The Early Years

Sir Keppel Archibald Cameron Creswell was born in London on 13 September 1879 to a small family. His father, Keppel Creswell, was 38 years old at the time of his son’s birth. His wife, Margaret, was the daughter of a solicitor in Rugby. Creswell had one sister, Margery.

Keppel Creswell came from a Nottingham family. His father and grandfather were both clergymen—successive vicars of the Nottingham parish of Radford—working for seventy-seven years between them, from 1803 to 1880. The first recorded Creswell ancestor, Samuel, was proprietor of the Nottingham Journal.

In the summer of 1891, Archibald Creswell, at the age of eleven, began attending the Westminster School in London. At Westminster he succeeded in his schoolwork and took the first steps toward developing the skills that shaped his future. One of these was mathematics. During his first five years at Westminster, Creswell immersed himself in mathematics and science. And in the remaining three years, he was at the top of his class in mathematics and science. One can argue that Archibald acquired the gift of terse and trenchant expression in his early years at Westminster, a conspicuous quality for his later archaeological writing.

While at Westminster, Creswell proved his academic prowess by winning many academic prizes, including the Vincent Memorial Prize for English in his third year. Another prize included a copy of George Rawlinson’s The Seventh Great Oriental Monarchy (perhaps the whole set). In later years, Creswell partly attributed his early interest in the East to this book. Even earlier, as a twelve year old boy, he received an illustrated storybook with pictures of eastern buildings, also triggering his early interest to begin collecting pictures and descriptions from travel books for a personal scrapbook. Thus began his first enthusiasm for eastern architecture and a methodical approach to a field he never abandoned.

Leaving Westminster in the summer of 1896, Creswell entered the City and Guilds Technical College at Finsbury to study electrical engineering. He became familiar with the technicalities of architectural and mechanical drawing, and acquired a skill for elegant and decisive drafting. He was also taught calligraphy, later used in his writings and hand drawings of monuments and mosques.

After college, Creswell worked for the electrical firm Siemens Brothers. He also briefly worked for Deutsche-Bank in 1914. But throughout this period his real life’s interest was Muslim architecture, specifically Persia. His serious application to the subject of Islamic Architecture began at the age of thirty-one in 1910 when he began to the collection of his library on Islamic art and architecture. Sixty years later his collection became one of the most complete private collections on this subject.

In December 1912 Creswell published his first article. The article was not architectural at all—few could have guessed the article would be contributed to The Occult Review with the title, ‘A Comparison of the Hebrew Sephiroth with the Paut Neteru of Egypt’. One does not know how Creswell was lured into writing about this unexpected field, but the point of the article was to propose a precise correlation of myths in the cosmogonies of ancient Egypt and the Qabalah. By the end of the article, Creswell’s disciplined pen had characteristically organized, without a trace of irony or derision, the hodge-podge of weird fantasies in two equal and exactly balanced schemes, tabulated on the page in geometrical form and satisfying an intellectual drive for order and clarity, recognized in all his writings.

Clearly, however, this first article was a digression from the Creswell’s main interests. In August 1913 he corresponded with the Burlington Magazine on the chronology of a Persian-tiled mihrab and later that year wrote his first essay titled, ‘On the Origin of the Persian Double Dome,’ for the magazine.

 

Next:
In the Middle East