Captain Archibold "David" Edmonstone Craig 1887 - 1960

With the passing of David Craig the fencing world has lost a fine épéeist and a personality of wide and varied interests and accomplishments.

He started his fencing career at the school of Mangiarotti in Milan in the early ‘twenties’ and rapidly rose to the first rank of épée fencers. He never won a British championship, largely because at first he was much abroad, and later because he refused to take part in any major competition not judged throughout by the electric machine.

He fought successfully, however, in international matches and club teams abroad, and in 1939 won every Epée Club cup except one, when he was placed second. He represented Great Britain in two Olympic Games, in Paris in 1924 and in London in 1948, in the latter event after he had passed his 61st birthday, becoming the oldest fencer to represent Britain at the Olympic Games. He fought in European or world championships in Vienna, Budapest, Paris and Lisbon, and captained a British team at Warsaw in 1934.

David was rarely satisfied with conventional views or accepted methods. He was a skilled craftsman, and always made the handles for his own épées, to a strange and individual design. When he had to give up fencing and took to archery he rapidly became proficient with bows and arrows of his own workmanship.

In many ways he was an extremist. His clothes were either immaculate and formal or completely unconventional. Once, when accompanying the writer to a Sunday luncheon party in the country at the house of an M.F.H. of strictly conventional tastes, he appeared in his skiing clothes. When it was pointed out that the chances of winter sports in Hertfordshire in April were problematical, he changed into an exquisitely-cut black double-breasted suit with a wing collar and an Ascot tie; a figure of infinite distinction among the country tweeds at lunch.

A painter of originality and skill, in recent times he concentrated largely on portraits, among his last being a full-dress portrait of Field Marshal Sir Francis Festing. who shared his interest in fencing and the collection of Japanese swords. He and Elizabeth Craig were great collectors, and their Chelsea studio contained a remarkable variety of beautiful things—jade, glass, ivories, fine furniture and pictures, including their own striking and individual paintings which formed an ideal background for the parties they gave on fencing and other occasions.

Although illness had prevented him for many years from taking an active part in British fencing his interest was unabated, and in the Winter 1960 issue of "The Sword" he produced a formula for a complicated experiment to eliminate the coup double, the perpetration of which was, to him, as much anathema as the non-employment of the electric machine.

He will be greatly missed on the fencing committees on which he served. and where he expressed the most controversial views, sometimes with a passionate conviction and often with his tongue in his cheek — as was only made evident by the chuckle with which he would greet the unwary and indignant member who rose to his bait. But most of all he will be missed by his friends for the charm of his personality and the rare quality of his mind; he was, in the proper sense of the word. a dilettante, and, in an age of conformity. a true original. It is impossible to think of David without also thinking of Elizabeth Craig, as they so perfectly complemented each other; and she is assured of the deep sympathy of all who knew them both.

 T.E.B.