Humfry Gilbert Garth Payne

"Scholar, Artist, Philhellene. Mourn not for Adonis." The last four words are from the poem "Adonais" by Shelley. Humfrey Gilbert Garth Payne was born in Wendover, Buckinghamshire. His father was a historian and a fellow of University College, Oxford; his mother was of partly German descent. He was educated at Westminster School and at Christ Church, Oxford, where he obtained a First in Greats, and went on to be a research student and an assistant at the Ashmolean Museum. He considered reading for the Bar; but, in 1924, he was accepted at the British School of Archaeology at Athens, and travelled to Greece in November of that year. In 1926, he returned to England, where he married Dilys Powell (q.v.) and took up a post at the Ashmolean Museum. Two years after that, at the age of only 27, he returned to Athens as the Director of the British School. For three years, beginning in 1930, he was in charge of the excavations at Perachora, about fifteen miles North of Corinth. In 1935, he was invited by the Archaeological Institute of America to give the Charles Eliot Norton lectures in the U.S., where he visited his elder sister, Cecilia, who had become a distinguished astronomer in Boston. The following year, however, a staphylococcic infection, which had been present in a minor form for some years, became acute. At first, Payne did no more than complain about a pain in his knee, and a week went by before it was diagnosed as blood poisoning. He was taken to the Hospital of the Evanghelismos in Athens, where the surgeons operated in vain; and, a week later, he died there. His last words were, "It would be absurd to die when there is so much to do." Dilys Powell has written movingly of him in "The Traveller's Journey Is Done" (1943). archaeologist Humfry Payne (1902–1936), who married the writer Dilys Powell (1901–1995)