Major Ion Calvocoressi

Richard Calvocoressi writes: Your obituary of my father (July 16) rightly mentions his loyalty to Lieutenant-General Sir Oliver Leese, whose ADC he was (1943-45). When “General Oliver”, as the family knew him, was president of the MCC in the 1960s, my father accompanied him on a tour of Australia to help him with his entertaining. They shared a deep love of cricket.

But my father was also devoted to his own “soldier servant”, the Scots Guardsman James Boyle, who had been with him for 15 months in the Western Desert before they were so dramatically separated. When my father went missing on June 13, 1942, Boyle grabbed a Tommy gun and went over Rigel Ridge to look for him, fearing that he had been wounded. He was met by a burst of shellfire and did not return.

It was some weeks before my father heard, to his huge relief, that Boyle had been taken prisoner before he could fire his gun, which had jammed. He spent the rest of the war as a prisoner of the Germans.

My father kept up with Boyle for the rest of his life. A few years ago they both appeared in a documentary on Scottish regiments, talking about their relationship in a way that was neither patronising nor sentimental but informative and moving.

Peter Ucko

Norman Hammond writes: Peter Ucko’s career of archaeological controversy began earlier than your obituary (June 26) describes, with the case of the Hacilar Fakes in 1969. A number of museums, among them the British Museum, the Ashmolean and the Louvre, had acquired Anatolian Neolithic painted anthropomorphic vessels, allegedly from the Hacilar site in southern Turkey and between 7,000 and 8,000 years old. Turkey’s antiquities laws forbade export, so the museums knew that they were purchasing apparently looted and smuggled objects.

Ucko had already been concerned about the pieces’ genuineness, and by stylistic analysis determined that a substantial number of the vessels were forgeries. A series of thermoluminescence tests by Martin Aitken and Teddy Hall showed that more than 70 per cent of the pots tested, including all of those fingered by Ucko, were modern fakes. A local peasant, Sevcet Cetimkaya, was arrested but freed when it was pointed out that exporting modern ceramics was not a crime.

Peter Ucko collaborated cheerfully on The Times’s front-page exclusive coverage (July 30, 1971), but later fell out with the paper over its views on the debacle of the 1986 UISPP Congress, when the banning of South Africa’s courageous archaeologists led to many others declining to attend. One Times leading article annoyed Ucko so much that when he quoted it in his book on the affair, he quietly altered the text to suit his purposes.