Anniversary Address

Extract

I stand before you this afternoon as the thirty-second lineal successor to Peter Le Neve, herald, genealogist, and antiquary, chosen in 1707 to be the first President of the ‘new creation’ and reputedly a former President, as far back as 1689, when he would still have been on the right side of 30, of the last of the forerunner societies whose intermittent existence links our present body with the circle of Stow and Lambarde, Cotton and Camden. If filial piety to an alma mater is not out of place on such an occasion, may I say that one of the special pleasures you have given me, a Londoner born and bred, by electing me as your thirty-third President, is the thought that there is one thing which Peter Le Neve and I and no other two Presidents have in common: we were nursed upon the self-same hill, though admittedly the nursing of the 1670s and the 1920s took place on opposite sides of the Walbrook. I find another source of pleasure, and indeed of pride, in reflecting that the occupant of this chair in the days when I made my first three visits to these rooms in 1932 was also my predecessor as Chief Inspector; and if it is to the first Inspector of Ancient Monuments, Pitt Rivers, that we look back as the father of modern field archaeology, it is the second, Sir Charles Peers, successively Secretary, Director, and President of the Antiquaries from 1908 to 1934, who deserves to be remembered as the initiator of Britain's approach to the conservation of standing monuments, an approach which brought renown to his branch of the public service and set the standards which are still its guide today.