in English, Latin and Ancient Greek.

The record carries the affiliation itself; it makes no claim about Robertson's standing within the field beyond what those bodies state.