Thomas Backhouse Sandwith

Thomas Backhouse Sandwith read the first classification of Cypriot tomb pottery to the Society of Antiquaries of London on 4 May 1871, eight months after he left the island where he had spent five years as British Vice-Consul^1,3.

He was born at Bridlington in 1831 into a Yorkshire medical family and went to school at Christ's Hospital, Wesley College Sheffield and Edinburgh Academy before taking a BA at St Catharine's College, Cambridge, in 1855⁹. He served in Turkey and Aleppo in 1855-57. He then served as unpaid Vice-Consul at Aintab and Marash and, from 1862, as salaried Vice-Consul at Haifa⁹. The London and China Telegraph of 11 November 1865 still names him as Vice-Consul at Caiffa¹⁵.

Dali and the British Museum

In Cyprus he reported to the Consul-General at Beirut and succeeded Dominic Ellis Colnaghi as British representative². Reeve dates his arrival to October 1865 and says he had no earlier archaeological interests. The British Museum had asked its consuls in 1864 to look out for antiquities, and Sandwith kept up meteorological records for the Scottish Meteorological Society alongside his consular work².

From 1868, after Robert Hamilton Lang and others had begun on the cemeteries at Dali (ancient Idalion), Sandwith bought finds from the tombs and employed villagers affected by famine to open graves^2,3. He held no firman, and Reeve concludes that he probably did no digging himself². On 17 March 1869 he wrote to Charles Newton at the British Museum about the tombs and the finds of Luigi Palma di Cesnola³. In 1869 he sold the Museum 53 pieces, for which Kiely gives a price of 20 pounds⁴. Reeve says he did not haggle over Newton's low prices and that the sales had scholarly as well as financial motives².

Sources disagree about his relations with Cesnola. Marangou describes joint expeditions, a share in Cesnola's early museum and a spell as acting American vice-consul in Cesnola's absence in 1869⁶. Merrillees treats the two as rivals over the stratigraphy and chronology of the Dali cemeteries³.

In April 1870 his brother, the Rev. Henry Sandwith, told the Sheffield Daily Telegraph that boxes of "ancient Cyprian art" were being consigned to him for sale in England to relieve distress in Cyprus². Some reserved pieces went to another brother, Humphry Sandwith, at Wimbledon. The collection was later deposited in the museum of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society at York, and part of it was shown and offered for sale at the Leeds exhibition of 1875, where the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society bought some². Pieces from it are now in the British Museum, at Leeds, in National Museums Scotland, and in the Ashmolean, Fitzwilliam and Garstang museums^2,3.

Crete and after

The paper of 1871, "On the different styles of pottery found in ancient tombs in the island of Cyprus", was printed in Archaeologia 45, pages 127-142¹. Sandwith was gazetted Consul in Crete in June 1870¹¹ and left Cyprus that September³. He served as Consul at Chania until 1885 and brokered the Pact of Halepa in Crete in 1878, for which Lord Salisbury thanked him and he was made a Companion of the Bath⁹. In the early 1880s he tried to interest the British Museum in Knossos, without result^16,17. He moved to Tunis as Consul in 1885¹² and was Consul-General at Odessa from 1 July 1888 to 1891¹⁴. A London Gazette notice of 28 August 1900 concerns his estate as that of Thomas Backhouse Sandwith, C.B., deceased¹³.