Fonds F0791 - Amice Calverley fonds

Amice Mary Calverley was born on 9 April 1896, in Chelsea, London, England. In 1903 her family moved to Bloemfontein, South Africa, where her father was employed as an archivist and librarian for the British colony there. After this position was abolished in 1909, the family returned to England. That same year, Calverley began attending Bedford High School for Girls and studying art at University College London’s Slade School of Fine Art. It was also during this time that Calverley took piano lessons.
In 1912, she immigrated with her family to Canada and settled in Oakville, Ontario. Calverley attended the Royal Conservatory of Music until the First World War, when she worked in a munitions factory, trained to be a nurse at the Toronto Hospital for Sick Children, and worked as a masseuse at the Christie Street Veterans’ Hospital.
In 1922, Calverley received a scholarship from the Royal College of Music and returned to England. There she studied under Ralph Vaughan Williams and George Dyson. In 1926, Calverley was hired as a draughts person at the University of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, where she illustrated a book by archeologist V. Gordon Childe. This work would connect her to the Egypt Exploration Society, which Calverley joined in 1927. In January 1928, Calverley was sent to Abydos, Egypt to photograph and produce manual drawings of the Temple of King Seti I.
She would make a second trip to Abydos in the winter of 1928-1929, where she would meet John D. Rockefeller. Impressed with her work, he provided funding for a publication of her illustrations and further field work. With this funding, Calverley was able to spend winter 1929 through to winter 1936-1937 with an assistant, Myrtle F. Broome. Their work was published across three volumes titled The Temple of King Sethos I at Abydos (published in 1933, 1935, and 1938). It was also during this period that Calverley began to document local life and customs on film in Egypt and in Balkan countries that she would visit between field seasons.
The outbreak of the Second World War would interrupt Calverley’s fieldwork, and she would instead pivot to various war efforts as she did in the First World War. In 1939, she became a driver for the Invalid Children’s Aid Association, assisting with evacuations from English cities. In 1941, she was sent to Cairo by the Ministry of Information to work in the propaganda unit of the British Embassy and analyzed photos for the Royal Air Force. In 1944, she signed up as civilian relief worker for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) in the Balkans. She would attempt to resume her work at Abydos in 1947, but a cholera outbreak saw her instead obtaining vaccines from Chicago and inoculating local Egyptians, as well as British and American nationals. This work was not new to her, as she had previously used her nursing background to provide basic medical treatments to locals while performing field work in Abydos.
In 1948, war between Egypt and Israel put a permanent end to her work in Abydos, and she relocated to the Greek island of Crete, with the aim of filming local daily life there. This period was a difficult one in Greece, with the Civil War still being waged. Calverley thus turned her attention to filming the conflict and using her nursing background to care for the wounded. Her experience in Crete compelled her to raise funds for disabled Greek war veterans and to support Greek war relief efforts in Europe and America.
Around 1950, with declining health affecting her ability to travel to the extent that she had become used to, Calverley returned to Oakville, Ontario, where she would become known in the Toronto arts community for her chamber music concerts and donations to the Royal Ontario Museum.
Amice Calverley suffered an aneurism and died on 10 April 1959 at her home in Oakville, Ontario. She had been preparing a concert at the time of her death and was working on the final 2 volumes of her publication of illustrations. Her legacy has been maintained by her niece Sybil Rampen, who founded an archive and cultural centre in Oakville.