Andrew Croft

A very full account of Croft's polar and wartime experiences was published in "British Polar Exploration and Research by N.W. Poulsom and J.A.L. Myres, published by Savannah Publications in 2000. The following has been extracted from that account, which may in turn have been taken from an even fuller obituary published in Polar Record, Vol. 35, issue 195, pp 358 - 351, in October, 1999. Noel Andrew Cotton Croft was the son of a curate, who attended Lancing and Stowe Schools and went to Christ Church College, Oxford. He worked in the Lancashire cotton trade for two years, and in 1929 went to the Continent to learn French and German. While there he witnessed the rise of Hitler's Brown Shirts and the burning of the Reichstag. In 1933-34 he was a member of Martin Lindsay's three-man Trans-Greenland Expedition, during which they sledged 1080 miles, unsupported, across Greenland. For a while he tutored the last Maharajah of Cooch Behar before serving as second-in-command to Sandy Glen's Oxford University North-East Land Arctic Expedition of 1935-36. He then spent three years assisting ethnologist Louis Clarke at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, learned to fly, but joined the army when war started and became involved in numerous high-latitude operations of a covert nature, as well as working behind enemy lines in Tunisia and in the Mediterranean. In 1945 he observed the Canadian army's 3000-mile winter journey across the northern wastes ("Exercise Musk Ox"). Croft retired from the army with the rank of a Colonel in 1960 to become Commandant of the Metropolitan Police Cadet Corps until 1971.