N. G. L. Hammond

Nicholas Geoffrey Lemprière Hammond CBE, DSO (15 November 1907 – 24 March 2001) was a British scholar of ancient Greece and an operative for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) in occupied Greece during World War II.

Hammond studied classics at Fettes College and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He excelled in his exams and also spent vacations exploring Greece and Albania on foot, acquiring knowledge of the topography and terrain, as well as fluency in Albanian. These abilities led him to be recruited by the Special Operations Executive during World War II in 1940. His activities included many dangerous sabotage missions in Greece (especially on the Greek island of Crete) as well as in Albania. As an officer, in 1944 he was in command of the Allied military mission to the Greek resistance in Thessaly and Macedonia. There he came to know those regions thoroughly. He published a memoir of his war service entitled Venture into Greece in 1983; he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order and the Greek Order of the Phoenix.

In the postwar period, Hammond returned to academia as senior tutor at Clare College, Cambridge. In 1954, he became headmaster of Clifton College, Bristol and in 1962 was appointed professor of Greek at Bristol University, a post which he held until his retirement in 1973. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1968 and an honorary member of the Centre des Nouvelles études de l´histoire, de la philosophie et des problèmes sociaux à Clermont-Ferrand in 1988.

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