William St-Clair brought his profound appreciation of the Romantic writings of the early nineteenth century to his study of the Parthenon Marbles. It was this literary expertise in the world of the Godwins and the Shelleys, Byron and Keats, that imbued his work on the building with unusual qualities. Inspired by the poets’ passionate devotion to Greece, he was especially shocked by Elgin’s careless desecration of the Parthenon and dedicated a lifetime of research to the circumstances that had permitted it.

As early as 1967 he published Lord Elgin and the Marbles. The controversial history of the Parthenon Sculptures, which was revised in two subsequent editions and translated into several languages. In 1998 the third edition incorporated the discoveries he had made concerning the treatment of the Marbles by the British Museum. Following the trail for reliable information, he prised open detailed accounts of the cleaning that whitened but disastrously damaged their surfaces.

By questioning the arrangements Elgin made with the local Ottoman authorities, William had revealed much greater detail of their illegality, which also sparked increased attention to the British Museum’s acquisition and guardianship of the Parthenon Marbles. He presented his research in numerous lectures including the annual Runciman lecture at King’s College London in 2012, when Nicholas and Matti Egonhosted a brilliant dinner in his honour. He was Chairman of Open Book Publishers, who also republished his classic study That Greece might still be free. The Philhellenes in the War of Independence’ (1972) in a revised edition in 2008.

We salute William’s determination to unravel the circumstances of the Parthenon Marbles’ journey to England and the significance of the removal of such vital symbols of Greek culture. We will miss his unmistakable presence and enthusiasm at events to celebrate the Marbles and to campaign for their reunification, and we mourn his untimely passing. With deepest condolences to his family and many friends among the giants of the UK literary world. 

BCRPM's Honorary President Anthony Snodgrass knew William St Clair since the 60's and writes:  

'At times, William St.Clair seemed to have lived more than one life. Even in our supposedly 'globalised' age, it came as a revelation to many of his fellow campaigners for the reunification of the Parthenon Marbles, to learn that he was also an acclaimed literary and historical authority on the Romantic Era - to the point where, on the strength of this, he had been elected a Fellow of the British Academyback in 1992. The same may have been partly true in reverse; and to both parties, it was surprising to find that he had served for years as a senior civil servant in the Treasury, whose research was at first a side-line. His later academic appointments are too numerous to list in detail here, but they covered Trinity College, Cambridge, All Souls at Oxford, the School of Advanced Study in London, Harvard and the Huntington Library in California.'

To read all of Anthony's tribute to William, kindly see the attached here .

You can also hear William speaking to student Nina Kelly in September of 2020 on a subject that he loved to speak about, the Parthenon and its sculptures.

In October 2017, the debating society at UCL schedule a debate for the evening of the 23rd  with the motion: 'This House believes the Elgin Marbles should be repatriated'. The evening, part of society's weekly debate series, was held at the Bloomsbury campus in London  and the speakers for the motion included William St Clair, Tom Flynn and Alexi Kaye Campbell. Below all three speakers pictured with Chair of BCRPM, Janet Suzman. The motion was carried in favour of repatriation.

British Museum 'huge breakthrough', a propaganda stunt according to the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles

The announcement of a "huge breakthrough" by the British Museum, with the discovery of blue paint on some figures from the Parthenon Marbles, looks uncommonly like a propaganda stunt, timed to divert attention from the opening of the New Acropolis Museum in Athens.

The original presence of colour on the Parthenon Marbles has been a matter of common knowledge for years. What is more, ordinary viewers can still see, with their own eyes, traces of it (in this case, dark green) surviving on the drapery in at least one of the original slabs, from the West Frieze of the Parthenon, which is in the new museum in Athens.

Professor Anthony Snodgrass, Chairman of the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles commented "it hardly needs 'a new imaging technique' to tell us what we can see for ourselves."

No doubt the British Museum's sculptures also once preserved some of their colour - that is, until Lord Duveen's drastic "cleaning" operation of 1937- 1938, which was designed deliberately to erase any trace of patina or colour.

"By all means let the debates over the proper care of the Parthenon Marbles continue - but on a grown-up level, please" concludes Professor Anthony Snodgrass.

Professor Anthony Snodgrass is a Fellow of the British Academy and Professor Emeritus of Classical Archaeology, University of Cambridge. The British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Sculptures (www.parthenonuk.com) has been established since 1983.

