Dr Francis Henry Hill Guillemard (1852–1933): Ornithologist, Incidental Antiquarian and Snob

Robert Merrillees examines the Cypriot travels of the Cambridge naturalist and physician Francis Henry Hill Guillemard, whose two ornithological expeditions to the island in 1887 and 1888 led to the creation of the Cyprus Exploration Fund. Sent on behalf of Lord Lilford to collect bird specimens, now in the National Museums of Scotland, Guillemard kept diaries held today in the CAARI archives that record both his daily shooting and skinning of birds and his growing interest in ruins, inscriptions and the purchase of antiquities.

Drawing on these diaries and published accounts, Merrillees follows Guillemard across Cyprus as he bought small sculptures, pots and coins in villages such as Perachorio, watched tomb-robbing at Lapithos, dug briefly near Kourion, and entered a tomb opened for him at Polis with the expatriate entrepreneur John William Williamson. On returning to England, Guillemard pressed for an institutional British expedition. Merrillees argues that Guillemard's primary motive, shared by the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies, was to secure antiquities for the British Museum and other English museums, taking advantage of High Commissioner Henry Bulwer's June 1887 ban on private digging under the 1874 Ottoman antiquities law.

The talk also illustrates Guillemard's social attitudes through his diary remarks on British residents in Cyprus, dismissing Larnaca commissioner Claude Delaval Cobham as "fairly affable, but Oxford and a bit stiff" and looking down on government engineer Samuel Brown for dropping his aitches, while ignoring Max Ohnefalsch-Richter altogether. After reviewing the Fund's first season under David George Hogarth at Leondari Vouno, Palaepaphos and Amargetti, Merrillees notes Guillemard's one scholarly contribution to Cypriot archaeology: demonstrating that the standing monoliths in the countryside were beam posts serving as the fulcrums of levers for olive or wine presses, contra Archibald Henry Sayce's view that they were Phoenician betyls. Guillemard donated his own undocumented first-millennium BC acquisitions to the Fitzwilliam Museum in 1888.