The Indiana Jones of Wales
In 1908, a Finnish biblical scholar, Valter Juvelius, convinced a group of old Etonians that he had found secret cyphers in the Old Testament. These cyphers, he claimed, showed where the Ark of the Covenant had been hidden for 2,500 years.
One of these old Etonians was Robin Duff, later the second Baronet of Vaynol, whose family were one of the largest landowners in Caernarfon, with one of the wealthiest estates in the whole of Wales.
Duff family owned and made their fortune through Dinorwic, one of the biggest slate quarries in Wales, which today serves as the location of the National Slate Museum. In total, the family’s Vaynol estate was worth the equivalent of £100 million at the time. An indicator of the family’s wealth was the fact that it included an in-built zoo, which held exotic and dangerous animals.
It was this fortune that Robin Duff was able to channel into the outlandish expedition to find the lost Ark, contributing the equivalent of around £1million. The old Etonians were largely connected through their service in the British Army and they set sail for Jerusalem in a private yacht in 1909.
Led by the Honourable Montagu Parker, later the fifth Earl of Morley the group would be involved in gun running, riots and even a supposed deadly curse. Believing the Ark to be hidden in tunnels just outside the city they bribed Ottoman ministers to gain permission to dig and promised to share the proceeds of their work. Wearing his Life-Guard dress uniform, including helmet, gauntlet and boots, Duff must have looked quite out of place in Jerusalem.
The Etonian expedition dug for three years without finding anything other than pottery and an ancient toilet. In desperation they resorted to bribery and gave 100 gold sovereigns to the guardian of the Haram al-Sharif, known in English as “Temple Mount” to be allowed to dig in secret at night in the Dome of the Rock, one of the most religiously sensitive places in Jerusalem. Dressed in disguise as locals, the group dug only at night, however, they were discovered and fled back to their yacht.
Legend had it that they did not return empty handed allegedly bringing back an ancient curse which said that anyone seeking the Ark would be cursed “six and sixty-fold”. In a bizarre turn of events, tragic fates did in fact await many of them. Some suffered early deaths, while others experienced any number of things from madness and bankruptcy to divorce and deportation.
Robin Duff was one of those that appears to have suffered. Inheriting the title of the Second Baronet of Vaynol on the death of his father in 1914, Robin attended the funeral in uniform as he had re-joined his regiment at the outbreak of the First World War. Three weeks later, he was killed just outside of the Belgian city of Ypres, shot dead on the frontline while attacking a German position.
So just over 70 years ago before Steven Spielberg produced the first Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981 we had our own Indiana Jones right here in North Wales.
My thanks to Wales Online and author Graham Addison for his book,
“Raiders of the Hidden Ark,”