Ends: Issued on behalf of the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles on 26 June 2009, press contact Marlen Taffarello 07789533791/01780 46145 or email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. / This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

To the Editor, The Guardian

I know that Simon Jenkins is fundamentally on the same side as I am, and I'm sure it wasn't he who chose to put that offensive phrase in his headline (A banana republic police HQ maybe, but not a home for the Elgin marbles, 23 October). But his piece did contain more than its fair share of anti-Greek prejudice. The Greeks were 'foolish' to turn down the offer of a loan of the Elgin Marbles this summer (a heavily conditional offer, confined to a few pieces, never officially proposed and withdrawn as soon as mooted). They have consigned the excavated ancient site under the new museum to a 'surreal dungeon' (unfair: it is to be open to visitors). And Jenkins cannot have it both ways: if the Greeks previously 'spoiled their case' for restitution of the Marbles by shortcomings in conservation, then he should not be complaining now that the restoration works on the Acropolis are so painstaking.
Anyway, the Greeks have now 'gone to the other extreme' with a building that 'screams the supremacy of Big Modernism' and looks like 'the police headquarters of a banana republic': Bernard Tschumi's New Acropolis Museum in Athens, which is the real target here. Comment is free, and a whole series of other expert architectural critics have commended Tschumi's building for exactly the opposite quality - 'handsome', 'unassuming', 'minimalist', 'unpretentious' - to what Jenkins detects. Simon Jenkins prefers the interior to the exterior: fair enough, so do many of us. But there was no call to package his criticism in this offensive wrapping paper.

Anthony Snodgrass
Chair, British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles

Thursday 22 October 2009, Simon Jenkins for The Guardian

A banana republic police HQ maybe, but not a home for the Elgin marbles

I am a restitutionist – but the new museum fails to clinch the case. It is not so much an argument as a punch in the face.

In 1812 Lord Elgin loaded the last of his Acropolis sculptures on to ships in Piraeus and set sail for England. Four years later and bankrupt, he sold them to the British Museum. This summer the Greeks, eager for their return, staged what they hoped would be a definitive retort by opening a £110m museum to house the marbles against the slopes of the same Acropolis. It is the most costly poison-pen letter in the history of cultural exchange.

Any lawyer can prove anything, and I happen to agree with those who regard the Elgin marbles as legally Britain's. But in any meaningful sense, they "belong" in Athens. As 56 of the surviving 94 panels of the Panathenaic procession, they should rejoin the 36 in the new museum. Precedent is not an issue, being the last refuge of reactionaries and those who have lost an argument. The Elgin marbles are, to put it mildly, a special case.

To me, architectural sculpture belongs on the building to which it was once attached. If it cannot be re-attached then it belongs in its climate, culture and context. The restitution of the marbles to Greece was thus always a noble goal of cultural diplomacy. Whenever I visited Athens, I came away ashamed at Britain's insistence that it would never return them, but this was coupled with sadness that the polluted, un-conserved and undistinguished city of Athens seemed determined to undermine its case.

Athens has now cleaned its air and its city. Last week the view of the Acropolis from the adjacent hill of Lycabettus was glorious, with the streets subdued in mist below and the deep blue bay of Phaleron shimmering in the distance. The sunlit slopes of the Acropolis were rid of traffic and immaculately landscaped. Athens seemed on its best behaviour. So was the case for restitution clinched?

I have to admit that, if anything, the case is weakened. When restitution was a futurist fantasy, idealism could rule the day. Sending back the marbles was part of a dream, in which the Parthenon itself might be restored, as the Stoa of Attalus in the agora has been restored. Perhaps the marbles might find their way back on to the temple. Perhaps a museum might be built for the entire frieze, completed with not only Elgin's panels, but missing ones conjectured from the original Pantelic quarries. Perhaps they might be repainted.

Today we can see what restitution would mean in practice. The argument has been hijacked by the gods of modern museology. Just as previously the Greeks spoiled their case by their conservation shortcomings, now they have gone to the other extreme and put their cause in the hands of archaeologists and architects – stripping it of all passion.

The new museum, designed in pastiche Corbusian style by the Swiss architect Bernard Tschumi, is not so much an argument as a punch in the face. It is big and brutal, like something flown in overnight from Chicago. Its rear hits the street with two storeys of concrete and corrugated metal, set back from the road like the police headquarters of a banana republic. The giant entrance porch cantilevers out towards the Acropolis, screaming the supremacy of Big Modernism over the serene stones of the Acropolis opposite. It is the worst case of architectural egotism, of I can do anything bigger than you.

