The Man Who Deciphered Linear B

The Story of Michael Ventris

Andrew Robinson

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780500770764
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Greek Ancient History
• Index: History

First discovered in 1900, on clay tablets among the ruins of the Palace of Minos at Knossos, Crete, Linear B script remained a mystery for over fifty years until 1952, when Michael Ventris discovered that its signs did not represent an unknown language as previously believed, but an archaic dialect of Greek, more than 500 years older than the Greek of Homer. This book tells the life story of Michael Ventris, an intriguing and contradictory man, a gifted linguist but a divided soul, together with that of his remarkable decipherment of Linear B. Dubbed the Everest of archaeology, the decipherment was all the more remarkable because Ventris was not a trained classical scholar but an architect who had first heard of Linear B as a schoolboy. An initial fascination became a lifelong obsession.

1

An Unconventional Upbringing

‘Did you say the tablets haven’t been deciphered, Sir?’

Michael Ventris as a schoolboy to Sir Arthur Evans at an exhibition on the Minoan world, 1936

To English ears, Ventris is a name that sounds slightly foreign, its origin hard to determine – perhaps appropriately for a man like Michael Ventris. Yet the Ventrises are a long-established English family. The Dictionary of National Biography lists, apart from Michael, Sir Peyton Ventris, a judge who was member of parliament for Ipswich in 1689; and that branch of the family, living near Cambridge, can be traced back to 1490. A second branch lived from 1560 to 1700 near Bedford at Compton Manor, a house that still stands; the panelling of its dining room contains bullet holes said to date from the civil war when Henry, brother of Sir Charles Ventris, was killed.

Continuing the tradition, Michael Ventris’s paternal grandfather, the son of a clergyman, was a distinguished army officer, the colonel of the Essex Regiment, who served in Africa, India and the Far East, retiring in 1920 as a major-general commanding the British forces in China. And Ventris’s father was an officer in the Indian Army. He, however, had an undistinguished career, overshadowed by illness and perhaps his own father’s military reputation: he retired from the army in his late thirties, as a lieutenant colonel, and was a semi-invalid for most of his remaining years until his death in 1938.

But Colonel Ventris did break with tradition in one important respect – he married a half-Polish woman, Anna Dorothea Janasz, the daughter of Joseph Janasz, a wealthy landowner in Poland, and an English mother from a Northamptonshire family. A fine-featured, intelligent, sensitive woman – known as ‘The Charmer’ in her family – who enjoyed fashionable clothes and developed a passion for modern art and design, Dorothea seems to have been a somewhat unsuitable partner for an unremarkable army officer. At any rate, it is she who would bring up their only child and influence him towards languages, archaeology and architecture, and not her husband, who apparently had little significant effect on the boy.

Although Michael was born in England (on 12 July 1922), he would spend much of his childhood on the Continent, chiefly in Switzerland, where his father was seeking treatment for tuberculosis. By the time he was just eight years old, he had been at boarding schools for three years: a year in England and about two years in Switzerland. Since the only languages spoken in the Swiss school were French and German, no English, he was compelled to speak both languages (including of course Swiss German). From his mother he picked up Polish. Very soon, it was obvious that Michael had an unusual flair for languages. In adult life, he would learn European languages in a matter of weeks and months; the more languages he spoke, he once told a friend, the easier it became to pick up a new one.

Dorothea Ventris.

(Courtesy Renee Ventris)

The Ventris family and friends on holiday in Switzerland, c. 1930.

(Ventris papers)

Photographs of him in the Ventris family album around this time show a pretty but slightly forlorn boy, happy with his smiling, chicly dressed mother but solemn with his more distant, melancholy-looking father against a snowy background of Swiss chalets and ski-clad adults. But Michael fell in love with the Swiss landscapes of his early years. Later in life, in wartime, while anxiously awaiting the birth of his first child Nikki, he wrote to his wife: ‘The beginning of December was always an exciting part of the year for me as a child – marking the beginning of the white half of the year.… St Nicholas with his shavers of nuts and his rather two-edged little presents always marked a three-star red-letter day in my childhood calendar, even though he was so obviously the peasant from up the mountain, and his beard was only held on precariously against his windy rounds.’ His adult passion for skiing dated from this time, though he was never as good a skier as he would have wished.

With such experiences, he could hardly be a typical English public-school boy of the 1930s, especially given his obvious academic talents: he was soon shining in ancient Greek and Latin, in addition to modern languages, at the English preparatory school where his parents sent him when he was nine years old (while continuing to take him regularly to Europe for long periods). Perhaps this is why they chose Stowe School for his secondary education. In 1935, Stowe was a relatively new public school, without too many stuffy traditions, and its energetic, showy headmaster, J. F. Roxburgh, was well known for indulging and encouraging boys with special, even eccentric talents (especially artistic ones) and for opposing the tyranny of athleticism then ruling most public schools. The famous 18th-century buildings and grounds of Stowe – the former estates of the dukes of Buckingham and ‘the most sublime setting of any school in England’ (Noel Annan, an Old Stoic, but here a fair judge) – also appealed to the Ventris parents, though ironically the school’s neoclassical grandeur would help to push their precocious son towards modern architecture.

