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 finishing his degree, he joined the staff of the Oxford Latin Dictionary before beginning a Classics lectureship at Cambridge in 1952.
After Ventris's death, Chadwick became the figurehead of the Linear B work, writing the accessible and popular book The Decipherment of Linear B in 1958 and revising Documents in Mycenaean Greek in 1978. and of Downing College, Cambridge.