Richmond Palmer

Richmond Palmer was the Governor of Cyprus who abolished the post of the island's Inspector of Antiquities and, on his way out, put a denunciation of its holder on record. When the first Director of Antiquities, John Hilton, arrived in November 1934, Palmer urged him and his wife to look at Italian restoration work on Rhodes on the way¹. He was born on 20 April 1877 and died on 22 May 1958³.

Palmer and Rupert Gunnis left Cyprus on leave on 9 June 1935, and the Secretary of State decided Hilton's case after exchanges with Palmer in London, which Nicholas Stanley-Price presumes took place at the Colonial Office. Hilton resigned effective 31 December 1935 but served until about March 1936; Palmer forwarded his proposal for restoring Kyrenia castle to the Colonial Office¹. Stanley-Price links Hilton's dismissal to Palmer's zeal for purging civil servants who were not performing¹.

Palmer was a friend of Gunnis. In February 1936 he abolished Gunnis's post of Inspector of Antiquities, which left Gunnis without an official position, and named him Travelling Member of the new Antiquities Advisory Board, with a stipend of 150 pounds^1,2. Hilton's statement of March 1936 made charges about Gunnis's export of antiquities; Stanley-Price writes that Palmer, influenced by his friend, did not pursue them, since Hilton had left². In May 1936 the new Secretary of State, William Ormsby-Gore, sent Palmer a nine-page letter asking that the Director of Antiquities have the full support of the Cyprus government and that Gunnis lose his stipend¹.

Palmer retired in the summer of 1939 and was succeeded by W. Denis Battershill. Before leaving he placed on record a bitter denunciation of Gunnis, which according to Stanley-Price included suspected illicit trading in antiquities for personal profit^1,2.