O.G.S. Crawford

O.G.S. Crawford – The ‘Father’ of aerial archaeology in England

O.G.S. Crawford (first row, far left) with group at Hengwm excavations, 1919

Born in Bombay in 1886, Osbert Guy Stanhope Crawford (1886-1957) was educated in England at Marlborough College then Keble College, Oxford specialising finally in Geography. During WW1 he served in the Royal Flying Corps, which was engaged with photographic reconnaissance. He also was a propaganda photographer during WW1, photographing trenches. In 1920 he was made the first Archaeology Officer of the Ordnance Survey, a post he held until his retirement in 1946. He wrote several books on aerial photography and was instrumental in the discovery of sites such as Woodhenge, situated near Stonehenge. During the 1930s he travelled extensively taking photographs of sites and places such as Warsaw, Berlin etc. before the second world war and saved OS photos and collections from being blitzed by taking them home to store in his garage. O.G.S  Crawford founded the Journal Antiquity; a Quarterly Review of Archaeology in 1927. The archive includes photographic images created or collected by O.G.S Crawford  covering archaeology, images of war, pre-war Europe, graffiti, and pre-and post- second world war social commentary.

Blog posts about O.G.S. Crawford:                                                                                 O.G.S. Crawford’s Shorts  (July 19, 2011)