Stewart Perowne

Stewart Henry Perowne OBE, KStJ, FSA, FRSA (17 June 1901 – 10 May 1989) was a British diplomat, archaeologist, explorer and historian who wrote books on the history and antiquities of the Mediterranean.

In 1930 Perowne transferred to the administrative branch of the Palestine Government, working for a time as Assistant District Commissioner for Galilee.

In the same year he deposited a collection of potsherds with the British Museum, most of which are of Bronze Age type and probably derive from the ancient site of Subr.

[5] In 1939 he was appointed Public Information Officer in Aden, where he developed a passion for archaeology, and where he discovered the seventh century BC sites of Imadiya and Beihan.

As a homosexual he decided to embark on a mariage blanc, more specifically a lavender marriage, and on 7 October 1947 he married the explorer and travel writer Freya Stark at St Margaret's church in Westminster.

[7][8][9] "In 1947 people's sexual proclivities were still part of their private lives and … no one among Freya's friends seemed able to warn her of the pitfalls of marriage to a homosexual.

Eventually, after skirting around the subject, he wrote to her: It is difficult to say what "normal" is – my friend a counsellor of St George's Hospital always refuses to use the word and in both men and women, you have a wide and graded range from ultra-male to ultra-female with naturally most people in the middle ranges ... Now for myself, I put myself in the middle group.

In 1947 Perowne was appointed Colonial Secretary to Barbados where he was a member of the island's Legislative Council[12] before becoming political adviser in Cyrenaica from 1950 to 1951.

[5] Taking early retirement in 1951, after his divorce in 1952 he returned to Palestine, now the State of Israel, where he assisted Weston Henry Stewart, the Anglican Bishop in Jerusalem in designing and organising model villages for Palestinian Arabs who had been made refugees as a result of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.

[15] Perowne's closing years were spent in the Distressed Gentlefolks' Aid Association's care home in Vicarage Gate, Kensington, London.