The Man Who Deciphered Linear B

by Andrew Robinson

  8

  Triumph and Tragedy

  ‘The peculiarities of [my] mind and personality have turned on me and made me deeply doubt the value both of my vaunted intelligence and to a large extent that of life itself.’

  Michael Ventris in a letter to an architect, August 1956

  The ‘architectural research job’ that Ventris had taken on at the beginning of 1956 was a project of considerable prestige. He was to be the very first research fellow appointed by a distinguished board of architects at the behest of the Architects’ Journal (AJ), the leading British publication for the profession, with a brief to conduct research ‘which will be of direct benefit to the architect in practice’. The award was worth £1000 for one year, to be paid by the journal’s publishers, the Architectural Press. Ventris chose to study ‘Information for the architect: what does he need and where will it come from’ – a subject which had clear resonance with his decipherment of Linear B.

  From the point of view of the early 21st century, when we are inundated with instantaneously available information of all kinds, it is not easy to imagine the situation for British architects in the mid-1950s, as the post-war economy began to boom. For a start, there were almost no books on architectural design, explaining how to design a school, a hospital or a factory; the typical architects’ design office did not even have a bookshelf. Manufacturers’ product samples were of course available, and were becoming more sophisticated, but they were printed in such a wide range of sizes that filing them for easy reference in a busy office was a major headache, if this was done at all. There was almost no organized analysis and assessment of products for the benefit of consumers (the Consumers’ Association and its magazine Which? were yet to come). As for government and university research on new materials and building techniques, although this was rapidly increasing in amount and scope, the results were not filtering through to architects effectively. ‘One of the misfortunes of architectural practice in this country is the way in which teaching, research and practice are largely kept separate and apart’, an AJ editorial bemoaned.

  Most professionals involved in the construction of buildings knew that a serious problem was looming. Architects were in an especially weak position. ‘A profession of generalists was about to be blown away by an explosion of social, technical and legal knowledge, all in the hands of specialists of innumerable types not particularly anxious in any way to help a profession seen as dilettantes concerned with pretty drawings and high fees but which was being handed by government massive problems to solve, for which as a whole it was ill equipped.’ This is from Dargan Bullivant, Ventris’s former colleague at the Ministry of Education in 1949–50, who took up Ventris’s research fellowship after his death. Or to put the problem in Ventris’s own inimitable words: ‘Even in offices with lavish information services it may be difficult to get architects to use them, owing to their natural “information resistance” – the feeling that it is easier to produce a design decision sitting at the drawing board, from memory, common sense and rule of thumb, than to have to take a walk each time and check on the latest state of knowledge.’

  In February, Ventris presented a truly formidable, not to say forbidding analysis of his job to the research board for its approval. His report is reminiscent of the questionnaire he sent out to Minoan script scholars in late 1949, which led to the Mid-Century Report of 1950. Having methodically set out his ‘terms of reference’ and the diverse ways he proposed to explore them, he listed eight ‘reasons for complaint’ and their possible remedies: a slightly ambiguous form of words since ‘complaint’ could mean both complaint by architects and complaint against architects, but which was inevitably a recognition of the fundamentally negative nature of the task ahead of him. Reason 1 was: ‘The architect does not realize he needs information on a particular problem/does not bother to get it/is not qualified to use it intelligently.’ (Ventris commented realistically: ‘This is not likely to be elicited from the architects themselves.’) Reason 8, the most interesting, was: ‘The architect is presented with inconclusive or contradictory information on problems of building technique, and no independent authority is prepared to give guidance on the relative merits of alternative products and systems.’ Under ‘possible remedies’ for the latter situation, Ventris listed: ‘More fundamental research by the bodies best suited to undertake it./ Fuller publication of research already done./ More explicit indications of specific products to which theoretical conclusions may be taken to apply./ A wider application of official seals of approval to products and systems./ Some way of getting around the law of libel to provide consumer assessments of products./ More and better “synthetic” books and articles covering particular forms of building technique./ More detailed and critical evaluation of technical details of buildings, published in the press, including a study of how they wear.’ However he recognized, summing up, that his remedies were not ‘necessarily…feasible ones’.

  It was a far-sighted programme – but as Ventris must have known, even before he subjected selected architects’ offices during the first half of 1956 to ‘a sort of urbane “third degree”’ (in the words of the AJ, after his death), much of the programme was also far from being feasible under contemporary conditions. Now, he was not manipulating Linear B signs in his mind and in Work Notes, or ‘group working’ with a few like-minded students at the AA, but instead dealing with the ingrained habits of hundreds of professional architects, not to mention their contractors and suppliers. Half a century later, we can admire his prescient thoughts on automation in ‘an Information Centre of the future’. (‘One might ring up the information centre to ask for any information, say, on aluminium schools in Australia; the information officer would operate a keyboard with the UDC numbers for aluminium, school and Australia; the microcards comprising the complete information of the centre would be sorted for those sharing these codings; the selected cards would have their articles transmitted electronically to a view or printer at the subscriber’s desk.’) But in 1956, to most working architects, this vision would have seemed merely far-fetched.

