The Man Who Deciphered Linear B Read online

  The Etruscan script (see table below) is essentially the Greek alphabet, but Etruscan is not an Indo-European language (see table above).

  Something still more profound, even unfathomable, may have been at stake for him here. For the tragic fact is, that while he was in the very midst of writing his article, his mother Dorothea took an overdoseof barbitone and died on 16 June, while staying in a seaside hotel in north Wales. The coroner’s verdict was ‘suicide while the balance of her mind was disturbed’. Apparently, her personal anxieties, which she had confessed to Breuer not long before, combined with the stress on her Polish family of a barbaric invasion, had finally proved too much for this sensitive, isolated woman.

  Ventris never spoke of what happened to his mother – presumably it was too painful to put into mere words – and never talked of either her or his father, even to his closest friends. That summer he deserted the Highpoint flat and went to stay for a while with Gabo, who had now moved to St Ives, the artists’ colony on the Cornish coast, where Michael quietly retreated into solitary work on his article. Returning to London and his architectural course, he moved into a boarding house in Hampstead, and did not go back to Highpoint, alone, until early October 1940, almost a month after the first German bombs fell on London.

  From the flat he told Gabo and his wife in a long letter: ‘I haven’t written to you since the Blitz really started, so I thought maybe you’d be wondering whether I’m still alive.… [The raids] haven’t bothered me much, though. It is the AA [anti-aircraft] fire which is the most disturbing.… In Hampstead we were near the railway line, and so they aimed around us most of the time. Several bombs fell very near, and we had some windows broken. Up here it is quieter, but whenever the shrapnel comes down on the six inches of concrete which lies between me and the open sky, it gives a resounding dongggg, which would no doubt wake me up if it happened while I was asleep.’ Talking of the Minoan article, he explained what it was about, and that he had sent it to a journal, and then he added: ‘I shan’t spend much more time on it, but will concentrate purely on architecture from now on.’

  In reality, from now on, Ventris would pursue his twin passions – architecture and the Minoan scripts – for the rest of his life. Although the first would feed the second, there was undoubtedly a rivalry between them: whenever he tried to give up his Minoan study, as he did several times, Linear B would reclaim him and take him away from architecture. In the end, the tension became a conflict that he was never able to resolve.

  Thus, in July 1941, he wrote to his former headmaster Roxburgh. He was getting on quite well at the Architectural Association School, he said, and would soon be taking some intermediate exams of the Royal Institute of British Architects. But at the same time he enclosed his published article and requested a reference from Roxburgh for a specialist philological library. ‘How the article got accepted is still a mystery to me.… I’m still working a bit on similar lines, and that’s what I badly want to get into this library for.… I don’t expect to be called up till some time next year.’

  At Highpoint, he continued to live alone, surrounded by the Breuer furniture and the Picasso paintings and Gabo and Moore sculptures that he had inherited from his mother. Fellow students at the AA would come to see the famous modern flat and sometimes stay over. One of them, Graeme Shankland, later a well-known town planner, recalled that in the small but elegant kitchen there was sometimes visible ‘a pile of unwashed dishes going up to the ceiling! Michael wasn’t a very domesticatedsort of person. He found that side of things rather a bore; he couldn’t be concerned with it.’

  Then, quite suddenly, he fell in love. Lois Knox-Niven, a couple of years older than Ventris (she entered the AA the year before him, in 1939), was ‘a real knock-out’, according to more than one of her student contemporaries. Her English cavalry officer father had died in 1923, when Lois was only three, from the effects of being gassed in the first world war, and her well-to-do Canadian mother had married again, this time to a wealthy former Coldstream Guards officer with a passion for flying and yachting who was chairman of the de Havilland Aircraft Co. Throughout the 1920s and after, he raced light aeroplanes, often accompanied by his new wife, who was also an able pilot, and flew in many parts of the world. (His obituary in The Times noted that he ‘did as much as anybody to popularize the light aeroplane.’) As a child, Lois seems to have been left to her own devices and formed a passion for animals as a substitute for her absent parents – at least that is what she herself felt about her childhood. In the later 1930s, as a young woman, she was sent to Vienna University and the Sorbonne in Paris to be ‘finished’, during which time she picked up some French and German, and practiced her skiing – though she never reached the Olympic standard of her glamorous mother. She also studied fine art and architecture; and this seems to have been what made her decide to train as an architect, against family precedent. It would be architecture that would be her strongest bond with Michael Ventris.