Michael won a scholarship and spent four years at Stowe, from 1935 to 1939. He did well academically but not outstandingly considering his later achievements. Like many truly original minds, he was not fond of formal schooling, though he never rebelled openly against it. His tutor for his last two years at Stowe when he specialized in classics, P. G. Hunter (inevitably known as ‘Piggy’), described him in an obituary as ‘neither rebel nor recluse’ and in his retirement recalled a boy who had a ‘perceptive and clear intelligence, and (when interested) a capacity for taking infinite trouble.’ For instance he produced an orographical map of Greece, modelled in clay on a wooden base, ‘exquisitely coloured and very neatly lettered’ with a dedicatory Greek inscription of ‘typical humour’, and – this was the hardest part – with ‘very convincing’ relief. These were all qualities that he would later display in architecture and decipherment, not to speak of map-making as an RAF navigator during the second world war.

Ventris would keep in touch with his former tutor Hunter, whom he liked, when he was working on Linear B in the 1940s and 1950s – uniquely among those who had taught him at Stowe. The rest of the school’s staff, including Roxburgh, seem to have held little interest for him. In a letter to a much older Russian friend living in England (the sculptor Naum Gabo) written in March 1939, during his last year at school, Michael gave a glimpse of his true feelings, remarkably mature for his age. He described an ‘irritatingly imperialistic’ history master, who asked him in class ‘whether I wouldn’t feel personally humiliated if Britain suffered some insult or had her colonies removed, and when I found some difficulty in agreeing with him, he rebuked me and said that things hadn’t gone so far as to allow people to feel no pride in their country. But then five minutes later he told us with a superior grin on his face that England was the only country who always emerged from a war with more than she started with, although she professed to be completely disinterested, implying that England’s sense of honour wasn’t all it was made out to be.’ Then Michael summed up the master: ‘He’s quite nice really but awfully English.’

A few years later, Ventris told his wife that ‘I think they [at Stowe] rather thought me a black sheep.’ But there is no real evidence of this; indeed in the 1980s, Stowe School produced an affectionate booklet about Ventris, Michael Ventris Remembered, in which his contemporaries recalled how pleasant and humorous he had been as a boy. But it is true that he stayed in touch with none of them as an adult, and that almost everyone who knew him at school found him a bit of a mystery. He was clearly detached from school life and certainly not a team player (his only sport seems to have been a little fencing): more of an amused, and sometimes amusing, observer of school rituals than an active participant. One contemporary commented: ‘I believe he was half Greek.… My most vivid recollection is of a sardonic but not unkindly smile.… I am sure that Michael was without guile or vice; he just thought us funny. I think that this dispassionate view of established belief and behaviour must have made it much easier for him to start demolishing Arthur Evans’s theories and deciphering the Linear B script.’ Christopher Robin Milne (son of A. A. Milne), a mathematics specialist who shared a study with Ventris for two terms, remarked: ‘What exactly he did with himself, where exactly his interests lay, what were his hobbies or his hobby horses, I cannot recall.… I would certainly not have guessed either architecture or cryptography.’ And another contemporary, who was in the scholar’s form with Ventris, remembered chiefly that when they were both about 15, in 1937, Michael ‘was so impatient to get on with his research that he worked under the bedclothes by the light of a torch after official “lights-out”.’

Long before he went to Stowe, Michael had started reading about ancient scripts and languages; when he was seven, he had bought and studied a scholarly book on the Egyptian hieroglyphs written in German. ‘He reads quite advanced books on language and archaeology during the holidays’, his mother told the headmaster in September 1936 (apropos of a long complaint from her about the ‘monotonous and quite unscientifically planned’ school food, which Mrs Ventris felt undermined Michael’s health and concentration during term time). Barely a month after she wrote this letter, Michael had his first encounter with Linear B.

According to almost every book on the subject (including The Decipherment of Linear B), what is supposed to have happened is that the 14-year-old Ventris heard a lecture in London by Sir Arthur Evans on ‘The Minoan world’, and became interested when Evans mentioned that the Minoan tablets could not be read. What actually happened is more revealing – about the importance of chance in our lives and also Ventris’s serendipitous mind.

Undoubtedly there was a grand public lecture by Evans, on 16 October 1936, at Burlington House, home of the Royal Academy of Arts, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the British School at Athens. But Michael did not attend it. Instead, he was one of a school party of Stowe classicists taken by Patrick Hunter (who had not yet started to teach Michael) to see a Greek and Minoan art exhibition also arranged for the anniversary at Burlington House. Evans, who was by then 85 years old, happened to be present when the boys arrived, and he proved willing to lead them around the Minoan Room with an impromptu running commentary. They reached a glass cabinet containing some clay tablets and Evans remarked that no one had been able to read them, although he himself had tried hard. At this point – a surprised Hunter sharply remembered even in old age – the most junior member of the party ‘piped up, very politely’ with a question ...