As if to slam the point home, the excavated streets of old Athens, discovered below, have not been laid out as a public site but consigned to a surreal dungeon beneath the concrete columns and glass pavement of the museum's ground floor. Were this Pompeii, no one would have dared such an outrage. Where there should be elegance and deference, there is all the architecture money could buy.

The foyer is in the air-terminal style beloved of big-time museums – witness the Louvre, Tate Modern or New York's Museum of Modern Art. The first two floors offer a mass of structural space for little content, though the oppression is relieved by the exquisite delicacy of the classical sculptures.

These objects – ethereal maidens with plaited hair, beautifully carved boys, the caryatids of the Erechtheion, a mischievous Silenus – seem to float before the viewer, most of them free of glass and deliciously close to the eye. They suggest that Athens has treasures aplenty, without having to reclaim those lost to other cities. (Indeed, the city's new gallery of Cycladic art is one of the finest archaeological museums I know.)

The museum's undoubted coup, political as much as sculptural, is the top gallery, dedicated to the Parthenon. Fashioned as a pavilion with a surrounding colonnade, its walls are hung with the frieze panels still in Greek hands. Glassed on all four sides, the terraces look out over the roofs of Athens and to the Acropolis above. Here the absence of the London panels is undeniably painful. Their replication with plaster casts makes some amends, but the absence of the end pediments is particularly sad. The political point is made, the visual impact stunning.

While the Greeks win full marks for theatricality, the gallery is not the Parthenon, nor a copy, nor remotely deferential to the original. Architecture and museum technology have combined to dictate a lowering ceiling and heavy steel and concrete frames, overlooked by lighting gantries, window blinds and double glazing.

The whole thing is unremittingly hi-tech, with Tschumi determined to push himself forward as a rival to the builders of the Acropolis. The result is ironic. I find the British Museum's bland and gloomy presentation of the marbles somehow more pristine than these souls lost in a modernist wilderness.

Again I would be more sympathetic to Athens were it not for the continued chaos of the Acropolis itself. In a lifetime of visits, I have never seen it free of builders' yards, now more than ever. It was taken from world view by the archaeological profession in the 1980s and submitted to a protracted torture of poles, planks, cranes, rails and sheds. It seems destined to last for ever. I doubt if readers of this article will be able to photograph the Acropolis free of scaffolding in their lifetimes: I have not.

With the Propylaia also covered in scaffolding and the Erechtheion a half-rebuilt "designer ruin", the Acropolis composition is a monument not to ancient Athens but to the unknown 20th-century archaeologist. It is shocking, as if London were to keep St Paul's and Big Ben in scaffolding in perpetuity.

The squabble has now become messy. The Greeks were foolish this summer to reject the British Museum's half-mooted offer to loan the Elgin marbles back for the opening, on the grounds that acceptance might concede London's title. The Greek point would have been better made had the world seen the marbles united, however briefly, than by this legal nicety.

If I were seeking a compromise, I would return the pediments, which are the most glaring omission from the new museum. I would also return Elgin's filched Erechtheion caryatid. As for the rest of London's hoard, I remain a restitutionist, but less convinced than before. Athens has substituted a bunker for a dream and failed to end the argument.

23 May 2022, London, Thanasis Gavos for Skaigr

"Great shock" said Michael Wood, a renown British historian as he grappled with the "false" claim of the British Museum that most of the Parthenon Sculptures located in London were collected by Lord Elgin's associates not from the monument, but "from the rubble".

This argument was made by the Deputy Director of the British Museum Jonathan Williams at UNESCO's the intergovernmental commission's 23 session on the Promotion of the Return of Cultural Property last week in Paris.

Speaking to SKAI Mr. Wood, Professor of Public History at the University of Manchester and one of the newest members of the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles (BCRPM), clarified: "It is clearly clear that most of the marbles that Elgin took were taken from the monument. You cannot tour the British Museum today looking at them and thinking that these marbles fell from 40 feet in the rubble. The greatest of the damage they suffered was in their removal by Elgin and his envoy, the Italian Lusieri."

