Such is The Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem 1947 a guidebook with a brilliant

Such is The Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem (1947), a guidebook with a brilliant discussion of the mosaics of the church that went against the commonly accepted wisdom of the time and that aroused some further disagreements, but which found partial confirmation in recent investigations. He was also a remarkable draughtsman and water- colourist; I was convinced for years that he had been trained as an architect, because his reconstructions as well as the copies he made of finds are both striking in technique and imaginative in evoking long-lost buildings or any part of them.His scholarly contributions fall into two main groups. There are the learned disquisitions on individual monuments he helped renovate or preserve. I do not know what Hamilton wrote to a correspondent unknown to both of us, but I do know that he answered the letter a month or two before his death.This trivial anecdote illustrates the inevitability of certain ways of knowing other people, especially from foreign lands, among those who held positions of trust and responsibility in a world-wide net of service to the Crown.Hamilton studied the classics at Oxford, learnt Arabic, became an ''excavating'' archaeologist as well as an admirable student of single monuments to be rescued from time or men.

The letter sought information about a German archaeologist who had excavated in Palestine before the Second World War and who was, I believe, killed on the Russian front.I remembered that the British Robert Hamilton had once told me that, at the beginning of the war, in 1939, he had sequestered the belongings of that archaeologist and discovered a sizeable cache ofarms and a lot of Nazi propaganda. I had received a letter from Germany that had been sent to an American friend, another Robert Hamilton, who had been, during his lifetime, a part-time archaeologist. He created the British archaeological centre in Baghdad, often returned on various missions to Iraq or Palestine, and was offered the post of Director of Antiquities of Iraq in 1961, but turned it down. My last exchange of letters with Hamilton brought back a memory of his official functions in the 1930s. There thus had been a breach of article 2.It was not appropriate to make an award of damages since the three terrorist suspects had been intending to plant a bomb in Gibraltar.Ying Hui Tan, Barrister.

Robert Hamilton had several successive and partly overlapping careers, as an imperial civil servant, a scholar and a museum administrator. Hamilton's father had served in India and Robert Hamilton was Inspector and the Director of Antiquities in the Palestine of the British mandate in 1938-48, where he resided almost continuously between 1929 and the end of the mandate in 1948. The authorities were bound to exercise the greatest of care in evaluating the information at their disposal.Having regard to the decision not to prevent the suspects from travelling into Gibraltar, to the failure of the authorities to make sufficient allowances for the possibility that their intelligence assessments might be erroneous and to the automatic recourse to lethal force when the soldiers opened fire, the court was not persuaded that the killings constituted a use of force which was no more than absolutely necessary in defence of persons from unlawful violence within article 2(2)(a). It was disquieting that the suspect car bomb was conveyed to the soldiers as a definite identification of a bomb.The failure to make provision for a margin of error had to be considered in combination with the training of the soldiers to continue to shoot once they opened fire until the suspect was dead. There was the possibility that the terrorists were on a reconnaissance mission. A number of the authorities' key assessments turned out to be erroneous Insufficient allowances were made for other assumptions.