He was on an archaeological mission in Afghanistan between 1940 and 1942 (also working for British intelligence), and was at the excavations led by Joseph Hackin in Begram in 1940.
In the mid-1930s he was involved in a heated controversy, denying the claim that much 17th-century furniture hitherto regarded as Dutch or English was in fact made in India.
This position was given in papers by the Danish curator Poul Fritz Vilhelm Slomann in The Burlington Magazine: "The Indian Period of European Furniture-I" (September 1934, Vol.
These concluded that For all practical purposes I believe to be safe to consider all laquer work found in Europe and dating from about 1600 and fairly far on in the century as having come from India, or from China and Japan.
[2] Codrington responded, joining with Ralph Edwards, a furniture historian, from 1937 Keeper of Woodwork at the V&A, and the exchanges continued into the next year.