Margaret Rule

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Margaret Helen Rule , CBE (born 27. September 1928 in High Wycombe , Buckinghamshire as Margaret Martin , died 9. April 2015 in England ) was a British archaeologist and project leader for the 1982 even salvage the ship Mary Rose .

Life

Margaret Martin grew up in London, where she also experienced the German air raids on England . She wanted to start studying chemistry at University College London , but had to give up her place in favor of returning soldiers after the war. She attended evening school and worked as a laboratory assistant in toothpaste research at Beecham , where she met the microbiologist Arthur Rule. They married in 1949 and later moved to Sussex . When their son was born in 1958, Margaret Rule gave up working.

With her husband, she joined a group of amateur archaeologists and assisted Alec Down on excavations in Chichester . When the remains of a Roman villa were found in Sussex in 1960, she and the archaeologist Barry Cunliffe organized the excavation, and she became the full-time curator of the Fishbourne Roman Palace Museum, founded in 1968 .

Salvaging the Mary Rose (1982)

Since the mid-1960s, she dealt with the recovery of the Mary Rose , Henry VIII's flagship , which was requested by the hobby researcher Alexander McKee , which had sunk in the Solent strait of the English Channel in 1545 . Rule learned to dive and made over a hundred dives to the shipwreck. She became a member of the Nautical Archeology Society , which in 1973 campaigned for a law to protect shipwrecks .

The "Mary Rose Trust" under the patronage of Prince Charles , who also dived to the wreck himself in 1974 and 1982, appointed Rule as the project manager for the salvage in 1979. It took place on October 11, 1982 and was broadcast live by the BBC as a media event. The salvaged parts of the hull were temporarily stored under Rules management in the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard until conservation measures began in 1994. The Mary Rose Museum , which has since been built and opened in 1984 with the cannons and over 10,000 objects from the wreck, is to show the hull from 2016 in an extension built in 2013.

Rule was named Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1983, received honorary doctorates from Portsmouth and Liverpool, and received the Caird Medal from the National Maritime Museum . In 2008 she received the Colin McLeod Award from the British Sub-Aqua Club for promoting international cooperation in diving.

Fonts (selection)

  • with Alec Down : Chichester Excavations . Chichester Civic Society Excavations Committee, Chichester 1971
  • Floor mosaics in Roman Britain . Macmillan, London 1974
  • Fishbourne Roman Palace . Sussex Archaeological Society, Sussex 1977
  • The Mary Rose: the Excavation and Raising of Henry VIII's Flagship . Windward, Leicester 1982
  • with Jason Monaghan: A Gallo-Roman Trading Vessel from Guernsey: The Excavation and Recovery of a Third Century Shipwreck . Guernsey Museums & Galleries, Guernsey 1993

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. a b c Isabel Berwick: Director whose determination lifted a sunken Tudor treasure . In: Financial Times , April 18, 2015, p. 5
  2. ^ Prince Charles recalls diving days . In: The Telegraph , February 26, 2014