21 Facts About Michael Ventris

Michael Ventris's grandfather, Francis Ventris, was a major-general and Commander of British Forces in China.

Michael Ventris's father, Edward Francis Vereker Ventris, was a lieutenant-colonel in the Indian Army, who retired early due to ill health.

Edward Michael Ventris married Anna Dorothea Janasz, who was from a wealthy Jewish and Polish paternal background.

Young Michael Ventris started school in Gstaad, where classes were taught in French and German.

From 1931 to 1935 Michael Ventris was sent to Bickley Hall School in Bromley, Kent.

When he was not boarding at school, Michael Ventris lived with his mother, before 1935 in coastal hotels, and then in the avant garde Berthold Lubetkin's Highpoint modernist apartments in Highgate, north London.

Michael Ventris's father died in 1938 and his mother, Dora, became administrator of the estate.

Michael Ventris lost his mother to clinical depression and an overdose of barbiturates.

Michael Ventris never spoke of her, assuming instead an ebullient and energetic manner in whatever he decided to do, a trait which won him numerous friends.

Michael Ventris later said that Gabo was the most family he had ever had.

Michael Ventris decided on architecture as a career, and enrolled in the Architectural Association School of Architecture.

Michael Ventris did not complete his architecture studies, being conscripted in 1942.

Michael Ventris's preference was for navigator rather than pilot, and he completed the extensive training in the UK and Canada, to qualify early in 1944 and be commissioned.

Michael Ventris took part in the bombing of Germany, as aircrew on the Handley Page Halifax with No 76 Squadron RAF, initially at RAF Breighton and then at RAF Holme-on-Spalding Moor, both in East Yorkshire.

Michael Ventris's friends assumed he was on intelligence duties, interpreting his denials as part of a legal gag.

Michael Ventris continued with his efforts on Linear B, discovering in 1952 that it was an archaic form of Greek.

In 1940, the 18-year-old Michael Ventris had an article "Introducing the Minoan Language" published in the American Journal of Archaeology.

Armed with the symbols he could decipher from this, Michael Ventris soon unlocked much of the text and determined that the underlying language of Linear B, a syllabic script, was in fact Greek.

On 1 July 1952, Michael Ventris announced his preliminary findings on a BBC radio talk which was heard by John Chadwick, a classicist at the University of Cambridge who had been involved in code breaking at Bletchley Park during the Second World War.

On 6 September 1956, the 34-year-old Michael Ventris, who lived in Hampstead, drove to his in-laws' home late at night to retrieve his wallet.

In 1959 Michael Ventris was posthumously awarded the British Academy's Kenyon Medal.