Eric Williams

Eric Williams (13 July 1911 – 24 December 1983) was an English writer and former Second World War RAF pilot and prisoner of war (POW) who wrote several books dealing with his escapes from prisoner-of-war camps, most famously in his 1949 novel The Wooden Horse, made into a 1950 film of the same name.

Early life

Eric Williams was born on 13 July 1911, and was educated at Christ's College, Finchley. In 1940, he joined the Royal Air Force.

With the assistance of a third POW, Oliver Philpot, the tunnel was completed by 29 October 1943 – an important factor, since Williams, Codner and Philpot planned to use the local railway to quickly put distance between themselves and the camp, rather than the usual escape strategy at the time of travelling on foot at night and hiding in barns or haystacks during the day, but the Escape Committee only had local railway timetables valid until the end of October.

The trio made their way by train to the Baltic; Philpot headed to Danzig (Gdańsk), while Williams and Codner, posing as French labourers, made their way to Stettin (Szczecin), where they eventually managed to make contact with the Danish Resistance and gain passage on a ship to Copenhagen and thence to Gothenburg in neutral Sweden. There they met Philpot, who had been able to travel more quickly to Sweden via Danzig. From Sweden, all three officers were repatriated to Britain.

After his return to active duty, Williams worked for MI9, the intelligence organization tasked with supporting available European Resistance networks and making use of them to assist Allied airmen shot down over Europe in returning to Britain. After a period of training in Canada, he was in Italy when the war in Europe ended. He was subsequently sent to the Philippines to do welfare work with liberated Allied prisoners of war. He was there when the war ended.

A signed copy of Williams' book The Wooden Horse was sold at auction in 2022, along with a vintage Rolex watch that was owned by Lt. Charles Maurice Anthony Whitaker, whom Williams had befriended during their time in Stalag Luft III.

Writing career At the end of the war, on the long sea voyage home on the RMS Queen Mary, Williams wrote Goon In The Block, a short book based on his experiences. Four years later, in 1949, he rewrote it as a much longer third-person narrative under the title The Wooden Horse. He included many details omitted in his previous book, but changed his name to "Peter Howard", Michael Codner to "John Clinton" and Oliver Philpot to "Philip Rowe". Two years later, he wrote The Tunnel, a prequel to The Wooden Horse that described his and Codner's escape from Oflag XXIB.

Williams also amassed a substantial collection of escape literature and published several anthologies of excerpts from this collection.

Postwar Williams spent much of the time after 1962 living on his boat Escaper in the Eastern Mediterranean with his wife Sibyl. Personal life

Williams married twice, first to Joan Mary Roberts in 1940, then to Sybil Grain MBE in 1948.