  In wartime conditions, relationships developed quickly. The 19-year-old Ventris told Gabo in early 1942: ‘It looks as if, in the ordinary way, we’ll have a baby some time round next November – at least Betts [Lois] has changed her mind, and she wants to have it, and I don’t think either that it would be quite right to stop new life when this world needs it so, quite apart from the risk. But the social politics of it is all rather involved, and we’re in the process of working that out. So we might get clandestinely married – but all this is confidential in the extreme!’ In the event, he and Lois married at a London registry office in April 1942 with two hired witnesses and no public announcement. Once again, Ventris had decided to ignore convention.

  Ventris (third from right) with fellow RAF trainees, 1943.

  (Ventris Papers)

  In a matter of months they were parted. In August, he was finally called up and joined the Royal Air Force for training as a pilot. Within a day or two of leaving Highpoint and his pregnant wife, he found himself in a tent in a field in Shropshire, his days filled with the menial activities of service life for a new conscript, living in close proximity to men with whom he had little in common. It must have been tough for him, and for his wife, but he took it fairly philosophically, judging from the long and frequent letters he wrote to Lois.

  ‘A nice thing about camp is the way everyone gets talking to everyone else. Of course there are a number of people who are completely empty, and others whose charm doesn’t rely on serious conversation. But all the same during meals, and when washing, and in the “shithouse”, one gets a passing acquaintance with a great range of people.’

  ‘Living under discipline, I begin to think, makes one sentimental – not quite in the modern sense of it, but more the late 18th-century one, like the Sentimental Journey. – A great increase in the amount of emotion that gets called up inside one by any small incidents and situations which show people in a sympathetic way – and a greater feeling for the charm of scenes and landscape. I’m afraid I shall become a Betjeman if discipline continues, and modern architecture will be got back to as something rather unusual, and, if I am not careful, unfelt!’

  He was determined not to stagnate in the RAF. Besides a great deal of reading on a wide range of subjects, including politics and science, and frequent visits to the movies, he worked at picking up five or more European languages (his letters to Gabo were soon entirely in Russian); he made endless sketches of aircraft and buildings, including a constantly remodelled house for himself, Lois and children; and, off and on, he thought about Linear B.

  It was something of a coup to receive a letter in late 1942 from Evans’s long-time friend and now executor, (Sir) John Myres, the retired professor of ancient history at Oxford, appreciating his 1940 article in the American Journal of Archaeology. Following Evans’s death in 1941, Myres was trying to prepare for publication well over 1500 Minoan tablets, for the vast majority had been kept by Evans to himself. Ventris told his wife (one of his rare references to Linear B in their corre
spondence; she did not share his fascination): ‘I hope he’ll let me know how his researches are going, as he’s got much more material to work on, and he’s a big shot, and he’s very cautious, so whatever he establishes should be pretty echt. But I’m afraid it’ll rather shake him to find I wrote the opus at 17 – I mentioned it [in reply] half out of conceit and half out of thinking the whole thing was rather a joke anyway.’ To Myres himself, he wrote enthusiastically about the great man’s plans to publish all the tablets: ‘I doubt if I’ll have the leisure to be tempted into reattacking them. But it will give opportunity for a wide circle of researchers to get to work and progress should pick up speed.’ Then he concluded rather presciently: ‘At present one can remain sure that no Champollion is working quietly in a corner and preparing a full and startling revelation, as no one has access to sufficient reproductions.’ After the war, young Ventris-Champollion and old Sir John Myres would have a lot to do with each other.

