His glad handing visitor above was the Canadian prime minister, Mackenzie King.
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.
Back in London he was appointed MBE, became a British citizen and studied politics and economics at Balliol College, Oxford, on a veteran's scholarship. In 1946, he married Patricia Rambault, a Wren. She had written to Bill regularly when he was a PoW.
In the early 50s, Bill joined the BBC, where his colleagues included Tony Benn, who became a lifelong friend. Bill became head of the BBC's Indian operations, but as his career briefly flourished, his marriage crumbled. Towards the end of the 50s he married Ranjana Sidhanta, a leftwing academic.
In the 70s and 80s, he chaired the Writers' Guild of Great Britain. He encouraged a new generation of writers through his work at the BBC and, later, as literary manager at the Soho Poly theatre in central London (now the Soho theatre). His 1985 book The Way to Write Radio Drama is a standard text.
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