Nathan Bodington

Nathan Bodington, Professor of Greek and then Principal of the Yorkshire College in Leeds, was the man behind two gifts of Cypriot antiquities from the British Museum to Leeds². In late 1894 or early 1895 the Museum's Trustees offered the College material from the Amathus excavations, and Bodington accepted¹. In July 1902 A. S. Murray minuted the Trustees that the Principal had applied on behalf of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, whose museum the students used, for duplicates from the Museum's Cyprus excavations. The material came from Enkomi, Klavdia-Tremithos and Paphos; Reeve names four spindle whorls and a stone pestle from Enkomi^1,2. Birmingham applied as well and received a similar selection¹. Bodington was the Society's president from 1898 to 1900².

He was born in 1848, became the first Vice-Chancellor of the University of Leeds in 1904 and was knighted in 1908. He married Eliza in 1907¹. He dug Roman sites in Yorkshire in 1908, and visited Pompeii five times and Knossos twice¹.

He had a Cypriot collection of his own. The date and circumstances of any visit to Cyprus are unknown¹. After he died in May 1911, aged 62, the antiquities lay among his stored possessions in the University cellar. In October 1913 Eliza Bodington gave one group to the University's Classical Department and a selection to the Society's museum¹. Four pieces from it, a bronze mirror, a Bichrome amphora, a knucklebone and a Black-on-Red flask, are now in Leeds Museums and Galleries (LEEDM.D.1964.0388, 0359, 0387 and 0362); the glass has not survived¹.