In the decade following his appointment to University College, Dundee just after World War II, Dr Frederick Wainwright made a number of important contributions to the development of archaeology – including to what is now known as ‘rescue archaeology’ – within Scotland. They ranged from significant publications to the organisation of important conferences to fieldwork, the last more particularly in the agricultural lowlands of Angus. Although Wainwright continued to undertake significant work on his translation in 1956 to St Andrews (a consequence of the re-shaping of the organisational links and ‘subject mixes’ between the two then-conjoined institutions) as lecturer in Anglo-Saxon Studies and – at the time of his early death from an aneurysm of the brain in Edinburgh at the age of 43 in 1961 – senior lecturer in Dark Age studies, the innovations of his Dundee years stand out as key elements in the post-war expansion of archaeology in and on Scotland, and merit being better known.
Early years
Born in 1917 in Merseyside and educated at Prescot Grammar School, Wainwright went to Reading University. There, he studied history with Professor (later Sir) Frank Stenton, the celebrated Anglo-Saxonist, eventually specialising in that period and mastering cognate subjects including place-name studies and field archaeology. Graduating with a First in history in 1938, he then qualified as a teacher, married a fellow-pupil of Stenton’s, and embarked on a career as a schoolmaster in Liverpool. There, he also undertook doctoral
