Life Outside Sport
On graduating from Cambridge University, he qualified as a Chartered Accountant, and later worked in the London Stock Exchange.
He was married to Isabel Norman-Butler and had three children. His wife's sister was married to George Abell who played cricket for Worcestershire and Oxford University.
He was commissioned as an acting pilot officer in No. 909 (County of Essex) (Balloon) Squadron, Auxiliary Air Force on 5 July 1938, he was promoted to flying officer later that year. He was called to active service at the outbreak of the Second World War, and was promoted flight lieutenant on 18 September 1939. On 25 February 1942 he transferred to the General Duties Branch for flight training, reverting to the rank of flying officer. He was posted to No. 256 Squadron RAF and was killed on 31 October 1942, when the plane he was piloting on a training mission collided with another in mid-air near Caernarfon, North Wales. The pilot of the other plane was Squadron Leader Roger Winlaw, a fellow Old Wykehamist who had played 52 games for Cambridge and Surrey. He is buried in the "Ingatestone and Fryerning Cemetery" in Essex.
Read more about this topic: Claude Ashton
Famous quotes containing the words life and/or sport:
“Young, and so thin, and so straight.
So straight! as if nothing could ever bend her.
But poor men would bend her, and doing things with poor men,
Being much in bed, and babies would bend her over,
And the rest of things in life that were for poor women,
Coming to them grinning and pretty with intent to bend and to kill.”
—Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)
“Americans living in Latin American countries are often more snobbish than the Latins themselves. The typical American has quite a bit of money by Latin American standards, and he rarely sees a countryman who doesn’t. An American businessman who would think nothing of being seen in a sport shirt on the streets of his home town will be shocked and offended at a suggestion that he appear in Rio de Janeiro, for instance, in anything but a coat and tie.”
—Hunter S. Thompson (b. 1939)