Tankerville James Chamberlayne

Major Tankerville James Chamberlayne served in the Cyprus Island Administration from 1886 to 1908 and was District Commissioner of Kyrenia from May 1898². He was private secretary to the Governor, Sir Henry Bulwer, in Nicosia, and Caubet calls him an active francophile who helped French visitors, among them the tour of the Gothic monuments made by Camille Enlart between February and June 1896³. In 1894 he published in Paris Lacrimae Nicossienses, a catalogue of Nicosia's medieval tombstones, which Given describes as virtually the only worthwhile British contribution to the study of medieval Cyprus in the nineteenth century^1,7.

He also collected antiquities. He gave the Louvre a group of terracotta figurines from a Cypro-Phoenician sanctuary at Lapithos³. Dissinger adds that some of his Lapithos figurines went to the Louvre and others to the Cyprus Museum, and that two figurines from the cave site of Embros reached the British Museum through him; he said he found them in 1897. She notes that he was not an archaeologist and recorded no findspots⁴. Kiely and Merrillees call his collection important and say it vanished altogether⁸.

On 28 December 1898 he wrote to the Chief Secretary about the first Lambousa silver. He reported that a peasant, Constanti Thoma, had found it, and that "Mr Giovanni" had told him the man said he had sold 17 pieces to a Nicosia jeweller named Nikolaki for 25 pounds. Some pieces were, "it is alleged", melted down. The same man had once offered him an "ancient urn" for 15 shillings, which he declined, hoping that finds would be offered to government first². Merrillees records that Chamberlayne was related by marriage to the duc de Dino, who sold the treasure to the British Museum, and suggests that the idea of the sale may have come from Chamberlayne². In 1905 the Museum Committee named him its agent at Kyrenia against illicit export⁶. Of a gold hoard found in 1906, 43 of 131 coins went to the bishop and 88 were lodged in the Kyrenia treasury, whence they passed to the Cyprus Museum⁵.