An inconvenient crush in King Tut’s tomb
SIR – Your report (October 15) on the ITV drama Tutankhamun discusses whether Lady Evelyn Herbert (born 1901) might have had an affair with Howard Carter (born 1874). The evidence for this is circumstantial and, probably, wishful thinking on the part of the programme’s makers.
Lord Carnarvon’s daughter may have developed a “pash” for Carter in the excitement of the discovery of the tomb. However, apart from their age difference and the social chasm between them, the main reason that precludes a relationship is that Carter was probably gay.
When I joined the British Museum, there were still people around who had known Carter. Most important was the late Harold Plenderleith, the former keeper of the research laboratory. In the Nineties, I interviewed him about the early days of conservation. Carter and Tutankhamun featured in these interviews.
When I asked Plenderleith about Carter as a person, he was reticent and eventually admitted that he knew something about Carter that was not fit to disclose. Plenderleith was an “upright” and larger-thanlife figure who probably had an oldfashioned attitude to homosexuality. His statements reinforced what I had previously been told by Leonard Bell, who was Plenderleith’s laboratory assistant and, later, a conservator and photographer at the museum. Andrew Oddy Worcester