  Meanwhile, his RAF training was taking him away from being a pilot and towards being a navigator. Pilots enjoyed more prestige, and no doubt his wife’s family, as keen fliers, looked down on navigation; but Ventris had been drawn to maps and map-making since school, and liked the mathematical, intellectual aspect of navigation. Although he flew solo a few times during his training, he did not feel confident as a pilot. Perhaps he disliked having to react quickly, as a pilot must, and preferred to have time, as a navigator has, to consider alternative courses of action. As an architect, in a somewhat similar way, he would always prefer thoughtful analysis to the more spontaneous creative aspects of design. At any rate, in mid-1943, he was sent to Canada for further navigational training, leaving behind Lois and the infant Nikki, who had arrived in early December (‘the nicest present St Nicholas ever brought’), and for whom the Ventrises asked Naum Gabo to be a godfather and Ben Nicholson to paint an abstract nursery picture.

  ‘From the air Manitoba looks like an immense Ben – a regular checkerboard of russet, ruddy-grey, green and black divided by N–S and E–W roads,’ Michael airgraphed to Lois. ‘On Main Street [in Winnipeg] at night you hear more Polish and Ukrainian spoken than English, which is rather intriguing.’ Food, too, was plentiful and excellent in Canada.

  Then it was back to cramped, rationed, wartime England, now as an officer qualified to navigate bombers. He joined a squadron based at Holme, not far from York, and flew Halifaxes over Germany from November 1944 to April 1945. Although the Luftwaffe was no longer the power it had been, this was still dangerous work. For example, he recorded a mission to attack Worms, in a private diary begun in February 1945: ‘I am afraid we have demolished or battered the cathedral at Worms. Of course all the sights are lost to me in my little office…because I am so preoccupied over our exact position: but apparently there was quite a lot to see, and though it didn’t menace us particularly closely, the defence was pretty versatile – fairly heavy flak, fighter flares, rockets and scarecrows.… But still we were surprised on getting back to find that ten kites were missing from the Group.… There are so many causes for an aircraft to go missing, and the enemy is only responsible for a bare half of them: collisions, being bombed from above, engine failures, and landings in poor weather are things that one is not particularly worried by, though one should be.’ According to The Bomber Command War Diaries, out of 324 bombers on this particular raid (21–22 February 1945), 10 Halifaxes and 1 Lancaster were lost, while 64 per cent of Worms was destroyed or damaged, 239 people were killed and 35,000 were bombed out, from a population of approximately 58,000.

  Ventris’s Christmas card to his wife Lois, Germany, 1945.

  (Ventris Papers)

  The end of the war in Europe was not the end of war service for Ventris. But he managed to avoid being sent out East by volunteering to go to Germany, where an ability to speak German was in demand among the victorious Allies and in the soon-to-be-established Control Commission. Based at Plön, north of Hamburg, at first he was quite interested in the work, which included analysing the structure of the Gestapo in Kiel, taking German prisoners to Copenhagen and attempts at liaison with the Russians; but as 1946 dawned without any prospect of his demobilization, he felt depressed and full of self-doubt about his future life. He became more and more anxious to return to London and his interrupted architectural training. His visit to Copenhagen, with its plethora of ‘vernacular’ modern buildings (in stark contrast to London), had been an eye-opener. As an exercise, in late 1945 he designed an officer’s mess at Plön and admitted to his wife: ‘I’m all for reducing the thing to a detailed system (perhaps because I find great pain and difficulty in designing) and providing oneself with readymade questionnaires to fill up on all the points that require research’ – a hint of his future direction as an architect and as a decipherer.

  Linear B had now reappeared on the horizon, after a longish gap, in the shape of a letter from Myres offering to show him all the unpublished tablets. Ventris expressed enthusiasm to visit him – just as soon as he could escape from the Control Commission.

  At last, in the late summer of 1946, he was released. He could go back to Highpoint, to his wife and two children (a daughter, Tessa, had arrived in April that year), to the Architectural Association School – and to Linear B. One of the first things he did on his return in August was to take a train to Oxford to meet Myres and see the Knossos tablets for himself.

