Claude Delaval Cobham

Claude Delaval Cobham was Commissioner of Larnaca for twenty-eight years, and from 1880 to 1883 the British Museum's excavations in Cyprus were registered under his name. He was born in 1842 and died in 1915^1,2.

An Oxford civilian in the new administration

Cobham came to Cyprus in 1878 as Assistant Commissioner of Larnaca. Nicholas Stanley-Price calls him an unusual appointment in a service staffed largely by soldiers: a civilian with an Oxford B.C.L., who had been preparing for ordination when Augustus Hare met him and recommended him to Wolseley as a linguist who learned a language in weeks¹. He became Commissioner in 1879 and held the post until 1907². Luke, quoted by Merrillees, remarked that he had private means and was content to stay in Larnaca for those twenty-eight years².

His first dealings with antiquities were official. At the 1878 trial of Alessandro Palma di Cesnola in the Civil Court of Larnaca for unauthorised excavation, Cobham summoned the defendant and translated the workmen's depositions. The finds confiscated from Cesnola were later kept in Cobham's house, where they still were in 1892¹.

Agent for the British Museum

In 1879 Charles Newton of the British Museum visited the island and asked Cobham to pack and send to London the Aradippou tomb group, a Cypro-Archaic I group that Cobham had taken into his keeping. It was presented to the Museum in the name of the Foreign Secretary, Earl Granville in 1880, together with finds from the 1879 demolition work at Kition-Bamboula^4,6. Kiely and Fourrier describe him as Newton's agent in Cyprus and extend the agency to Newton and, later, Alexander Stuart Murray⁴.

Cobham also brought Max Ohnefalsch-Richter to Newton's attention. Ohnefalsch-Richter wrote that Cobham and Demetrios Pierides took an interest in him when he arrived in 1878 and recommended him, and that Newton gave him the first excavations at the end of 1879¹¹. Between 1880 and 1883 Ohnefalsch-Richter dug at Kition, Salamis and Achna and elsewhere; Kiely and Fourrier say these digs were all supervised by Cobham, and that the Museum's acquisitions were registered in Cobham's name rather than Ohnefalsch-Richter's^4,6. Private patrons, among them Frederic Leighton, contributed to the cost⁵.

Ohnefalsch-Richter's own account gives Cobham a lighter hand. He wrote that Cobham left him free to choose where to dig, although Cobham recalled him from Achna when funds ran short. He also wrote that when he told Cobham of a German plan to dig at Salamis, he was told to drop the idea; the British Museum meant to dig there¹¹. Ulbrich and Kiely judge that Cobham "at times seemed to do more on Newton's behalf (as well as later in the 1890s when the BM were digging) than to help local efforts to excavate and preserve"⁷. Ohnefalsch-Richter, for his part, quotes David George Hogarth's praise of the Museum's digs "carried out through Mr. Cobham of Larnaca" as scientific, if small¹¹.

He also acted as intermediary in a sale. Ohnefalsch-Richter records that a monumental capital from Kition reached the Berlin museums in 1891, obtained at a moderate cost through Cobham; the seller is not named¹¹.

The Museum Committee and the collection

In 1882 Cobham was elected to the first Committee of the Cyprus Museum, alongside Robert Biddulph, Bovill and others¹⁰. In 1905 the Committee made him its agent in the Larnaca district for watching illicit export⁹. Two years after he retired he was invited, with Wilfrid Jerome Farrell and Thompson, to a conference in London on 14 September 1909, held by the British School at Athens to discuss Farrell's report on the Museum².

In 1894 he gave the Akhna duplicates from the 1882 excavation to the Cyprus Museum, and Myres and Ohnefalsch-Richter's catalogue lists them¹². Myres also records a model vessel that Cobham had presented to Rugby School Museum some years before 1897¹³. The Ashmolean credits two Achna statuettes, a turreted female figure and a votary in a sakkos, as presented "possibly" by him²¹. In 1904 George Jeffery inspected the duplicates in Cobham's Larnaca house for an exchange requested by the Egypt Exploration Fund⁸.

Books

Cobham published steadily on the island's history. With J. T. Hutchinson he issued A Handbook of Cyprus in 1907²⁵, and in 1908 the Excerpta Cypria, extracts from eighty writers in twelve languages^2,24. He translated Mariti's Travels in the Island of Cyprus (1909) and Ross's A Journey to Cyprus (1910)^15,26. His library of about 900 books on Cyprus went to the Royal Colonial Institute^2,16.

He retired in 1907². In 1918, three years after his death, his nephew gave his Cypriot antiquities intact to the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter⁷.