Bill Ash was a Spitfire pilot shot down over occupied France in 1942 who went on to make numerous escapes from German PoW camps. Bill, who has died aged 96, had three spells in Stalag Luft III and was one of the inspirations for Steve McQueen's character, the "cooler king", in the 1963 film The Great Escape. After the war, he went on to represent the BBC in India, co-found a political party, write several novels and mentor a generation of theatre and radio writers.
Bill was born in Dallas, Texas. His family was genteel but poor "not so much white collar as frayed collar," he recalled. As a boy he stacked shelves and later, while working at a local newspaper office, saw the bullet-riddled bodies of the outlaws Bonnie and Clyde. When he was 12, a family friend persuaded him to take the $200 he had saved up for a college education and invest it in stocks and shares. The 1929 stock market crash came a week later. It was that loss, Bill said, that put him on a collision course with capitalism.
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