  Scholars at the Mycenaean conference in Gif, France, 1956. Chadwick, with dark hair and glasses, second row left of centre; Ventris and Bennett, back row, third and second from right.

  (Gif colloquium, published in proceedings – see Further Reading for publication details)

  At the end of March, he took a break from interviewing: first, to ski in Switzerland, then to visit the long-planned Mycenaean colloquium in France. ‘He arrived bronzed and looking very fit, whereas the rest of us were pale after the winter’, Chadwick recalled. There were eight French scholars participating, and eleven foreigners, all staying in a chateau at Gif just outside Paris. Ventris, of course, was the centre of attention, not only because of what he had done but also because of his exceptional linguistic abilities: he spoke to the French in fluent French, the Swiss in Swiss German, and the Greek delegate in Greek. And his modesty and sense of humour set the tone of the meeting. ‘Now at the first sign of a quarrel, we have only to appeal to the esprit de Gif,’ wrote Chadwick in The Decipherment of Linear B.

  In the evenings, rather than providing dinner, the organizers gave the delegates money to go into Paris and entertain themselves. Mostly, Ventris, Chadwick and Bennett would spend the time together chatting pleasantly about things other than Linear B; it was really the first time any of them had done this in four years of intensive scholarly correspondence. However, one evening, Ventris and Bennett went off to a Paris nightclub without Chadwick. The following morning at breakfast, Professor Chantraine, the seniormost figure among the organizers, politely asked Ventris where he had been the previous evening. ‘Michael told him,’ recalled Chadwick in Michael Ventris Remembered. ‘Chantraine looked at him and asked him who had told him to go there. Michael looked most embarrassed and said, “As a matter of fact, it was Madame Chantraine!”’

  Bennett had fond memories of these days spent with Ventris. But he was most taken abac
k when Michael told him quite directly that he himself saw no future in Linear B. And he clearly meant what he said. Apart from reading the proofs of Documents in Mycenaean Greek, he would take no further part in Mycenaean studies before he died. As already remarked (in the Introduction), it was the puzzle of Linear B that had truly appealed to him, not what could be learnt from the tablets – and once the puzzle was solved, he lost interest, as he hinted in a talk about the Gif meeting broadcast on the BBC’s European Service on 1 May. (Typically, though, he offered to do versions of it in many other European languages.)

  During May, he was elected by a substantial vote to the council of the Architectural Association. Yet he was becoming very disenchanted with his work for the research fellowship, the first part of which he submitted to the AJ board in June. Very likely, his recent series of contacts with working architects had served to remind him, forcibly, of the fact that he was doing no design work of his own, and that he had not become a member of an architectural firm, unlike many of his friends from student days at the AA. The closest of them, Oliver Cox, had somewhat lost touch with Ventris during the heyday of the decipherment, being very busy with design work and having also got married in 1953. But he was aware that his gifted friend was constantly depressed that spring and summer. The old struggle with the creative part of design work (‘sharawaggi’) was again at the forefront of Ventris’s mind. ‘I was very conscious of his worries and his frustration that every time he got an architectural job he was pushed towards his capacity as an analyst.… He was desperately frustrated by the fact that he couldn’t get involved in a design team doing the sort of work he wanted to do. It was very distressing to him. His research work on information for architects in his last year was, I think, a mistake, because it pushed him further in that direction and made people realize how brilliant he was at sorting papers out.’ On what would be the last occasion the two friends would talk, in a car on the way back home from the AA, Cox strongly advised Ventris to extract himself from the fellowship. At the same time, Ventris had a heart-to-heart talk about the problem with William Allen, a sympathetic member of the AJ’s research board who was superintending architect at the government’s Building Research Station.

  So far as is known, Ventris never discussed these anxieties with his wife Lois. He had always tended to bottle up his deepest concerns, and there were many areas of his life in which Lois had little interest. She was in no sense an intellectual and undoubtedly resented his long love affair with Linear B, and she had never liked the shy, scholarly Chadwick, whom she thought (unfairly) had attached himself to Michael for career reasons. Even with regard to architecture, their chief shared interest, Lois had none of her husband’s capacity for analysis. Although their house at 19 North End is often described as a joint design by both the Ventrises, it is obvious from the drawings that almost all the real thinking and execution was done by Michael alone. By 1956, after fourteen years of marriage, the Ventrises had drifted quite far apart. A friend from the Ministry of Education, Edward Samuel – the same friend who used to help Ventris with decipherment in his lunchbreaks – took several enjoyable holidays with the Ventrises in the 1950s (including a most uncomfortable night spent à trois in a heavily dewed tent pitched in the garden of Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth at St Ives). One day, Lois told him candidly that the reason he was invited along was because otherwise she and Michael would simply run out of conversation.

