[1] Van der Stok spent his childhood between Sumatra, the Netherlands, and the Dutch West Indies, where his father was employed with Shell Petroleum.

After finishing his primary education at the Lyceum Alpinum in Switzerland, he studied Medicine at Leiden University with the intention of pursuing a career as a physician.

On the fourth attempt, he managed to reach Scotland in June 1941 as a stowaway aboard the Swiss merchant ship Saint Cerque, which had sailed out of Rotterdam, along with Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema and two others.

[3] On 12 April 1942, during an operation code-named 'Circus 122' over occupied North France to attack the railway marshalling yard at Hazebrouck, Van der Stok was shot down while flying a Spitfire Vb BL595.

The first was inadvertently spoiled by another prisoner who drew attention to the escaping Van der Stok while retrieving a stolen German cap from the roof of a hut.

[4]After the break-out, Van der Stok travelled from Breslau train station to Dresden where he was stopped at several checkpoints, convincing the Germans that he was not one of the escapees.

He then travelled to Utrecht through Oldenzaal and met up with a member of the Dutch underground, who briefed and equipped him for a bicycle trek to another safe house run by the Belgian Resistance.

He was offered a permanent commission and senior staff rank with the Royal Netherlands Air Force, but declined it and instead resumed and completed his prewar study, qualifying with a degree in medicine from the University of Utrecht in 1951.

He relocated to the United States with his wife Lucie and their three children, and began practise as an OB-GYN in Syracuse, New York, and as a general practitioner in Ruidoso, New Mexico.

In 2018, a brooch, awarded to him by the Caterpillar Club to acknowledge his use of an Irvin parachute to bail out of a stricken aircraft, sold for £3226 at auction, beating its estimate of £500-600.

[7] In February 2019 a new edition of his memoir was published by Greenhill Books, London, with a preface by The Times journalist Simon Pearson and a foreword by Bram's son Robert Vanderstok.