Madras type cleaver in collection at Manchester Museum
I recently discovered another prehistoric stone artefact from India collected by Archibald Campbell Carlyle. This one (see photo) appears to be one of the so-called Madras cleavers. The site Pathar-Kachhar is listed in Cook and Martingell’s British Museum occasional paper on the Carlyle Collection:
‘…in rugged country on the edge of the Vindhyas, about ten miles north of Kalinjar near Baraunda… Parari was in the state of Baraunda… this state now part of Madhya Pradesh…’ (p.93)
What’s really troubling from my point of view is the label:
‘Axe head or chopper from the high Laterite deposits sometimes denuded at Saipur Ghat – Patar Kachar found by and presented to me by Mr A.C.Carlyle Late Arch Surv(ey) of India – (see spec of Limozute (?) Laterite. This stained by the Laterite+ is probably one of the oldest Pal.objects found at the top of the hill or pass in cracks of Laterite.’ (NB water staining) .
In an earlier blog post I suggested that the labels stuck on the objects were written by Carlyle but this label says ‘presented to me by Mr A.C.Carlyle’. In which case who is ‘me’ ? Checking the O register for the entry record of this object I found out that it was presented by Robert Dukinfield Darbishire (1826-1908), the solicitor who handled Sir Joseph Whitworth’s will and supervised the civic benefaction that created Whitworth Art Gallery and Whitworth Park in Manchester.
Robert Dukinfield Darbishire
Whitworth was born in Stockport in 1803, the son of a local schoolmaster. He was apprenticed at the age of 14 to his uncle, a cotton spinner, and he quickly demonstrated an aptitude for mechanical engineering. In 1821 he went to work for the machine-making shop of Messrs Chrighton and Co in Manchester. He came to public attention at the Great Exhibition of 1851 and at the Paris exhibition of 1867. He received honorary degrees from the universities of Oxford and Dublin. At his death in 1887, Whitworth left a fortune of one million pounds, the bulk of it left to three legatees (one of them his widow, another was Robert Dukinfield Darbishire) with instructions to use it for charitable and educational purposes. You can find out more about Whitworth in Norman Atkinson’s Sir Joseph Whitworth The World’s Best Mechanician (Sutton Publishing, 1996). In The Whitworth Art Gallery the First Hundred Years it is said that Darbishire more than anyone else was the real founder of the gallery.
Label on cleaver 34140 at Manchester Museum
Could the hand writing on the label be that of Darbishire? The archive at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester has archive correspondence. Darbishire’s signature appears not to match the label on the axe, so the lithics in the collection with this hand writing must have belonged to another collector of Indian material. Perhaps Darbishire later purchased the objects at auction before leaving them to Manchester Museum in his will. But who was this other collector?
Ancient Worlds 