Ian Jenkins (Senior Curator of Antiquities, British Museum) died suddenly last Saturday 28 November 2020.
We disagreed of course on the proper abode of the 'Elgin Marbles', but he was a very great scholar/connoisseur and a good friend over many years, the last of them blighted by Parkinson's, and I am very sad that he is no longer with us.
What not many people will know is that he came from what would once have been called a 'humble', that is a working-class, background: his mother, he told me as we were visiting the Greek section of London's West Norwood cemetery together, had been 'in service'.
He wrote many excellent books and exhibition catalogues, including on the Parthenon sculptures, but my favourite remains......
More controversially, he convened and edited the proceedings of a conference devoted to the 'cleaning' of those Parthenon Marbles confined in the B.M.
BCRPM's Honorary President Professor Anthony Snodgrass adds: one big thing in Ian Jenkins favour was the honesty of his speech at the 1998 BM Colloquium on the 'cleaning' (his conduct later on notwithstanding), in which he said:"The cleaning was a scandal, and the cover-up another scandal."
Several BCRPM members attended the BM's '200 years of the Elgin Collection lecture' on 01 July 2016 and Ian Jenkins then wrote an article in the September /October 2016 British Archaeology Magazine. This article was written to mark 200 years since the British government's decision in June 1816 to purchase LordElgin's collection of Parthenon (and other) Marbles, and which starts off by noting the latest (July 11) Parliamentary bid to have them restored to their native Athens, he provides a most succinct and pointed resume of the current state of play: how they came into Elgin's possession and then the British Museum's custodianship, what they represent, and what pieces of the Parthenon are not in the British Museum (and not in the new Acropolis Museum, either...).
In April 2018, the Rodin exhibition opened at the BM and Greek journalist Labis Tsirigotakis interviewed Ian Jenkins for ERT, Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation TV. The questions regarding the Parthenon sculptures put to Ian by Labis were firm, and the replies equally so.
A recent, revealing interview with him was published in The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies' ARGO magazine.
Rest in peace.
Paul Cartledge
A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture Emeritus
University of Cambridge
