Henry Crowther

Henry Crowther was curator at Leeds when two groups of Cypriot antiquities reached the city's museum, one in 1902 and one in 1926. He began as assistant curator at the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society in 1876, left in 1881 for a full curator's post at Truro, and returned to Leeds as curator in 1893. He held the post until 1928, and his interests were chiefly natural science and popular and school education¹.

In 1902 the British Museum gave Leeds about twenty Mycenaean objects from Cyprus. Nathan Bodington had sought them as a teaching collection; Crowther used them in the museum's displays and in school lectures, and in July 1902 he wrote to Alexander Stuart Murray to thank him for the gift¹. He added that he had given twenty lectures to 7,000 children in the previous year¹.

The second group came after the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley. The Colonial Commissioner for Cyprus offered the Cyprus pavilion's pottery to Leeds in December 1925; the committee declined in March 1926 and accepted by June, paying 200 pounds for 103 objects¹. The committee's minutes record the decision as its own; Reeve reads Crowther's support as probably the deciding factor¹. Kiely writes that much of the pottery E. M. Jelajian sold at Wembley was bought by Crowther for the Leeds museum³. Crowther retired in 1928 and was succeeded by Herbert Ricketts¹.