  The children remained a bond between them of course, but not a very strong one. The Ventrises could afford to leave their children in the care of others, and, as was the custom among their set in the 1950s, they often chose to do so. Moreover, like many intellectually inclined people, Michael was ambivalent about parenthood; the very design of 19 North End reflects this, with its deliberate separation of the children’s rooms on the ground floor from those of the parents upstairs. (A Country Life article on the house is entitled ‘Keeping the children under’.) As Nikki Ventris admitted to the authors of Michael Ventris Remembered in a letter, written just two days before his own death from a heart attack in 1983 at the age of 40: ‘My father was a private person and shared few of his concerns with us. In fact he seemed rather remote and very absorbed in his work to the exclusion of family life. That is not to say that he was incapable of enjoying himself: on occasion he took his part in family outings and games with obvious pleasure and we were always pleased to have his company.… I did not know my father at all well, and it was only at and after his death that I realized how much I had missed in not getting to know him better.’

  Perhaps this psychological background explains, if only a little, the extraordinary, shocking, abject, private letter, handwritten in his usual immaculate, print-like script, that Ventris now wrote to the editor of the Architects’ Journal:

  I have had a couple of weeks abroad, and had a chance to get into perspective the hash that I’ve been making of your Fellowship; I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s quite unrealistic for me to pretend to you or to myself that I’m going to be able to finish off the work in the way that it should be done. I’m afraid I must ask you again, as I have done since April, to devise some formula, however humiliating to myself, for relieving me of the second part of the task.

  I am mortally ashamed of the waste of time and energy that this false start means for those who have been associated with the Fellowship. It would be easy to say that the ‘information’ subject was a dangerous research subject, and that it was risky to pick on me to do it; but the fault lies in me, and I know how worthwhile the job would be if one could do it well. The peculiarities of mind and personality which seemed to make me suited for the Fellowship have turned on me and made me deeply doubt the value of both my vaunted intelligence and to a large extent that of life itself. I’ve had to turn for professional advice to help me sort out my life and meanwhile I feel it’s quite presumptuous to set myself up to attack anyone else’s problems, either on the high level demanded by the Board or with the glibness required by the Journal.

  The money I’ve so far received from you on account will have to be paid back apart from any value that you may put on the work I have already turned in: perhaps that can stand as some sort of contribution, though I know only too well how cold and dull it all is. As for explaining to AJ readers why the second half of the programme has flopped, you’d be justified in writing me off in a way that will make it difficult to hold up my head in the ranks of architects again, and bring pain to my family. All I can ask you is to temper your justifiable anger with a little compassion.

  Yours,

  Michael Ventris

  The letter is dated 22 August 1956. Scarcely two weeks after he wrote it, aged only 34, Ventris was dead. Near midnight on 5 September he left 19 North End alone, and just before 1 a.m., for unknown reasons (according to his wife), he was driving on the Barnet bypass near Hat-field, north of London, when his car collided at high speed with a lorry parked in a lay-by; and he was killed instantly. The verdict of the jury at the coroner’s inquest was ‘accidental death’.

  Perhaps the lorry was not showing its lights, as was suggested at the inquest (and denied by the lorry driver). Perhaps Ventris’s mind became distracted by his evident worries at the wrong moment (he was not a good driver, as he had not been a confident pilot). Perhaps he had a heart attack (as his son Nikki would). Perhaps, even, he was affected by defective night vision, as implied by his pilot father-in-law at the inquest (though there is no evidence of his suffering from this condition in his wartime letters to his wife – otherwise how could he have been a superb navigator?). Perhaps it was suicide (as some of his friends have wondered), like the death of his mother. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.…

  As Oliver Cox told Lois Ventris just before her death in 1987, there is small point in speculating. No one will ever know for certain what happened that night. Like so many other facets of Michael Ventris, his death, too, was unconventional and mysterious.

  The obituaries dwelt, without any hyperbole,
on his youth, his good humour, his perfectionism, his ‘genius’, and above all his understatement and modesty. ‘Those who knew Michael Ventris at the “AA” will remember his kindness, sincerity and sense of fun. Great modesty hid his brilliant powers,’ said the Architectural Association Journal. Patrick Hunter, his former teacher at Stowe, remembered Michael’s lecture at the school after the decipherment: ‘a model of lucidity, spiced with much entertainment, the whole delivered with an enviable degree of objectivity. He was so obviously unspoiled by the fame which in a world wider than that of specialists and scholars he had surely won, so loth to make claims for himself and so ready to acknowledge the work of others.’ John Chadwick wrote in The Times: ‘It was typical of him that he sought no honours, and preferred not to speak of those he received. He was always modest and unassuming, and his charm and wit made him the most agreeable of companions. Nothing was too much trouble for him, and he gave generously of his time and services. Perhaps only those who knew him will fully understand the tragedy of his untimely death.’ While a French scholar, Professor Dumézil, who had known him only at Gif, commented simply and truly: ‘Devant les siècles son oeuvre est faite.’*

  On Ventris’s plain gravestone in the village of Welford in Northamptonshire, where his mother’s family came from, only these words are written:

  MICHAEL VENTRIS

  WHO FIRST READ THE

  MINOAN LINEAR B

  SCRIPT AS GREEK

  1922–1956

  This much, at least, will forever be known about a unique Englishman.

  * ‘In the centuries to come his reputation is made.’

  Postscript