The following obituary by J.N. Carreck appeared in
Proceedings of the Geologists' Association 84 (1973): 118-120, and
was reprinted in British Dental Journal 135 (1973): 240-241.
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ALVAN THEOPHILUS MARSTON, who died on 14 January 1971, aged eighty-one, at Cromer, Norfolk, was a familiar figure at our meetings. He was best known for his discovery of the Swanscombe Skull, the oldest remains of an Acheulian hand-axe maker known in the world, and his early recognition of the Piltdown mandible and canine tooth as of an ape.
He was born in Leicester on 26 September 1889. His father, Robert Marston, was involved in early experiments in dental anaesthetics, particularly with nitrous oxide. Some of his instruments are in the Museum of the British Dental Association, London.
A.T. Marston was educated at the Wygeston Boys' High School, Leicester, where he received many prizes. After studying medicine and dentistry at London hospitals he qualified as a dental surgeon at the Royal College of Surgeons, Edinburgh, in 1914. In 1949 he obtained the Fellowship in Dental Surgery of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. During the Great War he assisted for a short time in his father's practice at Leicester, and in 1918 moved to Clapham Common, London, where he bought the practice of his uncle, Daniel Marston. He retained this position until his retirement, in 1964, to Cromer. He was a perfectionist and dedicated practitioner, particularly good with children, yet in many ways very retiring. Shortly after 1914 he married and had three daughters and one son, the latter now a veterinary surgeon, who was present at the finding of the second bone of Swanscombe Man in 1936.
The writer spent many pleasant hours with him at Swanscombe and Northfleet, Kent, in studies of the Pleistocene deposits and relics of Palaeolithic man and animals there, as well as at his home in Clapham. He will long remember the surgery, largely unchanged since Victorian times, containing a Palaeolith-lined grotto with fountain playing, in front of the dental chair, a marble hand-basin, and early hunting prints. Several rooms of the old house were filled with the considerable anthropological collection including Primate skulls and flint artefacts, together with Pleistocene bones, older fossils, rocks and minerals of all kinds. By a bench and sink were bottles of reagents and containers of specimens soaking in solutions. There Marston made chemical tests and experimentally simulated natural staining. A case of Swanscombe specimens was exhibited in the waiting-room. Upstairs was a fine collection of learned books, many on dental anatomy.
Marston seems to have been influenced early in life by the writings of Darwin and Huxley, and, through his medical and dental studies, led to an interest in anthropology and human evolution. He was chiefly an anatomist and possessed a knowledge of the subject far above the needs of his profession. He did not claim to be a geologist at the time of his Swanscombe Skull discoveries, but later devoted much leisure time to the subject. He became a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute and the Geological Society of London. During his residence at Clapham his attention was drawn to the Pleistocene deposits of the Lower Thames, partly by our late member, Dr. Frank Corner, who encouraged him. In 1933 Marston began to search the Swanscombe gravels systematically for remains of early man, continuing the pioneer work of Smith and Dewey. He discovered the Swanscombe human occipital bone in the Upper Middle Gravel at Barnfield Pit, Milton Street, Kent, on 29 June 1935, announced in Nature of 1936, and described with a full anatomical account by him in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of 1937. He recognised its great significance from the first and located the associated left parietal at the same horizon close to nine months later. When Mr. J. Wymer and colleagues found the right parietal of the skull in 1955, not far away, Marston was called immediately to verify the discovery in situ. His great contribution to science was his long continued work at Swanscombe. In 1952 he discovered important new evidence of the Ebbsfleet Channel Series of the Late Pleistocene at Northfleet, nearby.
He gave much time to the study of physical anthropology and comparative anatomy and drew attention to the simian nature of the Piltdown mandible and canine tooth, long before its official recognition as such by the Natural History Museum, but he did not consider that a forgery had been made. Apart from his work on the Thames deposits he spent many summer holidays in the south of France (Toulouse district) excavating Neolithic sites, and also exploring many French limestone caves, as at Les Eyzies, Dordogne. He published many papers between 1936 and 1955 on the Piltdown and Swanscombe Skulls, his human mandibular lacteon constant showing different development in that part of human and ape jaws containing the milk teeth, Dr. L.S.B. Leakey's discovery of anthropoid jaws in the Miocene of Kenya, and the Palaeolithic industries of the Swanscombe deposits.
He periodically attended Field Meetings of our Association, both on Quaternary beds and older rocks, including those of his native Leicestershire. He lectured to us on the Piltdown Skull and for many years exhibited at our Reunions. In 1944 he was elected to membership of our Council.
Marston was a man of wide interests and scholarship and an omnivorous reader. He devoted much time to photography, music and the arts and would spend hours at the pianoforte. Several MS. books of his musical composition survive in the family. He helped in the rehabilitation of Borstal boys and cultivating an interest in archaeology and science among young people in general. He possessed a splendid collection of postage stamps, started by his grandfather, to which he was still adding enthusiastically late in life. His kindly and good-humoured nature was readily apparent.
His Palaeoliths from the Swanscombe-Dartford area of Kent have been given to the British Museum, Bloomsbury, and the first two bones of Swanscombe Man, Acheulian tools found close by in the Middle Gravels, and animal remains found by him in those beds, are in the British Museum (Natural History). In the Royal College of Surgeons Museum, London, is a set of plaster casts of transverse sections through mandibles of non-human Primates compared with others of the Piltdown mandible, all described by Marston. A series of Palaeoliths from Aylesford, Kent, is in Dartford Borough Museum. His later collections are at present stored.
Mrs. J. James and Mr. J.R.T. Marston have very kindly provided much information concerning their father.