Helen Waterhouse (1913–1999)

Helen Thomas Waterhouse was born in Chaldon, England. Her father was a professor of Sanskrit and Oriental Languages at Oxford University. She attended Roedean School and went to Cambridge University to read Classics. She graduated with a first class honors degree and went on to study archaeology at the British School at Athens. There her major field of research was the prehistoric Mycenaean civilization, with an emphasis on Laconia and Sparta. In Sparta, she participated in the excavation of the so-called palace of Menelaus. She later took part in the excavations of Ithaca at Stavros. After the outbreak of World War II, she joined the cipher office at the British Legation in Athens and later worked for the Political Intelligence Centre in Cairo. She went to London in 1941, and worked in the War Office as a civil assistant and later worked for the Research Department of the Foreign Office as a specialist on Greece. She returned to Greece after the war ended, and was appointed Librarian of the British School. She went back to England in 1948 and became Assistant Lecturer in Classics at the University of Manchester. In 1949, she married Ellis Waterhouse, Director of the National Gallery of Scotland, with whom she had two daughters. The family moved to Birmingham, where she was made an Honorary Lecturer and Research Fellow of Ancient History and Archaeology at the University of Birmingham. She wrote numerous scholarly publications about her research and a history of the British School at Athens.