As a bachelor he saw the potential of his 1820s house in Willow Walk in Cambridge which he

As a bachelor, he saw the potential of his 1820s house in Willow Walk in Cambridge, which he restored into a congenial meeting place. On the office side of things, he was a reluctant visitor to London but developed a warm rapport with the county editors, so forming a valuable link between the centre and the work out in the field.Baggs’s acceptance of traditional ways of recording monuments and his ordered ways in so doing did not make him a dry stick. He was the first person, for instance, to establish the layout and surviving fabric of the medieval precinct of St Werburgh’s Abbey, Chester (now the cathedral). He worked particularly closely with the head of the Cambridge office, Denys Spittle, and they enjoyed as much as any of the property owners they visited being the partnership “Spittle and Baggs”.In 1971 Tony Baggs transferred to the then twin pillar of traditional recording, the Victoria County History. Like RCHME, the Victoria County History had evolved a closely prescribed format for its parish histories and a style that preferred objective description to individual emphasis.

Unlike RCHME, the VCH in Baggs’s time never compromised its approach in favour of a more customer-focused presentation.The brevity of the final text of Baggs’s accounts of buildings, perhaps just four or five lines, often concealed months of research He also excelled in the patient analysis of complex sites. Both the ethos and the practice of the commission, as they were then, appealed to him. The way it recorded England, parish by parish, was founded on topography, indeed on his beloved map references; its fundamental philosophy combined archaeology with art history in a manner unusual even in 2006 in presenting an holistic view of the physical aspect of each community in the land. He trained at the Royal School of Military Survey for the Royal Engineers and was sent to Malaya. These were the latter years of the Communist-inspired movement against British rule and Baggs exchanged hostile fire only rarely.

He did, however, acquire an invaluable experience of surveying techniques even in the most unpromising terrain and, more generally, a military precision and order in his working methods. Fifty years later, he would never survey even a Cambridgeshire church without a structured kitbag.On his return to civilian life, Baggs undertook a management course – one of the few aspects of his life he admitted to having thoroughly disliked – but happily he soon secured a post at the Norwich Museum. By chance rather than choice, this became focused on technology, not archaeology. Baggs remained throughout his life a “hands-on” person in every sense, able to help grateful Cambridge neighbours with the drain clearer or the chimney brush.The crucial moment in his career occurred in 1963 when he was appointed to the Cambridge office of the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments for England. His father was a bank manager and Tony inherited an acumen about money which made him over the years immensely useful to his less realistic academic and archaeological colleagues.Schoolboy enthusiasm, stimulated by gifted mentors, inspired Baggs at an early stage to pursue a career in archaeology.

A less than helpful headmaster at his public school at Stamford – Tony was perhaps too individual a pupil to be easy – almost scuppered his chances of a place at Cambridge but Grahame Clark, later one of the most influential of 20th-century archaeologists, had already spotted Baggs’s potential and helped him obtain admission to Peterhouse.Although Baggs profited greatly by his time at Cambridge and retained affection for his college, it may be that his National Service years thereafter were more formative. He was always ready to exchange views and explain techniques with colleagues of all ages but would never have dreamt of seeking the limelight as a media archaeologist.
He was born Anthony Paget Baggs in Norwich in 1934 and remained a loyal Norwich and Norfolk man, although his mature life was centred on Cambridge. Tony Baggs’s achievements are not easy to explain in our celebrity-conscious age. Through his work with the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments for England and the Victoria County History, he wrote accounts of many thousands of buildings all over the country, expressed in tightly edited and anonymous texts; articles under his own name were much rarer. Anthony Paget Baggs, archaeologist and architectural historian: born Norwich 17 May 1934; FSA 1965; Architectural Editor, Victoria County History 1971-97; twice married (one son, one daughter); died Cambridge 31 May 2006. The latter is being investigated by the International Labour Organisation – with the company’s approval.The value of sales of Coca-Cola soft drinks in Britain rose by just the rate of inflation last year, 2 per cent, to reach £884m.In the television advertising campaign starting on Monday, the properties of the new drink will be depicted as “masculine”.