20 Facts About Ralph Merrifield

Ralph Merrifield was an English museum curator and archaeologist.

Ralph Merrifield began his career in 1930 as an assistant at Brighton Museum.

Ralph Merrifield produced a synthesis of known material on the archaeology of Roman London, published as The Roman City of London in 1965.

Ralph Merrifield was appointed senior keeper of the new Museum of London on its establishment in 1976, and soon after was promoted to deputy director.

Ralph Merrifield retired in 1978 but remained active, lecturing, and publishing The Archaeology of Ritual and Magic and further studies of Roman London.

Ralph Merrifield was a keen supporter of the Standing Conference on London Archaeology, a body designed to monitor the impact that English Heritage was having on the city's archaeology, which he believed to be negative.

Ralph Merrifield was born on 22 August 1913 in Temple Fortune, a suburb of north-west London that at the time was yet to be fully developed.

Ralph Merrifield's parents had married in 1912, and his father, Albert Merrifield, was a railway clerk, whereas his mother, Margaret, had "excellent qualifications and was experienced as a primary school teacher".

In 1940, during the Second World War, Ralph Merrifield was conscripted into the Royal Air Force, and in 1943 was transferred to its intelligence division, specialising in the interpretation of aerial photographs.

In 1950 Ralph Merrifield took a post as assistant keeper of the Guildhall Museum in London, a job that he would retain until 1975.

At the time the museum lacked premises, and Ralph Merrifield assisted its keeper, Norman Cook, in establishing an exhibit at the Royal Exchange in 1954.

In November 1956 Ralph Merrifield was sent to Accra in Ghana to establish the National Museum of Ghana.

Ralph Merrifield followed this with two works aimed at a general audience, Roman London, in which he looked at evidence for Romano-British occupation across the wider Greater London area, and The Archaeology of London, in which he surveyed the archaeological evidence of the region from the Palaeolithic through to the Early Middle Ages.

In 1975 the Guildhall Museum was amalgamated with the London Museum to become the Museum of London, and Ralph Merrifield became its senior keeper: he was promoted to the position of deputy director in 1977, and was responsible for designing the museum's first Roman gallery.

Merrifield retired in 1978, and a festschrift, entitled Collectanea Londiniensia: Studies in London Archaeology and History Presented to Ralph Merrifield, was published in his honour.

The historian of religion Hilda Ellis Davidson praised the "cautious and balanced arguments" of Ralph Merrifield's work, opining that it should be read by every archaeologist as a corrective to what she thought was their widespread ignorance of folklore.

Ralph Merrifield was uneasy with the changes made to London's archaeological establishment by English Heritage during the early 1990s, strongly supporting the creation of the Standing Conference on London Archaeology to monitor English Heritage's actions.

Ralph Merrifield continued to talk on archaeological subjects, and his final lecture, "Magic Protection of the Home", was given to extramural students in Northampton in December 1994.

Ralph Merrifield married Lysbeth Webb, a colleague at the Guildhall Museum, in 1951.

Ralph Merrifield came to be known as the "father of London's modern archaeology", the archaeologist Harvey Sheldon describing him as the "father figure" of London archaeology.