HOOD, (Martin) Sinclair Frankland 31 January 1917- 18 January 2021

[G. Willis]

The distinguished archaeologist- director of the British School of Archaeology at Athens- and academic Sinclair Hood, F.B.A. died 18th January 2021, short of his 104th birthday on 31 January. Some sources- https://thecritic.co.uk/sinclair-hood-the-archaeologist-who-bucked-orthodoxy/ ; https://www.arch.ox.ac.uk/article/sinclair-hood-1917-2021

He was the only child of Lt-Cmdr Martin Arthur Frankland Hood (1888-1919), R.N., and Frances Ellis, dau. of James Miller Winants, of Bayonne, N.J., U.S.A. (her stepfather, Lucius F. Donohoe, was Mayor of Bayonne), and sister of Capt. Garrett Ellis Winants, philanthropist, trustee of Rutgers College. The Winants family was of Dutch origin, and mainly settled on Staten Island. 

The Hood family- last featured in BLG 1921- were of Nettleham Hall, Lincs., also owning Yafforth House, Yorks. (the head of the family in 1862 also "lord of the manor of West Firsby, co. Lincoln"), and descended from a John Hood (fl. 1600) who accompanied General Monck (cr. 1st Duke of Albemarle) from Scotland in his efforts to restore King Charles II to the throne. Hood and Monck separated at York, the former remaining there with a regiment under Col Thomas Fairfax, 3rd Lord Fairfax of Cameron, and later settled in that county. The second John Hood- "of Craike, co. York"- listed in the BLG 1862 pedigree married "a dau. of Francis Radclyffe, Earl of Derwentwater" (several sources note him to have had "four daughters"; more detail perhaps in the 1921 edition?).

Sinclair Hood's father was the fourth son; a sister was the archaeological textile expert Grace Crowfoot (married to John Winter Crowfoot, C.B.E., an archaeologist and educational administrator, including as director of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem; their eldest daughter was the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Dorothy Hodgkin).The name "Sinclair" came from the 1847 marriage of his great-grandfather, Rev. William Frankland Hood (1824-1864), M.A., and Elizabeth, dau. of Rev. John William Sinclair, M.A., rector of Hutton Bushell, Yorks.

Sinclair Hood was educ. Harrow, Magdalen Coll., Oxon. (M.A. 1939), and the Univ. of London Institute of Archaeology. He was assistant director of the British Sch. of Archaeology at Athens 1949-51, and director 1954-62. He m. 1957, Rachel Eveline (1931-2016), dau. of John Simmons [1893-1974?], of Amersham Common, sometime of Beaconsfield, Bucks., and Margery (1894-1980), M.B., B.S., B.Sc., D.M.R.E. (Camb.), M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P., dau. of David Freeborough. Rachel Hood was a Girton-educated classicist, at one time emp. Cambridge University Press, and once secretary to J. B. Priestley. They had a son and two daughters.