Oliver Clutton-Brock |
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| Oliver Clutton-Brock, born in London three weeks before the end of the Second World War, spent the first 17 years of his life in Lincoln, surrounded by many of Bomber Command’s now historic airfields. Early aviation memories are of four-engined aircraft always flying overhead, searchlights, and a trip in a DH Rapide from RAF Scampton on Battle of Britain Day sometime in the fifties. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Educated at Windermere (swimming in the cold lake is a painful memory!) and then at Shrewsbury School, where his studies took second place to sport, he left in 1963 and had a variety of jobs before joining the Civil Service in London in 1969. He took early retirement – they made him an offer he couldn’t refuse – in January 1997. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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His first book, Massacre over the Marne, published in 1994 and written on a part-time basis, stemmed from a desire to discover why so many Lancaster bombers (41) should have been lost with so much loss of life on the French target of Revigny-sur-Ornain in eastern France in July 1944. The answer, after much research, was that they were lost through a combination of poor planning and bad luck, bad luck that on the first two of the three attempts to destroy the target – the railway junction at Revigny – the aircrew were dogged by poor visibility. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| On the third, and final, attempt 5 Group’s Lancasters were intercepted by a strong force of German night-fighters, probably after a shrewd piece of guesswork by the Luftwaffe controller. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| After early retirement in
January 1997, Oliver was able to concentrate on finishing
Footprints on the Sands of Time. RAF Bomber Command Prisoners-of-War 1939-1945, which has recently (June 2003) been published. Oliver was also briefly editor of the prestigious Bomber Command Association Newsletter from 1996 to 1998. |
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| Happily married (for nearly 28 years – more than a life sentence), he now lives in Wiltshire, close to the sound of the guns on Salisbury Plain, where he is planning a third book, possibly on RAF evaders 1939-1945. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| If anyone with evasion experience would care to contact him, he would be delighted to hear from them | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