The professor known through television histories to the British professor continued: "We have eyewitnesses who describe the forcible removal of the foreheads, the frieze. Even Lusieri himself admitted that he had to resort to becoming a 'little barbarian', as he put it, to get the pieces of the frieze, cutting the back with saws to make them lighter to be transported. So it is outrageous to claim that most of the sculptures were not on the monument."

Mr Williams' argument provoked a reaction from Culture Minister Lina Mendoni, who in a statement to the Guardian newspaper referred, among other things, to the "blatant theft" by Elgin.

The honorary President of the BCRPM Professor Anthony Snowgrass commented speaking to SKAI that the argument for rescuing sculptures from the rubble is not entirely new, but has now been formulated to an exaggerated degree. In any case, he added, it does not change the substance of the issue and the Greek request.

On the British Museum's argument for the legal acquisition of the Sculptures, which Mr. Williams insisted on at the UNESCO conference, Michael Wood noted: "In the year 2022 such arguments do not convince most people at all. Whether they were acquired legally is a very controversial point, there is very little evidence of this. In any case, how can he (Elgin) legally acquire them from an occupying power?

"The question on which we should keep our minds is not these meticulous arguments about whether it was legal, whether this sculpture was on the ground or not, but what is the right thing to do in this case. All over the world now these demands for reparations and for the repatriation of things looted by European powers in the era of imperialism are becoming a very big issue. The time has now come for these Sculptures to be reunited in the Acropolis Museum."

At the same time, Mr. Wood highlighted the importance of the moral argument about a single artistic creation that must be united to the greatest extent possible. "There are also fragments in the Vatican, in the Louvre, in Copenhagen, in Würzburg. Everything should be returned to Athens and the Marbles should be reunited.

As for the British Museum, he stressed that it could replace the Parthenon Sculptures with other "fascinating" masterpieces offered by the Greek government.

"Moreover, the return of the Parthenon Marbles would be a great, magnanimous gesture from the British to the Greeks, which most Britons support, according to the polls," Michael Wood concluded.

Source: skai.gr

03 December 2010

New Chairman for the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles

PROFESSOR  Anthony Snodgrass retired from his position as the chairman of the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles (www.parthenonuk.com and twitter BCRPM) and it was announced former MP Eddie O’Hara would take over the position.

Eddie O’Hara recently retired after 20 years as MP for Knowsley South and describes himself as “an unreconstituted classicist and lifelong supporter of the campaign for the reunification of the Parthenon Marbles”.

Throughout his parliamentary career he tirelessly promoted the case for the Marbles to be returned to Athens, using various means including Early Day Motions, parliamentary questions, debates, meetings with ministers and the presentation of a Museums Bill, whose purpose was to remove any question as to whether museum trustees could divest themselves of objects in their collections. 

Eddie O’Hara commented: “Professor Snodgrass has earned universal respect for the dignity and scholarship with which he graced the campaign and I am very much looking forward to carrying on his great work and continuing to campaign for the Parthenon Marbles to be returned to Athens.”

The British Museum has deployed a seductive new argument against their return. They have argued that the British Museum is one of a small number of ‘encyclopaedic’ museums, such as the Louvre and the New York Metropolitan Museum, and that the Parthenon Sculptures in the British Museumform part of a wider narrative of the development of western art together with outside influences upon it.  They believe to return them would damage the integrity of this narrative.

Eddie O’Hara disagrees with these arguments and believes there are many other exemplars that the Greek Government could make available to replace the Marbles that wouldn’t damage the integrity of their narrative.

Eddie O’Hara also believes the British Museum overstates its case when it says that after two centuries in its collection the Marbles no longer play a part in any Greek narrative.

He comments: “They should not put narratives in competition with each other but if they do surely the most important story to be told by and on behalf of the Marbles is that they form an integral unity with those in Athens, and together they form an integral unity with one of the most important historical monuments in the world.”

Eddie O’Hara concurs with Eleni Cubitt, Hon Secretary of the Committee as he would welcome a credible response to the argument for the return of the Marbles on the grounds of human rights. The Faro Convention proposes that for a cultural community to be deprived of enjoyment of its cultural heritage is a violation of its human rights.

“The Greeks are a cultural community as defined by the convention and the Marbles are part of the cultural heritage with which they identify. Where there is a dispute good practice as defined by the convention includes measures to look at cooperation and reconciliation of these differences” concludes Eddie O’Hara.

