The two wives of Professor James RB ‘Jim’ Stewart were his equals in fieldwork and the recording of finds from the varied Australian excavations of Early and Middle Bronze Age Cyprus directed by Stewart between the late 1930s and Jim’s death in 1962. However, neither gained significant recognition for this work during their lifetime. Jim’s first wife, Eleanor Neal, co-excavated and co-published the first Australian-directed archaeological excavations in Cyprus at Vounous between 1937-8. This blog entry will explore the life of Eve Dray, Jim’s second wife, to help reassess her importance in Cypriot archaeological studies.

Dorothy Evelyn ‘Eve’ Dray (1914-2005) was born in London to Margery and Tom Dray, an English surveyor, who worked in various capacities in places such as Egypt, Belgium and eventually Cyprus, taking his wife and daughter with him.  Eve studied French and Mathematics at Royal Holloway College between 1933-37, but she discovered an interest in archaeology when she learnt pot mending and drawing with Mortimer Wheeler at the Institute of Archaeology in London. Her skills were soon recognised. Eve worked on Wheeler’s excavations at Maiden Castle in Dorset, serving in 1936 under site supervisor Joan du Plat Taylor who encouraged Eve to join her team in Cyprus.
 
Eve found that her work with the Cyprus Museum and her skills as an archaeological illustrator became highly valued on the island. One project she worked on was Vounous with the young Jim and Eleanor Stewart. Along with Joan and Sydney-born Margaret ‘Kim’ Collingridge, Eve was a participant in the excavations of tombs at Tsambres and Aphendrika (Dray and du Plat Taylor 1939). The adventures of the team were sensationally reported in the Australian media at the time: “Archaeologist mistaken for a spy” Sydney Morning Herald 15 December 1938.
 
In 1939 Tom Dray inherited a property and land at Tjikos in the north of Cyprus, assets that would be central to the rest of Eve’s life. The building came into his possession from William Scorseby Routledge, the widower of Katherine Routledge, the first female archaeologist to work in Polynesia. Eve would later assist in the tracking down of some of Routledge’s lost archaeological documents. The house at Tjikos over time became the base for much of Eve and Jim’s fieldwork on the island.

After the war, Eve was reacquainted with Jim during his 1947 visit to Cyprus in preparation for his new teaching position at The University of Sydney. The two travelled the island to scope opportunities for Jim’s proposed Australian Cyprus Expedition and became lovers. As Jim left for Australia, he hastily devised plans to get Eve to Sydney too. In the intervening months she acted as his ‘agent’ on the island, acquiring antiquities for the Nicholson Museum and his personal collection. In Sydney she would join the now-separated Stewart, taking up the position of Technical Assistant at the Nicholson Museum. After their marriage in 1952, Eve’s employment with the museum ceased and the two relocated to Jim’s inherited manor house ‘Mt Pleasant’ near Bathurst, where Eve worked meticulously mending and illustrating finds. ​

​The Stewarts conducted fieldwork campaigns in the 1950s in Cyprus on a series of Early and Middle Cypriot burials which were not on the ambitious scale that Jim had initially planned for his Australian fieldwork projects. By the time of the couple’s final excavations at Karmi in 1961, Jim was very ill, and he passed away in 1962. 

Eve’s personal reminiscences recorded in 1999 for the fourth conference on Cypriot Studies at La Trobe University have now been published (Stewart 2013) as have some of her letters (Powell 2013). She died in a nursing home in 2005. Her archives are held in the University of New England Heritage Centre.
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Neither Eleanor nor Eve ever held an academic position, nor were their contributions to archaeology particularly celebrated during their lifetime beyond a general admiration for Eve’s determination to promote Jim’s legacy and complete his work. Thankfully, a greater acknowledgement of their respective contributions to Cypriot archaeology has finally begun. 

​Read The Mrs Stewarts. Part one - Eleanor Neal

​Two women, Eleanor Stewart (nee Neal) and Eve Stewart (nee Dray), had a profound impact upon the development of Cypriot archaeological studies in Australia, although their contribution has often been overlooked.  James R.B. “Jim” Stewart (1913-1962) is regarded as the founder of Cypriot archaeology in Australia and a major contributor towards an understanding of the Early Cypriot period. Within the past decade he has been the subject of an international conference and the Nicholson Museum exhibition Aphrodite’s Island.
 
