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Bernard Grenfell spent portions of his childhood in delicate health, but he recovered and won a scholarship to Queen’s College, Oxford. His intention was to study economics, but he excelled in the classical course under his chief professor, Albert Curtis Clark. (1859-1937), the Corpus Christi Professor of Latin. On the advice of his father, who had been an assistant in Greek & Roman antiquities at the British Museum, (1861-6), Grenfell also studied with the archaeologists Thomas Hodge Grose (1845-1906) and Edward Mewburn Walker (1857-1941), who introduced him to the fledgling science of papyrology. After graduation, Grenfell took a fifth year to study papyrus and in 1893 was given a Craven scholarship for travel to Egypt where he met Flinders Petrie (1853-1942) at his excavation at Koptos (Qift). When not actively excavating, Grenfell studied papyrology. When Petrie purchased a substantial papyrus roll from 7^th c. Apollonopolis Magna (Edfu), he entrusted its decipherment to Grenfell. The contents were a will, a settlement of accounts, and an annuity agreement, his first significant publication. At this point Grenfell established the program of spending winters in Egypt and summers back at Queen’s deciphering, translating and writing commentary. The following winter he returned to Egypt and obtained a second roll that continued Petrie’s roll, published as The Revenue Laws of Ptolemy Philadelphus. An Alexandrian Erotic Fragment (1896) would be the last publication under his name alone. In the winter of 1895-6, he went with his friend from Queen’s, Arthur Surridge Hunt (1871-1934), who had been reading manuscripts in Spain, and with the archaeologist David George Hogarth (1862-1927) to Faiyum under the auspices of the Egypt Exploration Fund (later Society). These were among the first excavations devoted to papyri. Their finds there were substantial, but the next winter found Grenfell and Hunt south of Faiyum, in modern Behneseh, ancient Oxyrhynchus. There they uncovered the beginning of an enormous trove of papyri, including an unknown poem of Sappho, relics of Sophocles, Euripides, Menander, and others, early Christian Texts including fragments of the Gospel of Thomas and the Sayings of Jesus that deepened our understanding of the foundations of Christianity. The finds include personal letters, legal documents and government records. So substantial was this discovery that the Egyptian Exploration Fund saw fit to establish a Graeco-Roman section. Publication of The Oxyrhynchus Papyri by the Egypt Exploration Fund began in 1898 and continues as new discoveries are found, through the 20^th century. So scrupulously were the papyri reported and commented on that Grenfell’s methods were a model for papyrologists to come. Indeed the appearance of so much information obliged classicists to broaden its approach to the culture and literature of the ancient world. 

            Grenfell and Hunt excavated in Faiyum from 1898 to 1902. With some work at Tebtunis (Tell Umm el-Baragat) and in 1902 to Ancyron Polis (El Hibeh). A year later the team returned to the Oxyrhynchus site and uncovered huge amounts of papyri in successive explorations until 1906. These were published as Oxyrhynchus Papyri 1-16 and remain a vital source of information on Egypt from the first century CE to the seventh. 

       Grenfell was elected to the British Academy in 1905 and in 1908 Oxford created a chair of papyrology, the first of its kind in the UK, for him. But in 1906 he had a breakdown in Egypt. He recovered for a year but relapsed in 1908 but recovered himself, with the support of his mother and returned to work in 1913. While Hunt was on military survive Grenfell worked on both the Tebtunis and Oxyrhynchus papyri, but his mother died in 1917 and after returning from a visit to Egypt in April 1920, he collapsed again, and was subsequently taken to a sanitarium in St. Andrews, Scotland, and ultimately Murray Royal Hospital near Perth, where, without his mother’s support, he died in 1926.