Honor Maude

Honor Courtney Maude (née King; Wem, Shropshire; 10 July 1905 – 15 April 2001, Canberra, Australia)[1] was a British-Australian authority on Oceanic string figures,[2] having published Maude & Maude 1958, Maude & Wedgewood 1967, Firth & Maude 1970, Maude 1971, Maude 1978, Emory & Maude 1979, Maude 1984, and Beaglehole & Maude 1989.[3] Maude was a charter member of the International String Figure Association in 1978.[4]

She was the wife of British civil servant and anthropologist Henry Evans Maude, who was stationed on the Gilbert Islands (modern day Kiribati) between 1929 and 1939.[5] When visiting Pitcairn Island in 1940 and 1941, Maude and her husband collected approximately 1,500 Polynesian cultural items, which became the largest archaeological collection of Polynesian Pitcairn Island material.[5] Henry sparked her interest in string figures through lending her a copy of Kathleen Haddon's Cat's Cradles from Many Lands on their way to Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony, where, on Ocean Island and later Beru.