Unfortunately, Eleanor and Eve, his two wives and archaeological partners, have not reached the same level of recognition for their pioneering efforts in Cypriot archaeology and in Eve’s case, keeping Jim’s legacy alive. However, the process of finally recognising this contribution has begun in recent years following the publication of a biography of James and Eve based upon Eve’s letters (Powell 2013) and a short summary of Eleanor’s life (Merrillees 2013).

Eleanor Mary Neal (1911-2002) was born in Somerset, England and worked for a time as a teacher. She met James Stewart through her elder brother who was at Cambridge where James read archaeology between 1931-1934. The pair worked on Sir Flinders Petrie’s final excavation season at Tell el-‘Ajjul in Dec 1933 - Jan 1934; it was the first fieldwork experience for both. Eve and Jim became engaged in April 1934 and married on 1 July 1935; using the Neal family home at Kingsdon in Somerset as their base until the outbreak of the Second World War. Although not formally trained as an archaeologist, by the time Jim took up a scholarship at the British School of Ankara in 1936, Eleanor had become a talented draftsperson, photographer and note-keeper.
 
They had first visited Cyprus in 1935 after a trip to Australia. Both fell in love with the island, and in 1937 returned to excavate a series of 85 tombs in the Early Bronze Age cemetery of Bellapis Vounous near Kyrenia. Eleanor not only worked in partnership with Jim during the excavations, but also on the recording and publication of finds and on an exhibition which was held at the Institute of Archaeology in Regent’s Park in 1939. Virginia Grace (The American School of Classical Studies, Athens) had visited the pair in the field and admired their ability to maintain complex catalogues of finds in their cat-filled workrooms in the medieval Abbey at Bellapais at the same time as digging (Powell 2013, 58).
 
Jim spent most of the war in prisoner-of-war camps in Germany; Eleanor with the Women’s Voluntary Services. At end of the war, the couple reunited in England and welcomed the birth of their only son in 1946. Shortly after, Jim took up a teaching role at the University of Sydney, moving to Sydney without his family. He returned to Cyprus alone in 1947 where he began an affair with Eve Dray and the marriage with Eleanor would soon end after she joined him in Sydney. As James wrote to Professor Einar Gjerstad in June 1947, “It looks as if Eleanor and I are going to break up our marriage—we have failed to adjust ourselves since the war, and it is no use continuing.  If it does come to a divorce this year, I shall marry Eve Dray, the girl who has been helping me with the drawings for Vounous and Lapithos.”
 
The final publication of the Vounous material appeared in 1950, co-authored by both Eleanor and Jim. It was her only writing on the archaeology of Cyprus but the contribution was significant. Jim made it clear the volume was a partnership: ‘the work is divided between us. My wife has been responsible for nearly all of the cataloguing of finds, and I have done the description of the graves’ (Stewart & Stewart, 1950: 10). However, because the work was published as E. and J.R. Stewart and the timing of its publication a decade after its main composition, many have erroneously assumed it was the work of Eve and not Eleanor. As Eve herself would later write (Merrillees 2013): ‘Eleanor might be given more credit; like me, she was the Junior Partner in Jim’s work: she did much of the Vounous cataloguing; many of the notes … are in her handwriting.’

After their divorce, Eleanor would remarry in 1952 but avoided archaeology completely. She married Sydney barrister Kenneth Jacobs who would eventually serve as a Justice in the High Court of Australia. From 1979 Lady Eleanor and Sir Kenneth Jacobs lived in the United Kingdom. Eleanor never revisited Cyprus although it is said that the she continued to have fond memories of the island (Merrillees 2013).

• Merrillees, R.S., ‘Eleanor Stewart remembered’, in: A.B. Knapp, J.M. Webb & A. McCarthy (eds), J.R.B. Stewart: an archaeological legacy (SIMA CXXXIX: Uppsala 2013), ix-xii
• Powell, J., Love’s Obsession: The Lives and Archaeology of Jim and Eve Stewart (Kent Town 2013)
• Stewart, E. & J. Stewart, Vounous 1937–38: Field-Report on the Excavations sponsored by the British School of Archaeology at Athens (Lund 1950)
• Stewart, J.R., ‘The Early Cypriote Bronze Age’, in: P. Dikaios & J.R. Stewart, The Swedish Cyprus Expedition Volume IV Part IA. The Stone Age and the Early Bronze Age in Cyprus, (Lund 1962), 205-401

 

Editorial note
​Unfortunately photographs of Eleanor are elusive both from her early life and long marriage to Sir Kenneth Jacobs KBE QC. No known images of Eleanor are currently in the public domain.