William Ash was born in Texas but fought as a Spitfire pilot in the Second World War before spending three years in a German prisoner-of-war camp. His repeated attempts to escape made him one of the models for the character played by Steve McQueen in the film The Great Escape and were chronicled in his best-selling memoir Under the Wire. After the war Ash acquired British citizenship, and went on to become a politician, broadcaster and President of the Writers' Guild of Great Britain. He write a dozen books of fiction and non fiction.