The British Museum curator Ian Jenkins and I were unlikely allies. I remember, as a postgraduate student, thinking him terrifying – not just academically conservative (everyone whose heels I was snapping at in those days was liable to that charge) but potentially disapproving. Sixteen years later, he and I were going through the draft of my book
Classical Art: a Life History in his tiny office in the British Museum, paper everywhere. He was the only specialist in Greek art, other than my husband, whose (dis)approval I had sought on the whole book – and his advice was invaluable. He was a treasure trove of information, and gloriously irreverent with it. I gained more expansive vistas on all sorts of things – from classical sculpture to Hadrian’s hellenism to classicism in China, not to mention the merits of my typescript vis-à-vis others he was reading, and was ticked off for my ‘mild tendency to construct complex sentences’. I often think of Ian when I write, and was
It was Ian Jenkins’s mother, Lena, who suggested he should apply for the post of a junior research assistant in the department of Greek and Roman antiquities at the British Museum. On his appointment in 1978, he arrived at the grand portals in Bloomsbury, central London, in his Wiltshire boots, the tools of his recent experience as an apprentice stonemason slung in his belt, only to discover that the job was rather more academic than anticipated. He began as he intended to go on, turning tasks that others considered humdrum into gold mines of academic and public interest. Nimbly sidestepping internal conflicts and rivalries, he built collegiate teams within the department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, the department of prints and drawings, the British Museum Education Service, the Joint Association of Classical Teachers, the Hellenic Society and far beyond.