College Record 2019

MEMORIES OF WOLFSON
Naming of the
Colin Kraay Room
By Professor Chris Howgego (GBF, Keeper of the Heberden Coin
Room), from his speech at the Iffley Dinner on Friday, 26 April 2019
The Heberden Coin Room in the Ashmolean
Museum, with its more than 300,000 objects,
is one of the ten leading coin collections in the
world. It is an important centre for teaching
and research in numismatics and monetary
history, and now also for digital numismatics.
Wolfson’s close connection with the
Ashmolean goes back to its foundation as part
of the University’s response to the increasing
number of graduate students and the need
to create college attachments for senior
academics without colleges. Museum curators
were exactly the kind of academics without
fellowships in the 1960s, representing as they
did disciplines then without the undergraduate
teaching requirements which attracted
fellowships at the traditional undergraduate
colleges. The heads of two of the Ashmolean’s
five curatorial departments have fellowships at
Wolfson – the other is Paul Roberts, Keeper
of Antiquities – and there are many other
connections.
I should like to pause at this point to
remember Michael Metcalf, who sadly died on
25 October last year. Michael, a very eminent
Byzantine and medieval numismatist, was
Keeper of the Heberden Coin Room and
Fellow of Wolfson from 1982. He published
prolifically, including almost 250 scholarly
articles, and some 23 books. I owe to him
my own recruitment to the Heberden
Coin Room. Michael regularly took lunch at
Wolfson. He memorably described his long
and loving marriage to Dorothy, who died
just before him last year, as ‘For better, for
worse, but not for lunch’. Michael’s academic
archive and a somewhat implausible bronze
bust are now in Ashmolean.
The Coin Room has a particularly close
connection with Wolfson as together we
run three visiting fellowship and scholarship
programmes to invite numismatic scholars
from all over the world to research in
Oxford for one month each year. These
initiatives have made a huge impact, laying
the ground for the extensive network of
collaborators on current research projects.
The earliest of these schemes was set up in
1977. Two are now named after Colin Kraay:
the Kraay Visitorship for those of professorial
standing and the Kraay Travel Scholarship for
early career researchers.
Colin Kraay joined the Heberden Coin
Room in 1948, acting as Keeper from 1975
until his untimely death in 1982. He was at
first a Fellow of Iffley College and then of
Wolfson, acting as Vicegerent from 1971 to
1973. He is my principal subject, since we
have just been celebrating the re-naming of
President’s Dining Room as the Colin Kraay
Room. This room has long been hung with
images (mostly prints, with one painting)
and ceramics paired with these images. They
are some of the earliest representations
of the Eastern Mediterranean by western
travellers. They were originally commissioned
Photo: Wolfson Collge
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COLLEGE RECORD 2019