Sinclair Hood


Martin Sinclair Frankland Hood, generally known as Sinclair Hood, is an archaeologist and academic. He was Director of the British School of Archaeology at Athens from 1954 to 1962, and led the excavations at Knossos from 1957 to 1961. He turned 100 in January 2017.

Early life and education

He was born in Queenstown, Ireland, in 1917, the only child of Martin Arthur Frankland Hood, a lieutenant commander in the Royal Navy, and Frances Ellis, daughter of James Miller Winants, of Bayonne, New Jersey, U.S.A., and stepdaughter of Lucius F. Donohoe, Mayor of Bayonne. The Hood family were landed gentry, of Nettleham Hall, Lincolnshire, female-line descendants of Francis Radclyffe, 1st Earl of Derwentwater; they had strong ecclesiastical and military traditions. His father's sister, Grace, was a pioneer of archaeological textiles, and was married to the educational administrator and archaeologist John Winter Crowfoot. Lt-Cmdr Martin Hood died at sea when his ship sank just after the First World War; Hood was subsequently raised by his mother at Cornwall, where they lived in a bungalow.
After Harrow, Hood received a Master of Arts degree from Magdalen College, Oxford in 1939. During World War II he was a conscientious objector serving with the Civil Defence Service and Holborn Stretcher Party. At his mother's behest, at this time he was apprenticed to a Chiswick architect for a time, which Hood considered a "great help for later career" in that he learned to measure and draw. After the war, in 1947, he received a Diploma in Prehistoric Archaeology from the University of London, having been taught by Kathleen Kenyon and V. Gordon Childe. He then attended the British School of Archaeology, Athens, and the British Institute of Archaeology, Ankara.

Academic career

He was assistant director of the British School of Archaeology, Athens, from 1949 to 1951, and served as director 1954-62. His work has been done mostly in Greece and Turkey, but also in then Mandatory Palestine and Crete.

Personal life

On 5 March, 1957, Hood married Girton College, Cambridge-educated classicist Rachel Simmons, whom he had met conducting an excavation on Chios. She had previously been Secretary to J. B. Priestley, and would later organise Adult Literacy at Thame. They had a son, Martin, and two daughters, Mary and Dictynna.