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  Embryo Architect

  ‘It is the privilege of individual genius to follow no system beyond a creative intuition; but in group working some minimum of method is essential.’

  Michael Ventris, ‘Group Working’, in Plan (journal of the Architectural Students Association), 1948

  During the two years or so after he was demobbed, Linear B took a back seat in Ventris’s life, although he never stopped working at it. In 1946–48, he threw himself into his architectural training at the AA, which had been interrupted in 1942, determined and happy to make up for time lost during the war. The methods of design he would evolve in this period would later prove useful in decipherment too.

  Immediately after the war, the Architectural Association School, now back at its Bedford Square premises in central London, was an exciting place to study, its students bubbling with modern aesthetic and social ideas and ideals, aware of the potential of recent developments in constructional materials and technologies, and hopeful of finding much new and interesting work in post-war reconstruction under the Labour government. Before the war there had been 250 students at the school, now there were 450. As a result, Ventris found himself doing drawings in a Nissen hut in a freezing cold winter. Nevertheless, he was soon working day and night.

  ‘At that time we were all rabid socialists…and one of us was a member of the Communist Party,’ Oliver Cox, who was closest to Ventris at the AA, recalled in the 1980s. ‘Michael’s theories about design showed a development of analytical approach which today you would describe as Marxist. And it wouldn’t have disturbed Michael at all for anyone to say to him: “I see you’re a Marxist.” He’d say: “Well, what of it?” He wouldn’t regard it as important.’ Certainly, Michael and Lois chose Labour at their first opportunity to vote: the landslide general election of 1945 that threw out the Churchill government – against the instinctive Conservatism of his wife’s family.

  He, Lois, Cox and Graeme Shankland – who had all been at the school in Hadley Common at the start of the war – instantly formed a close group within the 1946 intake. Together, occasionally with input from others, they collaborated on a wide range of student projects. They designed a block of flats, a multi-storey garage, an arts centre, a factory for Penguin Books – for which they were briefed by the ‘King Penguin’ himself, the founder Allen Lane – and an opera house. In addition, Cox, Ventris and another architect entered a professional competition to design a London headquarters for the Trades Union Congress; although they did not win, their design was published in the Architects’ Journal. Ventris found the problem of designing the
opera house and TUC auditoria a particularly fascinating challenge, because both spaces entailed complex geometry and calculation to ensure that the opera house stage was clearly visible to 2000 spectators (some of them in boxes) and that individual trade unionists standing in their places could be heard throughout the congress hall. (At this time, pre-transistors, public address systems were primitive.) Most of the precise, highly detailed drawings the group produced, with Ventris’s immaculate, almost print-like hand lettering, are preserved.

  ‘Group working’ was then something of a buzz phrase among architecture students – in contrast to the typical hierarchy among architects in the profession in which specialists worked in a firm under the general direction of one commanding figure, who might well be a prima donna like Le Corbusier. To a considerable extent, the ‘group working’ concept was being forced on an unprepared post-war profession by the advent of multifarious and increasingly complex materials and construction techniques, which required greater interaction between architects on a project than was necessary in designing a more traditional building. But for the Cox/Shankland/Ventris partnership, group working was almost an article of faith, and also chimed with the socialist ethos of the time. ‘Like the architects of the Restoration and the engineers of the Industrial Revolution for whom he had an intense admiration, he was an ardent anti-specialist,’ wrote a Times obituarist of Shankland in 1984. ‘The “inter-professional team” was no catchword to him, it was the way he worked throughout his whole professional life.’ Cox and Ventris took the same view.

  Thus, in 1948, in the wake of the limited success of a group in designing an icon of the age – the new United Nations building in New York, Ventris published a conversation between architects about group working in Plan, a new student magazine of the AA. The views expressed about it were rather mixed. Perhaps the most original contribution was Ventris’s own, a kind of manifesto for his method of architectural design, and also (though naturally he did not mention it) for his future approach to decipherment.