John Manwaring Baines

John Manwaring Baines was the curator of the museum at Hastings that held most of the Cypriot antiquities of the Brassey collection. Born in 1910 into a prominent Leeds family, he became assistant curator at Leeds Museum in 1931, aged 21, under Herbert Ricketts, and left after four years for a full curator post at Hastings¹. He was chiefly a natural historian. His unpublished memoir, Curator unmasked, describes the Leeds museum and its displays but says little about antiquities¹. Taylor's chapter on Lady Brassey spells his name Mainwaring².

Hastings received most of the Brassey Cypriot objects after 1919². Taylor writes that in 1957 Baines, as Keeper, asked R. A. Higgins of the British Museum to examine a small group of them². The note to that passage cites Higgins's letter to Baines of 21 January 1956, so the two dates differ². The same note records that in 1957 Baines added an Iron Age painted jug to the collection, bought with official permission from a private collection in Cyprus². He died in 2002¹.