Thomas Kenneth Penniman
| Thomas Kenneth Penniman | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 | |||||
| Born | 1895 | ||||
| Died | 1977 | ||||
| Residence | Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford | ||||
| Occupation |
museum work archaeologist | ||||
| |||||
Contents
Notes
Office Notes
RAI Council 1939-40 Member
RAI Council 1940-41 Member
RAI Council 1941-42 Member
RAI Council 1945-46 Member
RAI Council 1946-47 Member
RAI Council 1947-48 Member
House Notes
1939.04.25 nominated
1947 joined Ancient Mining and Metallurgy Committee
1953-63 Ethnomusicology Committee
A51/33/5 T.K. Penniman, Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford to WBF, 9 Jan. 1953 – on details of the Pitt Rivers Museum’s collection of N.W. Thomas’s phonograph records (autogr.)
Notes From Elsewhere
Thomas Kenneth Penniman was only the second Curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum, he was Curator between 1939 and 1963. His principal contribution to the Museum was his instigation of the working card catalogue system which allowed information about all artefacts to be easily retrievable, and was the forerunner of today's computerised collections managements systems.
Penniman had had a hard, rural upbringing in north eastern USA, where he gained many practical skills. He also worked as an archaeologist in Iraq. These practical skills and interest in archaeological and ethnographic technologies and materials were brought out once he became Curator.
Penniman was born in 1895 in New Hampshire, USA. He was awarded a Rhodes scholarship in 1917 but decided to enlist in the army, where he served for 18 months before arriving at Trinity College, University of Oxford in 1919. After graduating he stayed in Oxford working as a private tutor. In 1926 he registered for the Diploma in Anthropology, which he was awarded in 1928 ‘with distinction in all three parts’.
In 1928-1929 he was a member of the Oxford-Field Museum Expedition to Kish in Mesopotamia (Iraq). Around this time, deciding that he wished to make his home in England, he became a British subject. The Oxford University Gazette records that he was given a room and ‘other facilities’ in the Department of Human Anatomy, then located in the University Museum (of Natural History) at Oxford from 1929 ‘for the purpose of mending the skeletal material which he excavated at Kish ... and of preparing a report on the graves excavated during that season.’ (Gazette, 1930: 661)
In 1931 Penniman was made the secretary of the Committee for Anthropology at Oxford, at a salary of £50 per annum, and was responsible for the library of ‘the Department of Social Anthropology’. The Annual Report for the Department of Human Anatomy for 1931 reports that he had ‘been working on the material collected by the late Sir Baldwin Spencer in Tierra del Fuego. He seems therefore to have undertaken several part time jobs at the same time during this period.
Penniman lectured on Henry Balfour’s behalf in 1935 and 1936 while he was sick. Throughout this period he also seems to have coached students. According to the Oxford University Gazette in 1937 Penniman was 'appointed by the University to lecture on the interconnexions of physical and cultural anthropology, an as yet little-explored field.' (Gazette, 10 December 1937: 255) He also shared the teaching of Comparative Technology to the Diploma students with Beatrice Blackwood whilst Balfour was unwell.
In early 1939, because Balfour continued to be seriously ill, Penniman was appointed Deputy Curator until Balfour could resume duties. A month later, after Balfour’s death in office, Penniman was appointed Acting Curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum, and from 1 October 1939 he was appointed Curator for seven years. This appointment was renewed in 1946 for a further seven years. This position continued until 1963 and Penniman often complained to the University authorities about the lack of a permanent Curatorial position.
Ken Burridge,[1] who worked with Penniman described him as a man ‘few knew well’. He summarises his character as ‘[h]e had a full and many-sided sense of humour but was distant, caustic, and stubbornly shielded himself from others ... In his more winsome years, … [he] develop[ed] the stoop that was later to become habitual, appropriate to a scholar and museum man. ... Becoming in time a familiar Oxford figure as he wended his way every evening (including Saturdays and Sundays) from the Pitt Rivers Museum via the old Lamb and Flag to his sparsely furnished digs on the Banbury Road, Tom could unbutton himself – especially when someone, clumsy or uncaring, it mattered not which, mishandled his musical machines or trampled on the small garden plot outside his study. Then he unfolded. From the cramped stance suited for eye level conversation with his partner, the diminutive Beatrice Blackwood, he could swell to his full six foot four of New England bone, brawn and muscle and roar like a bull. No worse fright could any man have.’ (Burridge, 1977: 530).
Penniman was brought up on the family farm and 'learned to plough with oxen, make maple syrup, fell trees, shoot and skin bison, pluck ducks and chickens and churn cream and eggs into custard during his childhood'. [Larson and Petch, 2006: 125] He also learnt other skills, to repair local roads and bridges, from his father. He continued to work on farms to support his education at Middlebury College in Vermont.
In his forties, according to the Higham Times obituary, he learnt to spin and weave ‘by hand as well as with a watermill’. Weaving seems to have interested him for the PRM Annual Report for the year ending 31 July 1941 reports that:
Some time before the war began the Curator was able to send [a teacher at a Tring school who was teaching her children how to spin, dye and weave] the fleeces of three pet lambs from Delvid Farm, named Faith, Hope and Charity, since one was bigger than the other two, and with the help of Miss Galpin of Dorchester, a generous friend of the Museum, to give some advice about the work. The children showed their appreciation by spinning, dyeing and weaving a handsome large scarf from some wool of these lambs. The scarf, now in the Curator’s room, is much admired by visitors, not only for its workmanship, but as an example of a kind of training which ought to be more generally developed in schools.
When Penniman took over as Curator of the Museum from Balfour in 1939 there was much for him to organize. Balfour had been ill for a long time before his death and it is clear (reading between the lines) that a degree of disorganization and muddle had entered museum working. Blackwood, who was his chief support in the early years, remarked in a letter, that they were trying to:
... catch up with some of the work which has got badly into arrears owing to Balfour’s long illness and his habit of trying to do everything himself (Beatrice Blackwood papers PRM ms collections: General Correspondence T-Z, letter to Wilson Wallis, 16 May 1940).
Penniman set about sorting out this mess and amongst other things, introduced the card catalogue system for all artefacts (the production of which took him, and Beatrice Blackwood) much of the rest of their museum careers).
Penniman saw the Museum as aiming, 'to show the origin, development, geographical distribution and variation of the principal arts and industries of mankind from the earliest times to the age of mass production'. He believed that 'the main source of strength is in our comparative material from peoples who were in the Stone Age at the time of their discovery by Europeans, and in our series illustrating techniques of working'. [both quotes from the Annual Report of the Museum for the year ending 31 July 1941]
He believed that students should get first hand experience of using different techniques:
Here they make flint implements under the direction of Professor Barnes, try their hands at spinning or weaving, work out the scales of primitive musical instruments or listen to recordings of them, spread out big maps, or read. We are gradually collecting models or other equipment so that students can work out and practise the basic processes and mechanisms before they begin their study of native arts and crafts and their distribution. Such knowledge adds greatly to the value of their reading, and is a natural introduction to the study of peoples, both at home and in field work abroad. Materials for this sort of teaching are charged to maintenance and equipment rather than to the account for specimens.' [from the Annual Report of the Museum for the year ending 31 July 1941]
Publications
External Publications
Penniman established a series of short books, written by people associated with the Museum, and published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Museum. He edited most of them with the help of his colleague, Beatrice Blackwood
House Publications
Related Material Details
RAI Material
Other Material
PRM: papers