When I was an apprentice dramatist just starting off having something performed at the Soho Poly theatre, and then on BBC radio, Bill Ash was a fatherly and generous presence as literary manager, and as good a judge of a script as I ever met.
The writers he worked with had no idea that he had been such a remarkable war hero he only seemed to be a strange Texan with a little bust of Enver Hoxha in his office. Gradually, however, as people got to know him better, it became clear he was a very committed Marxist-Leninist, an ally of the Ford negotiator Reg Birch against the revisionist communists in the motor industry in Birmingham (particularly) and the main educator about Hoxha's Albania at that time. His book Pickaxe and Rifle: The Story of the Albanian People (1974) was never reviewed but is now seen by historians as a reliable study of the Balkan nation around the time of the Sino-Soviet split.
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