A great, gruffly-spoken bear of a man, Sheppard Frere was one of the giants of British archaeology. He made the crucial excavations of Verulamium, the Roman city straddling Watling Street at St Albans, and was the author of the most authoritative account of Roman Britain. Frere succeeded the equally intimidating Sir Mortimer Wheeler at the London University Institute of Archaeology in 1955, and directed the excavations which Wheeler had begun.
He was the last of a generation of archaeologists who, like Wheeler, had begun their careers as self-taught amateurs. He was a great field archaeologist, and so meticulous a recorder of what he found on every dig that Wheeler memorably criticised his “elephantine” slowness in publishing the first volume of the Verulamium work, which appeared only in 1972, 11 years after the excavations were concluded. Two more volumes followed, the last one in 1984.
It is acknowledged that Frere improved on Wheeler’s methods, both in the field and in careful recording of evidence. Frere had studied classics and ancient history, and had come to archaeology through practical excavation done in his spare time while working as a schoolmaster. In particular he had gained recognition for excavations he led in Canterbury immediately after the Second World War in areas damaged by German bombs.
It meant exploring dangerous cellars and going down into deep, narrow trenches, a task requiring nerve and stamina. His wartime work with the fire service proved invaluable.
Frere led the institute, at first as reader then later as professor, in a transformative period. It followed a brief spell as a lecturer in archaeology at the University of Manchester, and preceded his 17 years as professor of the archaeology of the Roman Empire at Oxford University and the publication in 1967 of his seminal work Britannia: A History of Roman Britain.
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Taking on a group of postgraduate students after nearly a decade as a housemaster at Lancing College, West Sussex, proved a challenge: “It was a hard slog,” he reflected, “to gain the necessary knowledge of the subject and to keep a lecture ahead.” He inherited from Wheeler a large room at the institute’s headquarters, St John’s Lodge in the Inner Circle in Regent’s Park. “The lodge’s only disadvantage was the occasional descent of thick fog, which after dark made leaving the park a matter of some difficulty,” Frere recalled.
He was also an energetic exponent of a new phenomenon, the “rescue dig”, made necessary in the early postwar period by the radical redesigning and rebuilding of towns and by an ambitious road-building programme. His own series of intensive eight-week stints each summer at Verulamium, done with more than a hundred assistants, paid and unpaid, had been occasioned by a road-widening project that cut through the middle of the site.
In 1957, on examining part of the Devil’s Highway, the Roman great west road, on heathland near Bagshot in Surrey, he was so shocked by the damage that afforestation had done to “some very interesting cuttings where the road encountered steep gradients along its course” that he wrote an angry letter to The Times: about the “fine engineered terrace cut into the hillside by the Romans”. He wrote: “In a year or two all trace will have disappeared in a dense tangle of firs. I am sure, Sir, you and many of your readers will join me in deploring this act of vandalism.” He was disconcerted to discover that the heath belonged not to the Forestry Commission as he had assumed, but to the Crown.
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Frere travelled Britain to save archaeological evidence. A particular interest in how the Romans conquered the country took him north to the Roman fort at Strageath on Tayside, and west to Cirencester in Gloucestershire. At Cirencester he was instrumental in setting up an excavation committee in 1958 to explore the Roman military defences before many of them were obliterated by new houses and sewers.
Throughout his life Frere was a voracious reader of whodunnits and it was the same desire to solve a mystery that drove his enthusiasm for excavating. He kept spades, trowels and cumbersome archaeological tools in the back seat of a vintage Rolls-Royce. At Verulamium he would tour the several sites in the dig area in his car and once, in front of his students, was given a stern ticking off by two policemen for parking in a thoughtless position on the new main road. Frere had sprung out of the driver’s door to reach an area of interest on foot. Students, keeping their heads down in a trench nearby, considered offering him their bicycles. His apology, however, mollified the officers and no further action was taken.
On the day after the Great Train Robbery in 1963, Frere’s passage through a village in Oxfordshire with colleagues, dressed ready for a dig at Dorchester on Thames, prompted a police investigation after a woman reported seeing a large car, travelling at speed early in the morning, with “four rough-looking men” inside.
When he finally stopped digging, Frere passed on his trowel, with his initial “F” branded on the handle, to one of his former students, Charles Higham, who became professor of anthropology at the University of Otago in New Zealand and had dug with him at Verulamium.
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Sheppard Sunderland Frere was born in 1916, the son of Noel Gray Frere, a provincial commissioner with the colonial service in Sierra Leone. Frere’s great-great-great grandfather was the 18th-century antiquary John Frere, who discovered Stone Age tools in Suffolk. Frere was also related to the 19th-century colonial administrator Sir Henry Edward Bartle Frere.
He was the eldest of three brothers — the others being Bartle and David, who was also interested in archaeology. As boys they once walked more than a hundred miles from Sussex to Stonehenge. David died of leukaemia aged 28 in 1947; Bartle died in 2002.
Frere was educated at Lancing and went up to Magdalene College, Cambridge in 1935 to read classics, graduating in 1938. His father wanted him to join the colonial service, but at the last minute he found a teaching job in Epsom and enjoyed digging for archaeological specimens in his spare time.
In 1959 he married Janet Hoare, 14 years his junior, whom he had met while a housemaster at Lancing. She was the sister of one of the boys in Frere’s house. She trained as an architect, and at Verulamium and for Britannia: a History of Roman Britain helped with drawings and illustrations.
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From 1966 the couple made their home in a rambling vicarage near Abingdon, where their generous hospitality and cream teas became legendary among students. He and Janet had a son, Bartle, and a daughter, Sarah. Bartle became an airline pilot and Sarah a legal secretary. His wife and children survive him,.
One legacy of Frere’s wartime service, about which he could not be persuaded to speak, was a dread of house fires, and he always put a guard in front of the open fire. This did not, however, stop him puffing enthusiastically on his pipe.
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In his study he kept a wooden drawing-table, and drew in ink with dip-pen nibs on linen paper which could be reused by boiling. He was known on occasions to blow his nose on any spare pieces left lying around. He carried on digging into his later years, and was still visiting excavations in his nineties.
Professor Sheppard Frere, CBE, archaeologist, was born on August 23, 1916. He died on February 26, 2015, aged 98