Lillico, Joan
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Joan Wilson Lillico. Folklorist and anthropologist. Life dates: 12 March 1911 - 2001
Employed from 1935 as an assistant in the museum’s ‘Ethnographic Section’. Working under Rosa Burstein, she catalogued anthropology collections as part of the large-scale re-registration of objects. From handwriting samples in accession registers, Lillico registered objects from Nigeria collected by the anthropologist M.D.W. Jeffreys. In the late 1930s she worked on object displays for the ethnographic gallery at Euston Road.
Joan Lillico was born in 1911 in New Zealand. Her education listed in her staff file (WA/HMM/ST/Lat/A.136):
Completed a degree in Archaeology and Anthropology at Newnham College, University of Cambridge 1935 (Smith 1998). Joined WHMM in December that same year, aged 24, with letters of recommendation from Dorothy Garrod and J. H. Driberg (copies in Lillico's staff file).
Elected as a Fellow of Royal Anthropological Institute, 1937 ().
Lillico moved from WHMM to a post at Bristol Museum by 1949 () and remained at Bristol Museum until retirement in the 1970s ().
She died in 2001 in Bristol, UK.
- Staff file. Includes letters of engagement and resignation note.
- Lillico's monthly staff reports in folder of reports for 1935-1945.
See staff file WA/HMM/ST/Lat/A.136
Oral history in Symons 1987. Includes discussing work on the ethnographic collections in the 1930s, pp 31-32:
Tags: museum staff; scientific staff; anthropology; 'Ethnographic section'
.
. "Dorothy Garrod, first woman Professor at Cambridge." Antiquity, vol. 74, no. 283, Mar. 2000, p. 131. (Lillico was interviewed in 1998 regarding her former tutor Dorothy Garrod.)
(ancestry.com)
We worked in an enormous gallery divided into compartments by screens and empty packing cases and spent most of our time identifying and cataloguing the thousands of objects bought in Sale Rooms. We were helped with the heavy work of lifting, opening cases etc. by two men, & . … I gather he and Webb between them did a lot of the bidding at sales when Sir Henry was building up the ethnographic collection.