At Home - Bill Bryson [237]
Punch cartoon of John Lubbock, architect of the Bank Holidays Act and the Ancient Monuments Protection Act (photo credit 19.1)
As well as being a banker and keen entomologist, Lubbock was also a distinguished archaeologist, a trustee of the British Museum, a member of Parliament, the vice chancellor (or head) of London University, and an author of popular books, among rather a lot else. As an archaeologist, he coined the terms palaeolithic, mesolithic, and neolithic, and was one of the first to use the handy new word prehistoric. As a politician and member of Parliament for the Liberal Party, he became a champion of the working man. He introduced legislation to limit the hours worked in shops to ten hours a day, and in 1871 he pushed through—virtually single-handedly—the Bank Holidays Act, which introduced the breathtakingly radical idea of a paid secular holiday for workers.* It is almost impossible now to imagine what excitement this caused. Before Lubbock’s new law, most employees were excused from work on Good Friday, Christmas Day or Boxing Day (but not generally both), and Sundays, and that was it. The idea of having a bonus day off—and in summer at that—was almost too thrilling to bear. Lubbock was widely agreed to be the most popular man in England, and bank holidays for a long time were affectionately known as “St. Lubbock’s days.” No one in his age would ever have supposed that his name would one day be forgotten.
But it is for one other innovation that Lubbock is of importance to us here: the preservation of ancient monuments. In 1872, Lubbock learned from a rector in rural Wiltshire that a big chunk of Avebury, an ancient circle of stones considerably larger than Stonehenge (though not so picturesquely composed), was about to be cleared away for new housing. Lubbock bought the threatened land, along with two other ancient monuments nearby, West Kennett Long Barrow and Silbury Hill (an enormous manmade mound—the largest in Europe), but clearly he couldn’t protect every worthy thing that grew threatened, so he began to press for legislation to safeguard historic treasures. Realizing this ambition was not nearly as straightforward as common sense would suggest it ought to be, because the ruling Tories under Benjamin Disraeli saw it as an egregious assault on property rights. The idea of giving a government functionary the right to come onto the land of a person of superior caste and start telling him how to manage his estate was preposterous—outrageous. Lubbock persevered, however, and in 1882, under the new Liberal government of William Ewart Gladstone, he managed to push through Parliament the Ancient Monuments Protection Act—a landmark piece of legislation if ever there was one.
Because the protection of monuments was such a sensitive issue, it was agreed that the first inspector of ancient monuments should be someone landowners could respect, ideally a large landowner himself. It so happened that Lubbock knew just the person—the man who was about to become his new father-in-law, none other than Augustus Pitt Rivers.
Their relationship through marriage must have been as surprising to them as it is to us. For one thing, the two men were nearly the same age. It just happened that the recently widowed Lubbock met Pitt Rivers’s daughter Alice on a weekend stay at Castle Howard in the early 1880s. Lubbock was nearly fifty, Alice just eighteen. What caused a spark