Anna (Annie) Brassey, Baroness Brassey (née Allnutt)

In November 1878 Annie Brassey stepped ashore at Limassol from the steam yacht Sunbeam and, by her own account, struck "an amusing barter" with the Commissioner, Colonel Falkland Warren: new newspapers for "old pots and earthenware vases, some of beautiful shape, from the tombs"². Her Cypriot collection reached about 800 objects.

She was born Anna Allnutt, married Thomas Brassey on 9 October 1860 and had five children¹¹. Her husband became Liberal MP for Hastings in 1868 and sailed his steam yacht Sunbeam from 1874. She took the children on the voyages, which ran from 1869 to 1887, and wrote best-selling accounts of them¹. From the late 1860s she also collected on a large scale, partly through dealers such as Bryce Wright, reaching about 6,000 items by her death. Taylor says she aimed at a private museum in London for the education of working men¹.

Cyprus in 1878

The Sunbeam spent about twenty days off Cyprus in November and December 1878, with her husband, the children and their tutor¹. At Limassol the mayor also gave her two or three specimens of old glass, and she noted that digging for antiquities was now forbidden². At Larnaca the Commissioner, Colonel Henry G. White, showed her "a room full of vases and glassware, which General Cesnola's brother had dug up, and was taking away when stopped by the English officials"². She spent the night of 9 to 10 November at the army's Monastery Camp near Nicosia and dined with Sir Garnet Wolseley^1,2. Her husband's interest in the island was commercial, and he wrote to The Times on 26 December 1878 about Cyprus as a depot¹. She published Sunshine and Storm in the East in 1880¹.

Kourion and Colonel Warren

Taylor writes that Brassey arranged with Warren to sponsor excavations at Kourion, "now believed" to have been carried out by Max Ohnefalsch-Richter in 1883 and 1884; nearly 800 objects reached England by 1885, mainly pottery from the Bronze Age to Roman times and Roman glass¹. Kiely and Merrillees say that finds from what remained of her collection, "acquired through Colonel Warren (and presumably on his licence) for whom she provided funds", included material from Ohnefalsch-Richter's Kourion digs, in a number they could not give⁵.

Ohnefalsch-Richter's own account of 1886 adds detail. Six painted glass lids from a Kourion necropolis were in her possession. She had bought the Museum's third share of the find, two lids with the other antiquities in that share, for 20 pounds. He calls her holding of ancient glass hand-paintings "the most important collection". A glass hairpin and a floral glass bowl from Kourion, "found by me", also went into her collection³. The caption to a plate in his Kypros, the Bible and Homer of 1893 places the lids partly in the Cyprus Museum and partly with "Sir Thomas Brassey"⁴.

The collection was shown in public only occasionally. It appeared at the Brassey Institute at Hastings in 1881, at Newlyn in 1884 and at the Hastings School of Fine Art in 1885, while visits to Normanhurst were by ticket, for charity¹. For the 1885 show Bryce Wright produced a catalogue and Alfred Maskell a separate pamphlet, Antiquities in Cyprus. Maskell's list gave about 320 pieces of pottery, over 100 glass vessels, gold jewellery, an engraved gem and an Assyrian cylinder, about 50 bronze pieces and two very large hydriae from Warren. He admitted he lacked findspot details for much of it¹.

Assessments

Taylor argues that the Cypriot antiquities were "tools of her social ambition" and that she was "probably not even particularly interested in them"¹. Ulbrich and Kiely stress instead her educational aim, and note that she was one of few women collectors and a patron of excavation at Kourion⁶.

After 1887

Annie Brassey died on 14 September 1887 aboard the Sunbeam, aged 47, and was buried at sea¹. Her husband completed the Lady Brassey Museum in a wing of 24 Park Lane, designed by Maskell, with the Cypriot objects in its Sections 10 and 11. The dispersal began in 1888, when 59 pieces went to Wolverhampton on 18 April; others went to the Nicholson Institute at Leek, now lost¹. In 1919 her son Thomas gave most of the remaining collection to Hastings Corporation, and the Cypriot pieces there were still without a catalogue by a Cyprus specialist when Taylor wrote¹.