Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb was born in Bolton, Lancashire. In 1930, he joined the merchant navy and went to sea as an apprentice. While at a mission in Buenos Aires, he learned to box. In 1933, he joined the Royal Naval Reserve as a midshipman aboard the battleship HMS Rodney, and began boxing for the Navy as a lightweight. In 1934 he returned to England, and in 1935 he joined the Royal Air Force and was assigned to the Coastal Command. In 1936 he won the RAF Officers' Boxing Championship. In 1938 he transferred to the Air Branch of the Royal Navy as a sub-lieutenant. In 1939 he married Josephine Frances Elgar, with whom he went on to have two sons.

When World War II began, Lamb flew a Fairey Swordfish fighter plane, nicknamed the "Stringbag" by servicemen. In 1941, while flying in the Greek campaign, he was shot down during an air raid on Malta. He was imprisoned until freed by the Allied invasion of Algeria in 1942. Whole recovering from malnutrition, he recruited cadets. In 1943 he was approved to pilot again, and he joined the aircraft carrier HMS Implacable as Lieutenant-Commander, escorting Arctic convoys and launched air strikes against the German battleship Tirpitz. In 1945 he was injured by a broken propellor and spent two years recovering in a hospital before returning to duty. He served as a commanding officer until his retirement in 1958.

His war memoir, War in a Stringbag, was published in 1977.