‘The Eye Wink’

In 1941 Mr. F. W. Thomas, on the staff of the News Chronicle and the Star, was advised to evacuate from Seaford and went to live in Lewes where he and his wife stayed with Mr. A. P. Pollard, Assistant Surveyor of the Sussex County Council. One day as they were touring round Chailey they found themselves near the famous Piltdown site. They had some discussion of the gravels and the circumstances of the finds. When his visitor remarked on the great evolutionary importance of the Piltdown man he was extremely surprised at his guide’s reply, which was that there was really nothing in the great discovery, and that he was entirely sceptical of it all. Mr. Pollard did not add anything more at that time. From Mr. Salzman (now President of the Sussex Archaeological Society) I learnt in August 1953 that Mr. Pollard was well acquainted with the gravels and gravel workings in the Lewes region, and that he might be able to help me with my inquiries on the history of Piltdown. When I explained I was interested in the discovery, Mr. Pollard immediately asked me whether I had any reason to distrust the discovery, and on my admitting as much, he said, ‘I am not surprised. I believe it to be a fraud. At least, that is what my old friend Harry Morris used to say.’ What Mr. Pollard had to tell me he had learnt from Harry Morris, a bank clerk and keen amateur archaeologist, whose acquaintance he had first made on taking up his post at Lewes in 1928. Morris and he became close friends, and he was Morris’s executor and saw to the donations of the latter’s collection of eoliths and other flints to the two Lewes museums. Morris in 1912 or 1913, right at the beginning, had come to the conclusion that the flints at Piltdown were not genuine. When he first saw the flints, he at once rejected them because ‘Harry Morris knew every flint bed and gravel bed in the district’.