Reverend Selwyn Tillett

Selwyn Tillett is an Anglican priest, retired after a career of more than 40 years working in parishes ranging from South London commuter-land to rural Essex and Norfolk. He took his degree in Egyptology at Cambridge in the 1970s, a decade before ordination, and throughout the 1980s and ‘90s was a regular guest lecturer on the Nile for Bales Tours and Swan Hellenic. He has a specialist knowledge of the travels and careers of early British antiquarians and Egyptologists and has published Egypt Itself, the biography of Robert Hay (1799-1863) whose drawings of Egypt were said by all his contemporaries to be more complete and accurate than those of any other traveller yet remain unpublished. In parallel Selwyn has also published extensively for the Sir Arthur Sullivan Society of which he was Chairman for 7 years; in that capacity in 1990 he discovered the ballet music from Gilbert and Sullivan’s first opera Thespis, all the music from which was thought to have vanished.