Eddie O’Hara studied Literae Humaniores at Magdalen College, Oxford and has been General Rapporteur for the Cultural Heritage and Museums Rapporteur for the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.

To contact Eddie O’Hara please call 07831 809 957 or email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Ends: issued on behalf of the BCRPM by Marlen Godwin (01480 460145 and 07789533791 This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.)

Additional notes:

Professor Anthony Snodgrass Fellow of the British Academy, Professor Emeritus of Classical Archaeology, University of Cambridge held the position of Chairman of the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Sculptures from 2002 to 01 July 2010. His predecessor was the erudite Arts Campaigner Graham Binns (1997 -2002).

Since its foundation in 1983, the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles (www.parthenonuk.com) has achieved a great deal. Significant milestones include:

• Success in persuading the British Museum to refer to the Marbles as the Parthenon Marbles instead of the Elgin Marbles. Also the gallery in the British Museum was renamed the Parthenon Gallery.
• Taking an instrumental role in the publication of Christopher Hitchens'book on the Parthenon Marbles, the third edition of which - The Parthenon Marbles: The Case for Reunification- with a preface by Nobel Laureate, Nadine Gordimer, was launched in London at the end of May 2008.
• Initiating and organising many public debates on the topic, all of which the British Museum has refused to participate in. The last debate, chaired by Professor Anthony Snodgrass, Chairman of the BCRPM, took place at Cambridge University in February 2008. The final vote was 114 for the Return of the Parthenon Sculptures and 46 against.

The latest Mori poll results of September 2008 showed that 69% of those familiar with the Marbles debate support return, as opposed to 19% who oppose it (50% of the 2,109 people asked had knowledge of the Marbles debate).

The archives of the BCRPM have been donated to Kings College, London and these can be found in the Department of Greek History.

27 January 2021

'The Armada maps belong in Britain, along with the Elgin Marbles – nothing hypocritical about that', writes Simon Heffer in the Telegraph.

Simon Heffer makes a clear plea: "too many vital pieces of our national heritage have already been lost to overseas buyers. We must keep them, whatever the cost."

His opening paragraph asks: should we rejoice that the Government has banned the sale, to a collector in America, of a series of ink and watercolour maps from the late 16th century that depict the defeat of the Spanish Armada, or is it an act of shocking hypocrisy from a nation that steadfastly refuses to allow Greece to have the Elgin marbles back?

Professor Anthony Snodgrass, rightly points out: The salient point is that there's just no comparison between the two petitioners, in one case "a collector in America" and in the other, “the Greek nation."

Janet Suzman and Perter Thonemann sent letters to the Editor of the Telegraph  in response to Simon Heffer's article. Peter's letter was published in the Telegraph on 30 January 2021 and also in The Week on 06 February 2021.  

Sir,

Simon Heffer on the Elgin Marbles 27th January 2021

I fear Simon Heffer is comparing apples and pears; the Armada maps have a great deal to do with British history, but the Parthenon sculptures were conceived in the time of Pericles & are integrally part of the building that still stands above Athens. Far from being 'perfectly preserved'; they are much damaged by violent detachment from that building by Elgin’s servants.

Heffer fails to tell the BM has one half of the marbles looted by Lord Elgin, and the other half in Athens - neither making any sense without its absent half. Our lot were not kept to 'the most rigorous standards of conservation', once clumsily scrubbed to make them look whiter. They were not meant to look white as driven English snow, but showing up brightly painted in warm Greek sunlight.

Heffer is correct that no written permission has been found giving Elgin the right to steal the Parthenon’s carvings; they are here without the consent of Greece. Demands for their return have been constant since Greece became an independent state. The carvings are as meaningful to the story of Greece as the dolmens of Salisbury plain are to ours. More so.

Sure, they maybe they were saved from further accidents, but the figures left in Greece are pretty fine too. But be it noted Elgin wanted to save them, not for the nation, but for himself in his lordly pile in Scotland. Only when he later got ill and bankrupt he bethought him of selling them to the British Museum.

After two hundred years of captivity in gloomy Room 18 of the British Museum, the Marbles have done their work in reviving classical studies & inspiring the aesthetic, philosophic and political thinking of the West. Their beauty will hardly be diminished by beingby being in the world-class museum awaiting them in Athens . It is high time that the incomplete and inaccurate story told by Simon Heffer and friends was expunged from British urban mythology.

Sincerely,
Janet Suzman DBE
Chair British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Mables