John Robert Mortimer – The Indiana Jones of the Burial Mounds….

Some people are able to look back at their life and point specifically to a place in time when their life was changed – it could be an event, a place or a person. For John Robert Mortimer, amateur archaeologist extraordinaire, it appears that it was two places during one event. 

J. R. Mortimer was born on a farm in Fimber, East Yorkshire in 1825 and like many of his contemporaries, his formal education finished at the age of 12 or 13. He had received a typical village school education at Fridaythorpe.

There is a marvellous account of his boyhood – “A Victorian Boyhood on the Wolds – The Recollections of J. R. Mortimer”, edited by J. D. Hicks [Ref: L.9.52] which gives a detailed account of his childhood but also offers an historical insight into a Victorian childhood in a rural setting.

In this book, Mortimer recounts that it was astronomy and not archaeology that was his first true love. He had been lent two books on the subject by a family friend and this fired his imagination.  He bought an achromatic object glass from an opticians in York and with the assistance of his village blacksmith with respect to the tripod, he was able to make a rudimentary telescope.

A visit to the Greenwich Observatory in 1851 made him realise that to pursue astronomy further, he would have to buy a more expensive instrument which was beyond his means.  He also admitted [like me!] that maths was not his strongest subject and this would also be a hindrance.

Maybe the planets were all aligned in his favour……on the same visit to London [he had gone to two friends for a fortnight] he visited the Great Exhibition of 1851 and The British Museum.  Mortimer recounts that the trip to both these venues transformed his life and immediately he abandoned his first love of astronomy to that of geology and archaeology.  He recalled that:

“This being my first visit to London, I was overjoyed and bewildered with the wonderful things I saw. The marvellous treasures in the Exhibition (Crystal Palace), and the unrivalled geological and archaeological collections in the British Museum, were of the greatest pleasure and interest to me, and I can truly say originated and stimulated my future scientific taste through life.”

The Great Exhibition of 1851 ran from May to October of that year, with six million people passing thorough the “crystal doors”.  As many readers will be aware it managed to turn a profit and the proceeds were used to build a complex of museums in South Kensington, London.  This included the Science, Natural History and Victoria and Albert Museums, as well as the Imperial College of Science, the Royal Colleges of Art, Music and Organists and not forgetting the Royal Albert Hall.

The British Museum was established in 1752, largely based on the collections of the Irish physician and scientist, Sir Hans Sloane and was the first public national museum in the world.

After this life changing visit, J. R. Mortimer, along with his brother, Robert, began searching the fields around their local area for geological specimens and prehistoric artefacts. They also encouraged local farm workers to do the same. Thomas Sheppard, Curator of Hull City Museums, was later to write that -

‘in those days many farm servants spent their evenings and Sundays in walking up and down the fields, finding flints. Basket fulls [sic] were often brought to their office at Fimber’

They even had hand bills printed which offered rewards for “finds” made…..this incentive proved very popular to the point where prehistoric flint implements were called “Mortimers” in many of the Wolds villages!

In adult life he operated as a corn merchant, moving to the nearby larger town of Driffield in 1869.  His business included trade in seed, manure and fertilizer, as well as malt kilns and a brewery.  His true passion was archeology and during his lifetime he excavated over 300 burial mounds. It is widely recognised that his definitive work or “Magnum opus” on the barrow explorations that he published in 1905 – “Forty Years’ Researches in British and Saxon Burial Mounds of East Yorkshire” [L.571.92] – was an astounding and extensive legacy which has stood the test of time.

The text is a series of individual site reports which is enhanced by an incredible series of over a thousand scaled illustrations of objects.  These are even more remarkable given they were prepared by J R Mortimer’s eldest daughter, Agnes, who [as Mortimer himself acknowledged]

‘from the time she was thirteen years of age until she was nineteen, devoted many of her leisure hours to the compilation of this, which at her age, must have been a tedious and irksome task’  [photo 1]. 

J R Mortimer's acknowledgement to his daughter, Agnes, from A Victorian Boyhood on the Wolds – The Recollections of J. R. Mortimer”, edited by J. D. Hicks [Ref: L.9.52]

She certainly deserves credit and recognition by today’s archaeologists for her brilliant draftsmanship [photos 2-3].

Photo 2 - Agnes Mortimer's illustrations, from A Victorian Boyhood on the Wolds – The Recollections of J. R. Mortimer”, edited by J. D. Hicks [Ref: L.9.52]

Photo 3 - Agnes Mortimer's illustrations, from A Victorian Boyhood on the Wolds – The Recollections of J. R. Mortimer”, edited by J. D. Hicks [Ref: L.9.52]

Mortimer, during his adult life, assembled a huge collection of cultural remains which he began to display in the East Riding’s only purpose-built museum at 25 Lockwood Street in Driffield. This building, the display cabinets and the collection housed there was entirely financed by Mortimer himself.  The expenditure on this museum was largely responsible for his bankruptcy. After his death in 1911, and following much uncertainty as to the future of his collection, it was eventually bought in 1913 by Colonel G. H. Clarke of Kirkella and presented to the City of Hull.

Thankfully this allowed the collection amassed during Mortimer’s lifetime to retain intact and provides an invaluable source of material relating to the interpretation of British prehistory, particularly with respect to the Bronze Age.

The collection was initially displayed in the Victoria Galleries [part of Hull City Hall] as the Mortimer Museum [and is still acknowledged in Hull City Hall today as “The Mortimer Suite”]. In 1956, it was transferred to the Transport and Archaeology Museum on High Street.  It now forms an important part of the collection of the “Hull and East Riding Museum”.

It is acknowledged that J. R. Mortimer, although he was entirely self-taught, was [when compared to many of his fellow archaeologist] a thorough and competent excavator, who, almost single-handedly, succeeded in bringing together, preserving and documenting a huge collection of primary data which related to the early history of East Yorkshire which today’s archaeologists will for ever be in his debt. 

The residents of Hull and East Yorkshire should also be thankful to J. R. Mortimer for his collection since it instigated the first pubic museum in Hull. Throughout his life, Mortimer, no matter what personal sacrifices he had to make, remained passionately committed to the twin notions that his collection should remain intact, and in the East Riding area.

I also like to think that he would be delighted that his entrance fee of one shilling to the Great Exhibition in 1851 helped fund the Museum complex in South Kensington and inspire future generations, be it archaeologists, geologist or palaeontologists, the way that he was inspired by his visit to the Great Exhibition and the British Museum.

Caoimhe West, Reader Assistant, Unlocking the Treasures Project