Winifred Blackman (1872-1950)

Winifred Susan Blackman was an ethnographer and anthropologist of Egypt. She was born in Norwich, the daughter of a vicar. Salima Ikram, professor at the American University in Cairo, has noted that “Information about her early life is meagre.”[1] The family moved to Oxford in the early part of the twentieth century, and between 1912 and 1915 she studied a diploma in anthropology at the Pitt Rivers Museum. Her younger brother, Aylward Manley Blackman (1883–1956), later followed in her footsteps and studied Egyptology at Oxford. Winifred volunteered as an assistant to the curator of the Pitt Rivers, Henry Balfour, between 1912 and 1920, where she worked on various cataloguing projects.[2] She was also employed as the librarian of the social anthropology department and assistant to Robert Ranulph Marett, reader in anthropology.[3]

In 1920, she was appointed as a research student by the Oxford Committee for Anthropology, which allowed her to carry out research in rural Egypt for the first time. Between 1922 and 1926 she led the Percy Sladen Expedition to Egypt, during which she was able to collect most of the material for her one and only monograph, The Fellahin of Upper Egypt. The book was a success and caught the attention of Sir Henry Wellcome: from 1927 to 1933 she received small grants from the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum to collect ethnographic material. Between 1933 and 1939 she lived and worked in Cairo, working on various manuscripts, none of which were ever published. At the outbreak of war, she moved home to Liverpool, and the family then moved to Wales. She never returned to Egypt, and after the death of her sister Elsie in 1950 she suffered a breakdown and died later that year.[4]

Winifred’s younger brother Aylward became professor of Egyptology at the University of Liverpool in 1934, and retired from that position in 1938. A large archive of her research notes was thus deposited in the Department of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology. This was transferred to the Garstang Museum of Archaeology and recently to the University of Liverpool Library. A collection of ethnographic material she collected in Egypt is held by the Garstang Museum. In addition, the ethnographic material she collected for Henry Wellcome is split across the Science Museum, British Museum, and the Pitt Rivers Museum.

[1] WS Blackman 2000 The Fellahin of Upper Egypt. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, v

[2] A Petch n.d. Winifred Susan Blackman. England: The Other Within https://england.prm.ox.ac.uk/englishness-Winifred-Susan-Blackman.html

[3] Blackman, v

[4] Blackman, vi-xi