A 1976 Guardian newspaper job commercial was pivotal in altering the course of my husband John Steane’s life. It was providing the publish of subject officer on the Oxfordshire Museum in Woodstock.
Throughout his earlier working life as a faculty historical past instructor, John had been a energetic chief of subject journeys and archaeology experiments and so he leapt on the alternative, succeeded in his utility, and shortly turned county archaeologist for Oxfordshire.
Over the following 20 years, John recorded and interpreted greater than 90 buildings in response to planning functions. He was a formidable pressure in defending the panorama and was nicknamed “the Steaneroller” by his colleagues. He was a founder member of the Oxfordshire Buildings Document and the Oxfordshire Buildings Belief, and in 1972 was elected a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.
John, who has died aged 92, revealed articles, produced fantastic pen-and-ink drawings of buildings and wrote books of significance, corresponding to Oxfordshire (1996), The Archaeology of Energy (2001) and, with James Ayres, Conventional Buildings within the Oxford Area (2013). He additionally taught on the Oxford College Division of Persevering with Training.
Born in Balham, south London, he was the son of Edith (nee Mann) and Frank Steane, a military captain in the course of the first world warfare who had been talked about in dispatches and later labored as a clerk. John gained a scholarship to Dulwich school and cycled to high school among the many steel particles of second world warfare aerial raids.
From Dulwich he gained one other scholarship, to check historical past at Magdalen School, Oxford, the place he was impressed by the revolutionary message of his tutor, WG Hoskins, writer of The Making of the English Panorama, who mentioned: “Put in your boots, go into the fields, depart the libraries.”
It was at Oxford that John met Nina Carroll, an achieved watercolourist. They married in 1954 and had three youngsters. John started his instructing profession, first in Liverpool, then at Southport grammar, creating the primary of his “historical past boys” (pupils who gained historical past scholarships to Oxbridge) earlier than being appointed on the age of 33 as head of Kettering grammar college.
Nina died in 1990 and their son Peter later the identical yr. John and I had been neighbours and we married in 1991. He’s survived by me, his daughters, Kate and Anna, a grandson, Bruno, and great-grandson, Ethan.
