Rupert Forbes Gunnis

Rupert Gunnis sat on the Cyprus Museum Committee that put its "duplicates" up for sale, and in 1933 sold his own Cypriot antiquities to Sir Henry Wellcome and through Sotheby's. He was born on 11 March 1899 in London and educated at Eton^13,14. He served in the army in the First World War and was invalided out in 1917, then worked as private secretary to the last Commissioner of the British South Africa Company and to the Governor of Uganda¹.

The Museum Committee and the saleroom

Gunnis landed in Cyprus on 30 November 1926 as private secretary and aide-de-camp to the Governor, Ronald Storrs². On 12 December he visited the Cyprus Museum and wrote in his diary that it was "very well arranged by Mr Markides" but held "too many duplicates"². Eleven days later he was elected to the Museum Committee, at the meeting where the Committee asked the Curator, Menelaos Markides, to list "duplicates" for sale to museums and tourists².

Storrs, in his memoir, praised Gunnis for sorting the cellar stock and organising volunteer ladies to sell duplicates to cruise-ship passengers; Joan du Plat Taylor and Olga Tufnell were among the volunteers^1,2. Museum sales income rose from £0.3 in 1924 to £200 in 1926 and £359 in 1928². Storrs also created the post of Inspector of Antiquities for him about 1932; Symons calls his office Travelling Member, while Stanley-Price dates the Inspector's post from 1932 to February 1936^1,2.

Digging

Committee members could excavate with the Governor's authority, and the finds belonged to the Government². Gunnis opened tombs in Nicosia and Kyrenia and dug at Episkopi. In June 1927 he worked at Polis, where he recorded 500 terracottas from the Maratheri sanctuary in three days⁴. In December 1927 he dug at Enkomi Ayios Iakovos, found no tombs, and recovered a hoard of Late Bronze Age bronzes^6,8. R. S. Merrillees notes that no ingots from the "Gunnis Hoard" have been identified in the Cyprus Museum⁶. A trial trench at Ayia Irini in 1929 came before the Swedish permit arrived¹⁰. None of this digging was published.

He also worked with the Swedish Cyprus Expedition. Einar Gjerstad thanked him in the preface to the first volume of the expedition's publication⁹. He raised the donations that paid for Porphyrios Dikaios's Vounous excavation of 1931¹¹.

In December 1927 Gunnis arranged a police raid on the registered collection of George Basil Palma in Famagusta. Merrillees, who read Gunnis's diaries, wrote that it "reads more like pique than policing"⁶.

His own collection

Stanley-Price writes that Gunnis built a private collection "discreetly" while in public service, and that within fifteen months of arriving he had sent twelve packing-cases to England to furnish a "museum" at his family home². In a letter to his mother of 8 February 1927, quoted by Stanley-Price, he described finding pottery and a silver medieval coin, "which relics needless to add I have pinched for myself"². Museum records show few sales to him: 21 glass pieces in January 1927 and a broken statuette in June, both with export certificates².

On 30 August 1933 he sold a collection to Wellcome¹. On 12 December 1933 Sotheby's sold about 390 objects described as the property of Rupert Gunnis, some bought by the Ashmolean Museum and the Institute of Archaeology in London². Marion vases with Cyprus Museum numbers from the excavations of 1889 were among them; Smith says John Linton Myres noticed three Ashmolean lots with Cyprus Museum labels, and Stanley-Price names Gunnis as the consignor^2,4. Symons wrote that the Wellcome material, with Gunnis's, was dispersed in 1981, mostly to Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery, and that more than 200 pieces could be identified as his¹.

The allegations

No charge, trial or conviction is recorded. The allegations come from several hands. On 18 March 1936 the Director of Antiquities, John Hilton, sent the Colonial Secretary a confidential report saying Gunnis had "a widespread reputation ... as an unauthorised exporter of antiquities on a considerable scale", and that as a Committee member he had signed export permits for "a large quantity of antiquities taken out of the island for himself"². Hilton added hearsay from a visiting archaeologist, whom Stanley-Price identifies as J. R. B. Stewart, about Gunnis's purchases at Dali, and described a night opening of a tomb at Polis in 1929, of which he wrote "What he found I do not know"².

Stanley-Price calls Hilton's account a denunciation, writes that Gunnis's "misdemeanours in exporting antiquities were common knowledge in Cyprus and Britain", and says that Gunnis "manipulated" the duplicate sales "for his own benefit"; he also says Gunnis "may have abused his signature authority"². Powell reports a letter in which Stewart wrote that it was rumoured Gunnis had plundered a tomb by night, "but there was no single incident that could be proved"⁷. Merrillees says Gunnis amassed his collection "by one means or another" and had it exported to England "(smuggled?)"⁶. Thomas Kiely writes that he "acquired and sold antiquities illegally"⁵. Symons, the earliest of these writers, wrote: "By what other methods, if any, he acquired material we do not know"¹.

Removal and the later years

In February 1936 the Governor abolished the Inspector's post and made Gunnis Travelling Member of the new Antiquities Advisory Board at £150 a year³. Stanley-Price argues that Gunnis's opinions helped bring about Hilton's dismissal in April 1936³. Gunnis left Cyprus in March 1939; Stanley-Price says he left hurriedly, and Symons says he left "under some sort of cloud" that was "said not to have involved antiquities"^1,3.

Historic Cyprus appeared in 1936, the product of visits to 670 villages and 1,800 churches and chapels over three years^1,12. In England he lived at Hamsell Manor, Sussex, and later at Hungershall Lodge, Tunbridge Wells, where he was a councillor from 1947, chairman of the Library Committee that ran the museum, alderman and magistrate¹. His Dictionary of British Sculptors 1660-1851 appeared in the early 1950s¹. He died on 31 July 1965¹. His diaries are at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, and seven photograph albums, three of them with about 730 Cyprus photographs, are at The Amelia, Tunbridge Wells².