Bonar Hugh Charles Sykes, M.A.

Bonar Sykes was born on 20 December 1922, a grandson of Andrew Bonar Law the Conservative prime minister, and godson of Rudyard Kipling. His father, Chief of Air Staff, Sir Frederick Sykes, was appointed governor of Bombay in 1927 and Sykes hugely enjoyed his childhood in India during the last years of the Raj although, from 1931, he was able to spend only his summer holidays with his parents. After leaving Eton in 1940 he joined the Royal Navy; a lieutenant, he served in corvettes escorting North Atlantic convoys, in E-boats at the D-Day landings and took part in the bitterly fought raid on Walcheren Island which secured the allies’ bridgehead in the Netherlands albeit at great cost. Sykes went up to Queen’s College, Oxford, in 1946 to read philosophy, politics and economics and after graduation spent a year as a trainee in the tractor division of the Ford Motor Company, which was to prove useful when he retired to concentrate on farming and forestry. More immediately, he joined the Foreign Service in 1949 and was sent first to the embassy at Prague and then to Bonn, both sensitive postings in the 1950s in the uncertain aftermath of war and the onset of the Cold War. Ottawa was less stressful but the four years he spent as Counsellor in Tehran in the 1960s were the highlight of his diplomatic career from Sykes’ personal point of view. He made many Iranian friends and built up a varied collection of Islamic and pre-Islamic pottery and Persian rugs. With his wife and their friend Wilfred Thesinger, Sykes made many expeditions into the Afghan hinterland exploring the countryside on foot (they were all prodigous walkers). At the early age of forty-seven Sykes retired to his small estate at Conock, near Devizes, to farm and plant trees and rare species of plants and shrubs, while playing a full part in local and county institutions. Chief among these were the Devizes Museum and its governing body, the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society, of which Sykes had been a trustee since his student days, and of which he became its longest serving president from 1975-85. Sykes had no pretentions to scholarship; he never published or excavated, but he was ever mindful of Wiltshire’s formidable archaeological heritage and worked to protect and promote it. He began by converting the Museum’s chronic financial deficit into a modest surplus and extended its premises, installing up-to-date humidity and temperature control so that special exhibitions of a high standard became possible. The library was enlarged, both in floor and storage space and in its collections and visiting students and researchers were welcomed. Towards the end of his presidency, in 1984, Devizes Museum was awarded the runners-up prize in the National Museum of the Year Award competition organized by the Illustrated London News. Sykes paid almost daily visits to the Museum; he was a member of the Area Museums Council for the South-West from 1976-86 and of the Council of the Museums Association from 1981-4 and, on a more down-to-earth level, he raised funds by organizing musical evenings in the assembly rooms, all the professional musicians giving their services free. He was himself a generous patron and commissioned his friend, John Piper, to create a stained glass window for the small picture gallery he established in the Museum, and his support of the work of young artists and sculptors was generous. Wearing a different hat, Sykes was a visitor at Erlestoke Prison from 1977, Chairman of the Board of Visitors from 1983-5 and High Sheriff of Wiltshire from 1988. He died on 1 April 1999.