John Bailey Shelton MBE (19 March 1875 – 29 November 1958) was a British archaeologist who worked in the city of Coventry and a pioneer of rescue archaeology.
[4] In 1897, aged 22 years, Shelton moved to Coventry, where he found lodgings in Thomas Street and began work as a drayman for the London and North Western Railway.
He attended and was Sunday School teacher at the Wesleyan Chapel in Warwick Lane, now Methodist Central Hall,[5] where he met Catherine Ashton at the Young People's Bible Class.
[6] By 1907, having saved the sum of £100, Shelton started his own haulage business in Little Park Street,[7] initially working for the cardboard box makers, Bushill's, whose factory was in Cow Lane.
Later during convalescence, mobile on crutches, he watched the builders Messrs. Harris and Sons excavating on the site of the Hare and Squirrel, in Cheylesmore, only a short distance from his home in Little Park Street.
[9] His record of the excavation, later lost in the fire in his library during the Blitz, refers to finding sandstone walls, a medieval stone-lined well, fourteenth century pottery and encaustic tiles, which he interpreted as evidence of a chapel of Greyfriars, built about 1234.
As his home had been destroyed, Shelton and his wife, who had been injured in the blast, and died in 1946, moved into a caravan in Little Park Street with his museum in what remained of the house.