George Sassoon

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George Thornycroft Sassoon (born London, October 30, 1936; died March 8, 2006) was a British scientist, electronic engineer, linguist, translator and author.

Sassoon was the only child of the poet Siegfried Sassoon and Hester Sassoon née Gatty. He was born at a time when his parents' marriage was already in difficulties, and in 1947 they separated. George Sassoon thereafter spent much of his childhood with his mother on the Scottish island of Mull.

He was educated at Oundle School and King's College, Cambridge. He was noted for his prodigious linguistic ability, learning languages which included Serbo-Croat, Hebrew, Aramaic and Klingon. He investigated extra-terrestrial phenomena and helped his mother to run a sheep farm on Mull.

After his father died in 1967, Sassoon inherited and occupied his father's large country house, Heytesbury House at Heytesbury in Wiltshire. He found it much neglected and worked to restore it, and also battled unsuccessfully to stop a planned new A36 bypass from going through the park of the house. In these efforts, he sold many of his father’s papers. After a serious fire at Heytesbury House in the 1990s he moved to a smaller property in the nearby village of Sutton Veny; but spent part of the year on Mull, where he had inherited his mother's property of Ben Buie when she died in 1973.

Between 1978 and 1980, he published three books, two of which were about his theories on extraterrestrial visitations, and also spoke at conferences on alien phenomena.

Sassoon married four times - firstly Stephanie Munro, at Inverness in 1955 (dissolved 1961); secondly Marguerite Dicks in 1961 (dissolved 1974); thirdly Susan Christian-Howard in 1975 (dissolved 1982); and lastly Alison Pulvertaft. He had a daughter by his first marriage and also two children by his third marriage, both of whom were tragically killed in a road accident in 1996.

Sassoon was something of a bon-viveur, well-known among other things for his playing of the piano-accordion. Among his other interests were cricket, the Antipodes, and amateur radio - his call-sign was GM3JZK.

He died of cancer in 2006 and is buried on the island of Mull.