Um escólio à vida de Chadwick

He had a good sense of humour, and showed a lighter side to those who knew him. Some traces of this came across in his work, as in a light-hearted evening talk on ancient Greek food and wine: if a mouse was found floating in a vat of wine, it had to be cremated, then the ashes scattered in the vat to purify it, we were told. His books also showed some hints of this quiet sense of humour: "we suspect something has gone wrong here," he commented when a potential translator of an inscription from Crete suggested including the line: "supreme - of the eggs the white".