1 THE ‘OTAGO ALEXANDER’ Robert Hannah University of Otago The Otago Museum in Dunedin (New Zealand) was founded in 1868. Provided with a purpose- built structure in 1877, it passed in that same year to the management of the nearby University of Otago. This relationship survived until 1955, when the Museum was granted autonomy under its own Act of Parliament, with funding to come primarily from the various local bodies in the province of Otago. Nonetheless, throughout the Museum’s history, staff from the University have served as honorary curators for its wide-ranging material culture and natural history collections. The present writer is the current honorary curator of the Classical Collections. In 1948 the small collection of ancient Greek and Roman objects was enlarged significantly by two acquisitions. The first was a purchase through auction comprising a large part of the private collection of Arthur Bernard Cook, formerly Laurence Professor of Classical Archaeology at Cambridge University (d. 1952). The purchase was made possible by a very generous bequest from a local businessman, Willi Fels, who had died in 1946 and had in his lifetime donated to the Museum some 80,000 items, including 5,400 coins, among which were several hundred ancient Greek and Roman coins. 1 The second major acquisition in Classical material in 1948 was of 36 objects through donation from one of the more extraordinary benefactors of the Otago Museum, Dr Lindsay Rogers (1902–1962). Outstanding among these items was a small marble head identifiable as a portrait of Alexander the Great (cover photograph). Lindsay Rogers, a surgeon by training and by profession for much of his life, was a regular contributor to the Museum’s Classical and Near/Middle Eastern collections. He has attracted some fame in New Zealand military history, as he served during World War II as a doctor among Tito’s partisans in Yugoslavia, and published a memoir of his service in his book, Guerilla Surgeon, in 1957. 2 More information on him can be gleaned from a 1987 biography of his guerilla-surgeon colleague, the Canadian Colin Scott Dafoe, entitled The Parachute Ward. 3 Apparently still in the possession of Dafoe’s family in Edmonton is the original of a fine pencil portrait of Rogers by the Yugoslav artist Jakac. 4 Pertinent to our inquiry today is the fact that after being demobbed in 1945 Rogers went to Iraq in late 1945/early 1946, where he served as Professor of Surgery to the Royal School of Medicine in Baghdad. While in Baghdad there is no doubt he was kept busy teaching: his friend Dafoe reported in a letter to his wife in 1946: He had considerable difficulty in finally reaching Baghdad with the usual obstructionism one meets ... He is well-established and cramming at nights to keep 1 The late Professor Dale Trendall once told me that he was himself instrumental in ensuring that the University of Otago, as both the managing body of the then University Museum and as his own alma mater, should gain the best part of Cook’s collection. After graduating from Otago, Trendall had studied under Cook at Cambridge, and was well aware of the nature of the collection. On Fels, see Anson (2007). 2 Rogers (1957). 3 Street (1987); also available online at: http://www.znaci.net/canadian_surgeon/. 4 Street (1987: 262).