John Chadwick, (21 May 1920 – 24 November 1998) was an English linguist and classical scholar who was most notable for the decipherment, with Michael Ventris, of Linear B. Early life, education and wartime service John Chadwick was born at 18 Christ Church Road, Mortlake, Surrey, on 21 May 1920, the younger son of Margaret Pamela (née Bray) and Fred Chadwick, civil servant. He was educated at St Paul's School and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Chadwick volunteered for the Royal Navy in 1940 after completing the first year of his classics course at Cambridge. At first he served in the Mediterranean as an ordinary seaman aboard the light cruiser HMS Coventry and saw action when his ship was torpedoed by an Italian submarine and dive-bombed. In 1942 he was sent ashore at Alexandria for an interview by the Chief of Naval Intelligence and was immediately assigned to intelligence duties in Egypt and promoted to Temporary Sub Lieutenant in the RNVR. Thereafter he worked on Italian codes. Chadwick deduced from some R/T traffic meant to be handled at Bletchley Park that a British submarine had been sunk near Taranto. In 1944, he was transferred to Bletchley Park ("Station X"), learned Japanese, and worked on reading the encoded messages sent by the Japanese naval representatives in Stockholm and Berlin. After the end of the war in 1945, he returned to his studies at Cambridge, graduating with First Class Honours in Classics Part II, with a distinction in his special subject, linguistics. While studying at Corpus Christi College, he attempted, with some of his fellow students, to use cryptographic methods to decipher the "Minoan Linear Script B". They were already aware at the time of the work of Michael Ventris. They stopped working actively on the problem owing to a lack of published data from inscriptions. Career In 1950 he published his first scholarly work, an edition of The Medical Works of Hippocrates, co-authored with his cousin, William Neville Mann, a distinguished physician. After finishing his degree, he joined the staff of the Oxford Latin Dictionary before beginning a Classics lectureship at Cambridge in 1952. In July that year he heard a radio broadcast by Michael Ventris about his work on Linear B and offered his help as "a mere philologist". The men began to collaborate on the progressive decipherment of Linear B, writing Documents in Mycenean Greek in 1956, following a controversial