Beatrice Blackwood

Finally sharing another of the ladies I learnt about on my recent visit to the Pitts Rivers Museum in Oxford! 

Beatrice Mary Blackwood (3 May 1889 – 29 November 1975) was a British anthropologist, who ran the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford from 1938 until her retirement in 1959. 

Beatrice Blackwood was born in London on 3 May 1889. She studied German, Latin and Greek in Germany, before completing a degree in English Literature and Language at Somerville College, Oxford in 1908–1912. After gaining a distinction after returning to Oxford to study anthropology in 1916, she began her career working in the Human Anatomy Department at Oxford.  

Until 1920, women were not allowed to officially matriculate or graduate from Oxford. When this was finally allowed, Ms. Blackwood took both the BA and MA in the same day. In 1923, she also earned a B.Sc. in Embryology. 

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Beginning working as a research assistant to Arthur Thomson in 1918, Blackwood then began teaching physical anthropology and working with anatomy collections as a Departmental Demonstrator.  

In 1924, Blackwood travelled to North America on a Laura Spelman Rockefeller Fellowship to study anthropology in Native American, African-American, Asian and Caucasian societies. During this time, Blackwood collected items to add to the Pitt Rivers Museum collection.  

Blackwood was promoted to a University Demonstrator and Lecturer in Ethnology at Oxford upon her return in 1928. A year later, she received funding from Yale University, the Oxford Committee for Anthropology and the National Research Council which allowed her to spend 18 months working in the Northern Solomon Islands. This research was eventually published by Oxford University Press in an ethnography entitled Both Sides of Buka Passage, in 1935. In 1936, Blackwood became the University Demonstrator in Ethnology at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and at that same time, she conducted her second field study abroad, this time in unadministered regions of Papua New Guinea. While travelling, she gathered over 2,000 materials to add to the collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum.  

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Upon returning to Oxford in 1938, Blackwood was appointed alongside Tom Penniman to lead the Pitt Rivers Museum. They created a system to help volunteers organize accession records of the museum and catalogue the museum's collections. In 1946, Blackwood was designated as a lecturer in Ethnology at Oxford and continued to teach archaeology and anthropology to Oxford students seeking a Diploma in Anthropology.  

Blackwood retired from the Pitt Rivers Museum in 1959. Even after her retirement however, she continued to work on a catalogue of the Museum's holdings. In 1970, she published The Classification of Artefacts in the Pitt Rivers Museum upon request of researchers from the Smithsonian who visited the museum. Blackwood was still found working at the museum long after her official retirement, up until a few days before her death in 1975. 

Having worked in museums and heritage sites, I know first hadnd that it is still uncommon to see women in the top roles, so to not only find such a historically successful women as a founder of one of Britain’s most celebrated collections was truly a delight to me – and I’m glad that the PRM is highlighting the role of Blackwood and her female colleagues in making the museum what it is today.