Alexander Thom - Life and Work

Life and Work

Thom was born in Carradale in 1894. His mother was Lily Stevenson Strang from the family of Robert Louis Stevenson. Her mother (Thom's grandmother) belonged to a large family from Symington, upon whom had been bestowed the land by Robert the Bruce. His father was a clever tenant farmer at Mains farm for Carradale House. His father trained the Church choir while his mother was pianist. Thom spent his early years at Mains farm until moving to The Hill farm at Dunlop, Ayrshire. Instilled with a good work ethic by his father, Thom taught himself industrial engineering and entered college in Glasgow in 1911 where he studied alongside John Logie Baird. In 1912 he attended summer school at Loch Eck where he was trained in surveying and field astronomy by Dr. David Clark and Professor Moncur. In 1913, aged just 19, he assisted in surveying the Canadian Pacific Rail Network.

Thom graduated from the Royal College of Science and Technology and the University of Glasgow in 1914, earning a BSc with special distinction in Engineering. He suffered from a heart murmur and was not drafted during the First World War. Instead he went to work in civil engineering of the Forth Bridge and later designed flying boats for the Gosport Aircraft Company. In 1917 he married Jeanie Kirkwood with whom he shared a long and lively marriage. He returned to the University of Glasgow and worked as a lecturer from 1922 to 1939, quickly earning his PhD and DSc degrees. He built his own home called Thalassa in 1922, along with a windmill to power it with electricity. His father died in 1924 and he took over running the farm where he fathered three children, Archibald, Beryl and Alan. Thom helped to develop the Department of Aeronautics at Glasgow University and lectured on statistics, practical field surveying, theodolite design and astronomy. From 1930 to 1935 he was a Carnegie Teaching Fellow. During the Second World War, Thom moved to Fleet in Hampshire where he was appointed Principal Scientific Officer heading the Royal Aircraft Establishment team that developed the first high speed wind tunnel.

He later was a professor and chair of engineering science at Brasenose College, University of Oxford where he became interested in the methods that prehistoric peoples used to build megalithic monuments. Thom became especially interested in the stone circles of the British Isles and France and their astronomical associations. In 1955, Alexander Thom published A statistical examination of megalithic sites in Britain in which he first suggested the megalithic yard as a standardised prehistoric measurement. He retired from academia in 1961 to spend the rest of his life devoted to this area of research. The Thom Building, housing the Department of Engineering Science at Oxford, built in the 1960s, is named after Alexander Thom.

From around 1933 to 1977 Thom spent most of his weekends and holiday periods hefting theodolites and survey equipment around the countryside with his family member or friends, most notably with his son Archie. From studies measuring and analysing the data created at over five hundred megalithic sites. He also attempted to classify stone circles into different morphological types, Type A, Type B, Type B modified and Type D flattened circles, Type 1 and Type 2 eggs, ovals and true circles. He suggested several were built as astronomical complexes to predict eclipses via nineteen year cycles. Thom went on to identify numerous solar and stellar alignments at stone circles, providing the foundations for the scientific discipline of Archaeoastronomy. He further suggested the prehistoric peoples of Britain must have used a solar method of keeping calendar. Based on statistical histograms of observed declinations at horizon marks with no convenient star at -22°, +8°, +9° and +22° (except possibly Spica at +9°) between 2100 and 1600 BC, he suggested a year based on of sixteen months; four with twenty two days, eleven with twenty three days and one with twenty four. Thom's suggested megalithic solar year was divided by midsummer, midwinter and the two equinoxes into four and then subdivided into eight by early versions of the modern Christian festivals of Whitsun, Lammas, Martinmas and Candlemas (see Scottish Quarter Days). He found little evidence for further subdivision into thirty two, but noted "We do not know how sophisticated prehistoric man's calendar was, but the interesting thing is that he obtained declinations very close to those we have obtained as ideal". Thom explored these topics further in his later books, Megalithic sites in Britain (Oxford, 1967), Megalithic lunar observatories (Oxford, 1971) and Megalithic Remains in Britain and Brittany (Oxford, 1978), the last written with his son Archie after they carried out a detailed survey of the Carnac stones from 1970 to 1974.

Thom's ideas met with resistance from the archaeological community but were welcomed amongst elements of 1960s counter-culture. Along with Gerald Hawkins' new interpretation of Stonehenge as an astronomical 'computer' (see Archaeoastronomy and Stonehenge), Thom's theories were adopted by numerous believers in the lost wisdom of the ancients and became commonly associated with pseudoscience, which saddened him greatly.

In 1975, his wife, Jeanie died. In 1981 he underwent an eye operation and in 1982 he broke a femur falling on ice. He continued to write papers and undertook interviews and correspondence using a dictaphone with the assistance of audio typist, Hilda Gustin. He moved in with his daughter Beryl in 1983 in Banavie. Registered as blind, he concluded a final book Stone Rows and Standing Stones, a 557 page tome published posthumously with the assistance of Aubrey Burl in 1990. Alexander Thom died on November 7, 1985 at Fort William hospital, aged 91. His body was buried near Ayr.

His son Alan died in a plane crash in 1945 and Archie died in 1995 from a brain tumour. He is survived by his daughter Beryl Austin and grandchildren.