Talk:Walter Ewing Crum

Date of Death

I have changed the date of death from 20 April 1944 to 18 May 1944. Several sources provide 18 May 1944: The Oxford National Dictionary of Biography, The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, The Bulletin of the John Rylands Library—the latter two reporting on that death in the year it transpired. The 20 April date listed here was taken from a 1952 Speculum review (vol 27, no 1) of a 1950 Festschrift (Coptic Studies in Honor of Walter Ewing Crum). The review in question specifically cites the Festschrift as the source of the 20 April date. Some print copies of the Festschrift in fact corrected the date post-printing. (If you check out the copy from the Internet Archive, you'll see one example.) Page 12 of the 3 June 1944 issue of The Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette (Bath was the place of Dr Crum's death) contains a double obituary for Crum and Henry Francis Herbert Thompson which gives the 18 May date. The Speculum review contains another error of significance: that the bibliography in the Festschrift was reviewed by Crum himself. This is a misreading: The Festschrift says that the bibliography was reviewed by M. Crum—presumably Margaret (née Hart-Davis) Crum, who was not legally married to Crum, but who was his life partner & who took his surname. As a review of a book written in Crum's honour rather than a work about Crum himself, it should probably be considered a less reliable source for biographical details than everything else mentioned. We do not cite it in this Wikipedia article other than for this discrepancy, & I think it's best to just ignore it on this particular matter. Pathawi (talk) 23:04, 24 November 2022 (UTC)