BILL ASH’S early life consisted entirely of a series of astonishing stories — appropriately enough since he went on to become one of Britain’s most successful writers of radio drama. But the stories he lived were considerably more far-fetched than the ones he wrote.

He was a Spitfire pilot, a hobo, national chairman of a trade union, a founder of a communist party, and the most famous Stalag-escaper of the second world war.

Ash was born in Texas in 1917, his father an unsuccessful travelling salesman who was forever having his car repossessed. Growing up during the great depression, Ash managed to put himself through college by working casual jobs, and when graduation didn’t result in employment, he became a hobo, riding the rails and getting work where he could.

One of his best-known anecdotes dates from this time: a former professor recognised Ash as he was working as a lift-boy in a bank. Shocked, the man asked him if his employers knew that he had earned an arts degree with honours. “Yes,” Ash replied, “but they’ve agreed to overlook it.”

His political views came from what he saw and experienced while on the tramp, and by the time the second world war started, he was determined to do his bit in fighting fascism. The US was still a neutral country, so Ash joined the Royal Canadian Air Force.

“Tex” Ash was posted to Britain in 1941 and shot down over France in 1942. The French resistance managed to smuggle him to Paris, where he adopted the guise of an innocent US tourist. The Gestapo were not fooled.

Tortured and sentenced to death, he was saved late in the day when the Luftwaffe insisted he should be classified as a downed airman, not a spy. Ash spent the rest of the war as a prisoner — but not for want of trying.

Ash modestly denied being the model for Steve McQueen’s “cooler king” character in The Great Escape — for one thing, “there was never a motorcycle around when I needed one” — but his was a minority view. He made an extraordinary number of escape attempts, digging tunnels, going over the wire and under the wire, or walking out of the front gate in disguise. It’s probably fair to suggest that almost every minute of Ash’s time in the POW camps was spent either organising escapes or in “the cooler” — the punishment cells.

On several occasions, he did indeed get away, but was always recaptured until finally his last breakout was successful. This proved to be only a few days before the war ended, and the camp was liberated by the Allies. Still, he beat the bastards, and that’s what counts.

He’d been stripped of his US citizenship as soon as he took up arms against Hitler, but a grateful Britain gave him a passport, and he settled down in his adopted country. On May 17 1946 he was installed as a holder of the MBE for his escapology. That ceremony might have included some interesting conversations, since the war had turned him not only into a decorated British hero but also into a Marxist.

He got into Oxford University on a veteran’s ticket, and subsequently joined the BBC alongside another young recruit, Tony Benn, who became a lifelong friend. As the depth of his political radicalism became more apparent, BBC management were forever finding ways to sack him, and Ash was always finding ways to stroll back into Broadcasting House as a freelancer.

As a novelist, he was critically admired, though not necessarily successful commercially. It was in radio drama that he made his particular mark, not only as a writer but as a script-reader. His book The Way to Write Radio Drama was the standard work on the subject for many years. It was also as an activist and senior elected officer in his union, the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain, that Ash was seen as the great mentor to a whole generation of radio writers.

In 1968, Ash was a co-founder of the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist) — not to be confused with the main British communist party of the time, the Communist Party of Great Britain, which had refused him membership, possibly because he was considered too pro-China or possibly because of his general tendency towards rebellion and irreverence. He was a long-serving editor of his party’s official organ, and wrote books and journalism on the subject of Marxism.

Ash died in 2014, aged 96. His obsessive escaping as a POW, he once said, was down to “an unwillingness to crawl in the face of oppression.” That approach to life is perhaps best illustrated by another of his famous anecdotes. He always told people that on the day his plane was shot down — damaged beyond use and out of ammunition — he’d kept squeezing the gun trigger until the last moment, shouting “Bang! Bang!” at the enemy planes.

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