Remembering Dr Käthe (Kate) Bosse-Griffiths (1910–1998)

As highlighted in a blog post several weeks ago, this year the Egypt Centre celebrates fifty years of the Wellcome collection arriving in Swansea and forming the nucleus of the current museum. With today being International Women’s Day, it seems rather appropriate to honour our first curator of the collection, Dr Käthe (Kate) Bosse-Griffiths (1910–1998).

Born in Wittenberg (Lutherstadt) in 1910, a daughter of Dr Paul Bosse, a gynaecologist, Kate attended the Melanchthon Gymnasium there and later the Universities of Munich, Bonn, and Berlin, studying Classics, Arabic, and Egyptology (fig. 1). She was awarded a doctorate in Munich under Alexander Scharff in 1935, with her dissertation the following year under the title Die menschliche Figur in der Rundplastik der Ägyptischen Spätzeit, von der XXII, bis zur XXX, Dynastie (Glückstadt, 1936, reprinted 1978). After this, she assisted in the Egyptian section of the Berlin State Museums. She was dismissed from this post because of her mother’s Jewish origins; later her mother died in the Ravensbrück Concentration Camp.

Fig. 1: Kate Bosse-Griffiths (image credit)

After leaving Germany Kate received academic help in the UK, especially from the Society for the Protection of Science and Leaning, and this enabled her to work as an assistant in the Department of Egyptology at University College London under Stephen Glanville; here she was mainly conceded with the Petrie Museum. Later she assisted in the Egyptian section of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford and was a senior member of Somerville College. lt was in Oxford that she met her future husband, J. Gwyn Griffiths, who was then an Advanced Student at The Queen’s College, also interested in Classics and Egyptology. They were married in 1939 in the Rhondda Valley in Wales, and in 1946 made their home in Swansea. Here Kate was made Honorary Curator of Archaeology at Swansea Museum and in 1971 was given a similar post at the University’s Wellcome Museum (now the Egypt Centre), following the reception of a large collection of Egyptian antiquities from the Wellcome Trustees, an arrangement furthered by Dr David Dixon (fig. 2).

Fig. 2: Kate during the unpacking of the collection in the early 1970s

Between 1971–1995, Kate was responsible for unpacking the collection of antiquities that had just arrived in Swansea. The Wellcome Museum was officially opened in 1976 by her good friend Harry James, formerly Keeper of Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum (fig. 3). During this time she was able to build on the collection by arranging loans and gifts from various institutions and individuals. This included the inner coffin of the Chantress of Amun, Iwesenhesetmut (W1982), which was transferred from the Royal Albert Museum Exeter to Swansea in 1982 (fig. 4). During these twenty-five years she researched the collection and publishing extensively in journals, Festschriften, and conference proceedings. Many of these articles were collected together after her death and republished under the title Amarna Studies and Other Selected Papers (2001).

Fig. 3: The opening of the museum in 1976

Bosse-Griffiths was also a published author writing in Welsh on German pacifist movements in Mudiadau Heddwch yn yr Almaen (1942). Kate’s literary output of short stories and novels included Anesmwyth Hoen (1941), Fy Chwaer Efa a Storïau Eraill (1944), Mae’r Galon wrth y Llyw (1957; reprinted with a new introduction in 2016 by Honno Welsh Women's Classics), and Cariadau (1995), and two travel books, Trem ar Rwsia a Berlin (1962), and Tywysennau o’r Aifft (1970).

Fig. 4: Kate with the coffin of Iwesenhesetmut

Sadly Kate died just a few months before the official opening of the Egypt Centre in September 1998. A plaque above the entrance to the House of Life gallery at the museum was unveiled on the 30 November 1999 recording her work as “the First Honorary Curator of the Wellcome Museum, University of Wales, Swansea, 1971–1995”.