Donald M. Bailey

Donald M. Bailey spent forty-one years at the British Museum without a university degree and used them to put the Museum's nineteenth-century Cypriot finds back into their tomb groups. Thomas Kiely's obituary records that he did National Service in Cyprus in the early 1950s, joined the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities as Museum Assistant in 1955, took a DLitt in 1992 and retired as Senior Curator in 1996. He died in August 2014 aged 83¹.

His work began with lamps. Lamps in the Victoria and Albert Museum (1965) dealt with a corpus largely excavated or collected in Cyprus, especially by the Hake-Kitchener excavations of 1882 (George Gordon Hake), and four volumes of the British Museum lamp catalogue followed between 1975 and 1996^1,4,6,8. Kiely says he presented Cypriot lamps by their original archaeological context, in particular the Cyprus Exploration Fund tombs of 1888-91 and the Museum's own excavations of the 1890s, instead of by typology¹. He found unregistered Turner Bequest material from the 1893-96 excavations at Amathus, Kourion and Enkomi and reassigned much of it to its tomb groups from the packing and field notebooks¹.

He published single groups as well: the Aradippou "Village Priest's tomb" of 1879 in 1969, and in 1976 the Museum's Hala Sultan Tekke finds of 1897-98, which Kiely calls the first scientific publication of any of the Museum's 1890s Cypriot excavations^1,5,7. While cataloguing the bronze lamps for volume IV he recognised the unregistered silver Bes and Astarte jewellery from Kourion Tomb 73, which he published with the conservator Marilyn Hockey in 2001^1,3. Cypriot items registered in 1966 and 1967 are noted in the Museum's archive guide as given by him; the objects are not described².