His ancestor John Hood came to England in January 1660, during the English Civil War, with the Parliamentarian army of George Monck.

Subsequent generations of Hoods moved south, and by the early nineteenth century were landed gentry of Nettleham Hall, Lincolnshire: they had strong ecclesiastical and military traditions.

[6] After Harrow,[8][9] Hood studied Classics and Modern History and received a Master of Arts degree from Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1938.

[2] At his mother's behest, he apprenticed to a Chiswick architect for a time, which Hood considered a "great help for [his] later career" in that he learned to measure and draw.

[6] After the war, in 1947, he received a Diploma in Prehistoric European Archaeology from the University of London,[2] having been taught by Kathleen Kenyon and V. Gordon Childe.

[10][8] He learned the rigorous method of excavation and the stratigraphical approach pioneered by Mortimer Wheeler and Kathleen Kenyon, working with her in London (Southwark) and also as the last assistant of Leonard Woolley at Atchana (then in Turkey).

"[15]On 4 March 1957, Hood married Girton College, Cambridge-educated (MA 1949)[16] classicist Rachel Simmons (1931–2016),[17] whom he had met conducting the excavations at Emporio.

[18][12][19][20] For a fuller Bibliography of the Works of Sinclair Hood as published to 1994 and forthcoming from 1994, see Knossos: A Labyrinth of History, 1994,  pages xix to xxv.