24 November 1913(1913-11-24) (aged 51) Calais, France
Henry Finnis Blosse Lynch, MA, FRGS (18 April 1862 – 24 November 1913) was a British traveller, businessman, and LiberalMember of Parliament.[1]
Biography
Lynch was the only son of the Mesopotamian explorer Thomas Kerr Lynch, of a landed Irish family based at Partry House, County Mayo, and Harriet Taylor, the daughter of Colonel Robert Taylor, a British political resident at Baghdad, and his Armenian wife.[2][3] The Armenian ethnicity of his maternal grandfather may have played a role in his interest in Armenia.[4] The explorer Henry Blosse Lynch was his uncle. He was born in London and educated at Eton College, the University of Heidelberg,[5] and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied classics.[1] Although called to the bar from the Middle Temple in 1887, he eschewed a career in law in favour of working for his family business, Lynch Brothers, a commercial firm founded in Baghdad in 1841 which exported goods from Britain to Mesopotamia. He became the company's chairman in 1896.
Lynch was admitted as a freeman of the Worshipful Company of Bowyers of the City of London in 1888.
Lynch died, unmarried, of pneumonia in a hotel in Calais in 1913.[5] He left half of his estate to Trinity College.[7] He also bequeathed a large number of middle-eastern artefacts to the British Museum.[8] Photographs by Lynch are held by the British Library[9] and in the Conway Library at The Courtauld Institute of Art whose archive, of primarily architectural images, is being digitised under the wider Courtauld Connects project.[10]
David George Hogarth, reviewed it for the journal Man, calling it a "magnificently printed and illustrated mixture of travel notes and impressions, historical and archaeological research, political ratiocination, and geographical information."[13] Another reviewer, Charles William Wilson, wrote in The Geographical Journal that while it is "full of information, but from a geographical point of view, it is somewhat disappointing. In the descriptions of scenery there is occasionally such a flow of words that the reader is apt to be wearied and lose the impression which the writer intends to convey."[14]
It continued to be praised in subsequent decades. Martin Conway described it in 1916 as a "classical work on the country" and added that his "journeys in Armenia and close study of the country made him beyond question the greatest recent authority upon it."[15]Charles Dowsett called it, in 1962, the "best book by an Englishman on any aspect of Armenian studies."[16]Jean-Michel Thierry wrote in 1987 that the publication, "with its lively style, good documentation, abundant illustrations, enjoyed the considerable success it deserved."[17]Christina Maranci noted that Lynch's travel contain the "first modern western study of Armenian architecture" and suggested that he "deserves much more attention than he has yet received."[4]
In 2015, a first edition of his two-volume book, Armenia. Travels and Studies, sold for £2,000 at Sotheby's.[18]
^ ab'Mr. H. F. B. Lynch', The Times, 26 November 1913, p. 11
^Craig, F. W. S. (1989) [1974]. British parliamentary election results 1885–1918 (2nd ed.). Chichester: Parliamentary Research Services. p. 444. ISBN0-900178-27-2.
^Neild, Robert (2012). The Financial History of Cambridge University. London: Thames River Press. p. 66. ISBN9780857285157.