DYNE STEEL 1907 - 2001

ICON COLLECTOR, BENEFACTOR AND FRIEND

E.W.D. Steel, known as 'Miss Steel' to the Temple Gallery, as well as to generations of physicists who worked at CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research), was an astute and determined person who lived an unusually varied and interesting life. In her later years she assembled a collection of icons now given to the National Collection of Icons at the British Museum.

Her memoirs, 'A One and Only' Looks Back, were published in order to benefit the charity Help the Aged. The book recounts how, in her early travels working for the Red Cross, she was interned in France during WW2. The first civilian to enter Belsen after the Liberation, she worked for the rehabilitation of Holocaust survivors for a number of years until taking up her post as Conference Organiser at CERN in Geneva. There, her administrative skills gained her an international reputation. She was even called back from retirement to organise the inauguration of CERN's synchroton in 1977, which was attended by 3,000 participants including the presidents of France and Switzerland, various ministers and ambassadors and a host of high-energy physicists from all over the world.

She was an intrepid traveller and had been to many places in Asia including the cities of the Silk Route. Her special interest in Byzantine monuments took her to such countries as Egypt, Israel, Russia, Sinai, Serbia, Macedonia and Cyprus, where she visited remote and ancient monasteries and churches - travelling, where circumstances demanded, on donkeys and camels.

Some of the icons from her collection, now in the National Collection, can be seen on the Temple Gallery's website, www.templegallery.com, in the section 'Some Important Early Masterpieces Formerly at the Temple Gallery', nos. 8(click here) and 29*(click here). One of Dyne's last acts was to bequeath the remainder of her estate to the British Museum 'for the purchase of an icon or icons'.