Philip Grierson
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Philip Grierson,
Early life and education
Grierson was born in Dublin to Philip Henry Grierson and Roberta Ellen Jane Grierson. He had two sisters, Janet Grierson and Aileen Grierson . His father was a land surveyor and member of the Irish Land Commission who, after losing his job in 1906, ran a small farm at Clondalkin, near Dublin. There he gained a reputation for financial acumen, and was appointed to the boards of a number of companies. Grierson's father also built up an important collection of freshwater snails, which now resides at the Ulster Museum in Belfast.
Grierson was educated at Marlborough College, where he specialised in natural sciences. As a result, he was admitted to read medicine at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, in 1929. Almost immediately, he switched to history, and was to remain with the latter subject for the rest of his life. However, his early interest in the sciences left him with a sound knowledge of the methods and principles of metallurgy, mathematics, statistics and much more besides that would prove valuable in later years.
Grierson's performance as a student was exceptional. Graduating with a
Academic career
After being offered a
Grierson also had teaching responsibilities within the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge, which appointed him assistant lecturer in 1938 and full lecturer in 1945. He became reader in numismatics in 1959, and made Professor of Numismatics in 1971. He came to share and later lead teaching on the general introduction to European history, running through the history of continental Europe from the fifth to the fifteenth century.
Grierson's academic career eventually spread beyond Cambridge when, in 1947, he was invited to take up the vacant, part-time chair of numismatics at
Work in the United States began in 1953, when Grierson was one of the founding instructors at the
Outside of university, he served as director of the
Fitzwilliam Museum
Grierson's growing interest in numismatics soon brought him into contact with the coin room at the Fitzwilliam Museum, and he was appointed Honorary Keeper of the Department of Coins and Medals in 1949, and served as a syndic of the museum until 1958. Under his influence, the department of coins and medals in the Fitzwilliam became one of the most active and productive research departments in the museum. It contains a room named in his honour, which houses Philip's collection. He remained an almost daily visitor to the coin room, adding new specimens to his collection and meeting visitors, until very shortly before his death. The following Keeper of Coins and Medals, Dr Mark Blackburn, first came to the department in 1982 as part of the Medieval European Coinage project to publish Philip's burgeoning collection.
Coin collection
It was pure chance that first drew Grierson's attention to numismatics. A visit to the family home at Christmas 1944 or shortly thereafter produced a bronze Byzantine coin from one of his father's desk drawers. It was later identified as an issue in the name of the emperor Phocas, and inspired Grierson to visit Spink's in London. There, he expressed no intention of ever becoming a serious collector, and wished only to purchase £5 of coins to serve as illustrative material in his lectures.
These good intentions did not last, and by the end of the next year he had 1,500 coins, and 3,500 by the end of 1946. Eventually his collection was to include over 20,000 specimens, worth several million pounds as a whole. It is the finest representative collection for medieval Europe in the world. Although it resided in the Fitzwilliam Museum for many years, his collection only passed to the museum upon his death, and was retained in his own name so as to facilitate the selling of old specimens and the purchase of superior ones.
Grierson was never especially wealthy, and only built the collection by spending most of his modest inheritance and two-thirds of his annual income as an academic on coins. It helped that he started collecting at a time when the London numismatic dealers were awash with material from the enormous collection of
In 1982, Grierson arranged funding to begin a project aimed at publishing his (now very substantial) collection. Medieval European Coinage was initially envisaged as twelve volumes of definitive catalogue and text on the coinage of different parts of Europe. The first volume appeared in 1986, and discussed the coinage of all of western Europe up to the tenth century. It remains the standard catalogue and study of the period.
Personal life
Despite his prodigious volume of publications and onerous academic duties, Grierson was extremely sociable. He moved into St Michael's Court in the 1930s, and occupied the same set of rooms overlooking the Market Square in Cambridge after an interlude during the
During his time away from study, the cinema was one of Grierson's greatest interests. Evenings with friends in his later years would often begin with pizza (either at
As a student and young fellow, Grierson had a great interest in and admiration for the
Grierson's wartime experiences were relatively peaceful. Poor eyesight and a childhood injury left him unfit for military service, and despite being interviewed he was rejected from the Ultra codebreaking enterprise at Bletchley Park because his German was not strong enough. Instead, he remained in Cambridge as part of the reduced history faculty.
Throughout his life, Grierson remained active and relatively healthy. He played squash regularly until the age of 80, and enjoyed telling stories of how he had climbed Mount Etna in Sicily during its 1949 eruption. Physical challenges appealed to him, such as when on one occasion in 1932 or 1933 he walked home from London one evening – a distance of some forty-four miles – and arrived the following lunchtime. The evening, he was sworn in as fellow of Gonville and Caius in 1935 happened to coincide with an important family party in Dublin the next evening. Grierson was not deterred, and arranged for a friend to fly him from Cambridge to Rugby after leaving dinner at the earliest possible moment. At Rugby, he caught the post train for Holyhead, and after catching a ferry the following morning made it to Dublin in plenty of time for his party. Grierson learned to fly himself in his 20s, but never learned to drive.
Selected publications
- [with L. Travaini] Medieval European Coinage, vol. 14: Italy (3). South Italy, Sicily, Sardinia (Cambridge, 1998)
- Coins of Medieval Europe (London, 1991)
- [with M. A. S. Blackburn] Medieval European Coinage, vol. 1: the Early Middle Ages (5th–10th Centuries) (Cambridge, 1986)
- Byzantine Coinage (London and Berkeley, CA, 1982)
- Bibliographie numismatique, 2nd ed. (Brussels, 1979)
- Dark Age Numismatics: Selected Studies (London, 1979) [collected papers]
- Later Medieval Numismatics (11th–16th centuries) (London, 1979) [collected papers]
- Monnaies du Moyen Âge (Fribourg, 1976)
- Numismatics (Oxford, 1975)
- [with A. R. Bellinger et al.] Catalogue of the Byzantine coins in the Dumbarton Oaks Collection and in the Whittemore Collection, 9 vols. (Washington DC, 1966–99)
- Books on Soviet Russia 1917–42: a Bibliography and a Guide to Reading (London, 1943)
References
- doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/97018. Retrieved 12 December 2023. (Subscription or UK public library membershiprequired.)
- ^ "The Society's Medal". 23 May 2014.
External links
- Philip Grierson Fitzwilliam Museum
- Philip Grierson's profile; Fitzwilliam Museum
- Obituary in The Guardian
- Obituary in The Independent
- Works by or about Philip Grierson at Internet Archive