Obituary

OBITUARY CANON S.G. BRADE-BIRKS Canon S. Graham Brade-Birks, D.Sc., Hon. F.L.S., F.S.A., died in January 1982, at the age of 94. He was for many years a lecturer in geology, a noted agricultural scientist and a Fellow of Wye College. In 1930, he was appointed Vicar of Godmersham and later Rector of Crundale, a Rural Dean and a Canon of Canterbury Cathedral. B-B, as he was affectionately known by a wide and grateful circle of friends, joined the Kent Archaeological Society in 1953 and the following year received the honour of a Fellowship of the Society of Antiquaries of London. Although he attended the meetings of both Societies but rarely, he was often of very great practical assistance, especially in the study of soils, forward-looking and with marked literary and editorial skills, as his common-sense books on the science of agriculture for the English University Press exhibited. We remember especially B-B's practical assistance in the exeavation of Julliberrie's Grave at. Chilham in 1936-39, his quiet reporting of archaeological discoveries and notices of historical land- . scapes in east Kent to responsible quarters, and our long, instructive and deJightful archaeological tours of the Great Stour and Elliam valleys, the Roman road from Canterbury to Lympne, Barham Downs and its barrows and the Roman road to Dover on one occasion packed from hedge to hedge with snow-drifts. To his wife, Dr. Hilda Brade-Birks, a brilliant local and official physician, many of us in the Society owed and owe a memorable hospitality with stimulating conversation, which at times would turn again to B-B's most famous book, Good Soil, on a new edition of which he was trying to work despite his failed eyesight at the time of his death. (We are greatly sorry to learn that Dr. Hilda Brade-Birks died in September 1982, aged 91, following a painful fall in July while on holiday in Kent.) R.F.J. 271