Wilfrid Jerome Farrell

In 1909 Wilfrid Jerome Farrell wrote a confidential report on the Cyprus Museum that remained unpublished until R. S. Merrillees printed it in 2005¹. Farrell had entered Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1901, took the M.A. in 1908 and held a studentship at the British School at Athens from 1906 to 1909¹. He arrived at Larnaca on 6 March 1909, travelled to Nicosia, Kyrenia, Kythrea and sites in the east, discussed the Antiquities Law of 1905 with the High Commissioner, Sir Charles King-Harman, and left on 3 April¹. Merrillees infers from internal evidence that the School's director, R. M. Dawkins, commissioned the report¹.

Farrell wrote that the Museum Committee's elected members had a commercial rather than a scientific interest, and that they were suspected, "though not on certain evidence", of exporting antiquities or selling them to the Museum at inflated prices¹. He described the curator, Eustathios Constantinides, as knowledgeable but usually incapacitated by drunkenness, on good terms with dealers and without an accession book. He added that English residents suspected Constantinides of selling Museum objects and that he himself saw no evidence of it¹. He proposed abolishing the Committee and appointing an English or Greek curator¹. Hardy reports that Farrell called the Committee's activities "treasure hunting"³.

On 7 September 1909 J. ff. Baker Penoyre circulated the report with a letter from John Linton Myres, who called the situation "most scandalous" and urged a deputation to the Colonial Office; a conference was set for 14 September¹. Merrillees says the effect of the report cannot be traced without further archive work.

Farrell taught at Rugby and Haileybury from 1911 to 1915, served in the Royal Field Artillery and the Intelligence Corps, and worked in education in Iraq from 1919 and in Palestine until 1947, as Director of Education from 1937¹.