I am very sorry to tell you all of the death on 4 August 2024 of Richard Savage, loved and admired by all who knew him, aged 87, after a short illness.
A memorial service was held on Friday 20 September 2024 at 2:00 p.m. at St John the Baptist Church, Pitchcombe, Gloucestershire.
The following anecdotes about Richard's time at Crickley were read:
From Roz Cleal:
I’d come to Ullenwood for the start of the dig in 1976. with my friend, Jo, from University. We’d spent a depressing few hours settling in, sitting on our beds in Dorm 4, writing to our friend Kathy telling her what an awful place it was and how we were in a dorm with American girls who all seemed to know each other (they didn’t, actually- and one of them was Corky Gregory!)
We were so miserable that we decided to skip dinner and go to the pub, so we set out resolutely down Green Lane. We hadn’t got very far when a VW camper van coming the other way stopped alongside us. Richard asked us where we were going and when we said the pub, he said Not yet, as there was an important talk we needed to hear first.
So we were scooped up and returned ignominiously to the camp-for the ever to be remembered "Drains Lecture” - which became such an annual feature and for which the regulars always claimed front row seats! We would have been astonished, if we’d been told that evening, that in only two weeks we’d be asking if we could stay on, despite our University fieldwork grants having run out (and it was Richard who gave us the good news that we could - we’d both mastered the unpopular task of planning by then) ... and that I would return for 16 years! (and even Jo did for 4 or 5).
How long ago that all seems, and I can only imagine the amount of time Crickley must have involved for Richard and for you all, overall those years.
From Iain Ferris:
I am sure everyone from the Crickley Hill excavations who has written down their memories of Richard will have dwelt on him as an inspirational character and a charismatic presence. However, I may well be alone in also remembering Richard as a kind of style icon in the early 1970s, pre-punk times.
Arriving at 30 Painswick Road for the first time in 1972, knocking on the door which was answered by Lydia, wearing an Amish-style headscarf, I was ushered into a basement room which seemed quite bohemian. Others, all Americans as it turned out, were already there sitting on floor cushions, massive rucksacks beside them. After a short while, Richard arrived and announced himself, moving like a whirling Dervish. Wearing a plaid brushed-cotton shirt with rolled-up sleeves, faded straight-leg jeans (where on earth did he buy straight-leg jeans in 1972?), and heavy boots, with unruly, tumbling hair which he kept pushing back off his forehead, he seemed to be channelling a Beat character, - Jack Kerouac or Neal Cassady. After a slightly bizarre, schoolmasterly lecture to all of us on adders on Crickley Hill, and sex and drugs at Ullenwood Camp, we were ushered out to a rather beaten-up VW campervan which further enhanced the 'On the Road' feel of the whole situation for me, to be driven to Ullenwood. I was hooked.
From Julian Parker:
These days en-suite bathrooms are commonplace, not just in hotels but in private houses: at Ullenwood we shared 7 basins, 5 lavatories and 2 showers between more than 100 of us.
In 1979 the drains blocked for a couple of days. We could not use the ablutions block. This led to me and Flt. Lt. Southwood throwing buckets of cold water straight from the standpipe outside Lofty's house over each other and anyone else keen on this spartan form of washing.
A number of us, of both sexes, were engaged in this bracing activity when Richard arrived, knowing that some parents were about to deliver, with some hesitation, their 17-year-old daughter to Ullenwood. For reasons I can't begin to understand, Richard thought that a clutch of wholly- or half-naked, wet and muddy diggers might not give the right impression: so he bundled six of us into the back of Phil’s Land Rover and threw a tarpaulin over us. Without missing a beat, he greeted the 17-year-old and her parents and welcomed them to Ullenwood. He showed them round and assured them that no harm would come to her.
It took what seemed an eternity for Richard to take mother and daughter to inspect Dorm 4 (firmly ‘Women Only’) and slowly return to father, waiting in the car. I don't think they noticed the shaking of the Land Rover as a motley pile of wet diggers suppressed our giggles.
The parents’ car retreated down Greenway Lane; Richard slapped the side of the Land Rover, off flew the tarpaulin, and out we all leapt to the consternation of one 17-year-old.
