Robert Biddulph

Robert Biddulph, High Commissioner of Cyprus from 1879 to 1886, approved the founding of the Cyprus Museum on 15 June 1882, on condition that it cost the government almost nothing^3,8. A Royal Artillery officer who had served in the Crimea and at Lucknow, he had succeeded Garnet Wolseley in the post¹⁴. The petition came from Archbishop Sophronios, the Cadi and the Moufti⁹. His terms were that the museum live on subscriptions and donations, with at most the temporary loan of a room in the Government offices³. He presided over its first Committee, whose government members were Elliott Bovill, Claude Delaval Cobham, Samuel Brown, W. Corby and Herbert Kitchener¹⁰.

He was also a private client. In 1883 Max Ohnefalsch-Richter dug near Soloi for several private patrons, and Reinach lists "sir R. Biddulph" among them⁶. A moulded glass tumbler from Linou, recorded as in Biddulph's collection, was deposited in the South Kensington Museum^1,7. His successor Henry Bulwer tried to end the private excavating consortia that Biddulph had tolerated⁵. In 1886, no longer High Commissioner, Biddulph lent antiquities to the Cyprus Court of the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London², and in 1889 he published a paper, "Cyprus", in the Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society¹³. He was briefly Quartermaster-General to the Forces in 1893, then Governor of Gibraltar until 1900, and died on 18 November 1918¹⁴.