Hilda Deptford Trammel, 1904-1976

Descended from Yorkshire yeomanry, Hilda Deptford Trammel was the first woman to rise to the status of Fellow of the Institute of African Studies. Her death last month in Kampala, where she was visiting her niece, leaves a void in her field that will not soon be filled.

As a child, Hilda displayed eager interest in history and the natural world, exploring the Druidic cairns near her home in Stoat-over-Hants and vivisecting church mice. Her niece, Mrs. George Lloyd-Llewellyn Jones, recalls stories about the young Hilda measuring the heads of local villagers in a precocious effort to demonstrate the degeneration theory of Cesare Lombroso, author of L'Homme Criminel.

Briefly affianced in her teens to a ministerial student, Hilda broke off the engagement and in 1922 entered Magdalene College, Oxford, where she received first class honours. She went on to study at the Institute of African Studies, where her thesis on blood-letting and bridewealth among the Nuer of the Sudan was the foundation of all her subsequent research. Hilda never regretted her choice of career over marriage and motherhood. At a speech to the Girls’ Explorer Club of Hampstead Heath in 1962, she urged her young audience to heed their own desires and to shun the “foetid swamp of diapers and dyspepsia” so often women’s lot.

While unable to secure a fulltime academic position, women in those days rarely achieving such distinction, Hilda did lecture frequently at the Institute and was visiting scholar at the University of Saskatchewan in 1933-34. A small inheritance from her mother, combined with the income from a family-owned sugar beet farm in Northern Ireland, allowed her to pursue her research and to travel with chums around the world.

Hilda’s contributions to the war effort were considerable, ranging from serving as air-raid warden in her Kensington neighbourhood to assisting the Colonial Office in its effort to alphabetize the names of more than 3,000 tribal clans located in the path of Rommel’s Afrika Korps during the campaign of 1942. No doubt the full story of Hilda’s role in this pivotal operation will some day be told. In 1946 she was awarded the Silk Garter of Princess May of Teck, an honour reserved for women who have “served their country during wartime with exceptional rigour.”

While committed at the highest level to her scholarship, Hilda Deptford Trammel considered it her duty to help educate the public. In the late 1940s, she was a frequent guest on the popular BBC radio programme “Know Your Natives,” where she regularly bested panel members Sir Henry Atkins-Smythe and Professor R. Zrydzlecki. From 1953 to 1957, she wrote a column for Ladies magazine, “Caravanserai,” a lighter look at anthropology that was well-received, even after the publication of her, at the time, provocative study of segmentary lineage and the semen cult of the northern Nuer.

The circumstances surrounding the incident in Khartoum in 1960 remain shrouded in mystery.

An avid gardener, Hilda enjoyed showing visitors her collection of rare African plants. In recent years, she had exhibited several times at the Chelsea Flower Show, where her exotic garden, “I Had a Farmhand in Africa,” took the bronze medal in 1971.

Hilda’s major work remains her comparative study of kinship and animal husbandry, Kith and Kine among the Swine (1937). She also contributed to the young people’s series, The Sun Never Sets, describing the customs and lore of her beloved Nuer. She was at work on a major revision of that monograph for the series, now called Capitalism, Colonialism, and Culture, at the time of her death.

In this age of “women’s liberation,” it is all too easy to forget the struggles and achievements of those women who, like Hilda Deptford Trammel, forged their own path through a man’s world, oft with their own machete. “Wuht eme le’ane mah’de ciekde le’hn” (All cows come to the watering hole, but only one drinks the non-diseased water), Hilda wrote in her unpublished memoirs, describing her ceaseless drive to overcome the obstacles she faced in her chosen field.

A funeral with friends and family was held in Stoat-over-Hants in April. A public memorial service is planned for September at the Institute of African Studies. Contributions to the Hilda Deptford Trammel Scholarship Fund may be made to the IAS. Gifts in her name may also be made to the Girls’ Explorer Club of Hampstead Heath.

The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Vol. XI, No. 2, May 1976.

French Hay

I went looking for the road to our house, but the road had moved, or at least been broken into bits, with each bit set at a different angle. I could not follow it. It was the road that turned east at Yellow Tavern and went up through the Slashes, past the river and the winding creeks, the family plots sinking into the marsh. Sometimes small bones would wash out onto the banks, but we left them there. They were our father’s father’s bones, we thought, or maybe Indians.

I do not know why I left the house. I had a cough, I remember. I was in the kitchen, hiding from my sister. It was November and I remember coughing. Then I was outside looking for the road, only it was summer and the thistles were sweeping up around my legs as I tried to move forward.

The house faced south – we could look across the valley for miles. But it was not there, only traces of the driveway, I thought. Did it burn? Was my family somewhere waiting for me?

The sun was setting and the shadows were so long; I could not see much distance ahead with the low sun in my eyes. I turned my ankle in the marsh but kept walking. I had nowhere else to go. I passed an old wooden fence and came to another brook – Stony Run? I climbed down the bank to try to get my bearing -- I have played here so many times – and saw a bone glistening in the shallows. This must be home.