with the wellbeing of London's museums and galleries at heart. I must declare a personal interest. It was the Whitechapel that gave me my own baptism of art, taken there just before the outbreak of the Second World War by my uncle Jim, who more often took me to the 'Boleyn' a mile or two away to see Alf Garnett's West Ham United play football on a Saturday afternoon. Mosley's blackshirts pranced provocatively outside. Inside was Picasso's Guernica, breathtaking in its vastness and colour and complexity. And another irresistible reason for my holding forth is that the last of my biographical subjects, archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley, honed his own broad interest in the arts and crafts at Whitechapel in it earliest days when his father, the Revd George Herbert Woolley, a lifelong collector, held the living of St Peter and St Thomas in nearby Bethnal Green. As soon as he had finished his time at Oxford, pointed in the direction of archaeology by the inimitable Dr Spooner, Leonard Woolley was appointed an assistant keeper of the Ashmolean. From that moment he followed in his father's footsteps, acquiring in his own lifetime an imposing and catholic array of drawings and paintings, inheriting in addition his father's unique collection of Turner drawings. He went back time and again to the Whitechapel for ideas and inspiration and, at his death, left a valuable collection to the National Art Collections Fund.Artists and architects were Woolley's favourite people and he appointed many of them to his digging teams, the most famous of which excavated Ur of the Chaldees, putative birthplace of Abraham in the southern region of what was then Mesopotamia (now Iraq), between 1921 and 1930. The great archaeologist's supreme merit was his ability to bring an ancient dwelling place to life by drawing a verbal picture of