Charles Allberry

[1][2] He was best known during his lifetime for his 1938 partial translation of A Manichean Psalm-Book, and posthumously as the model for C. P. Snow's character, Roy Calvert, introduced in The Light and the Dark (1947).

[1][5] Before the outbreak of war, he spent time as a researcher in Germany and elsewhere in Continental Europe, receiving a travel grant from the Lady Wallis Budge Fund in 1938.

In a contemporary review, the Coptic scholar W. E. Crum writes: To have deciphered 230 pages of papyrus where many of them ... still show but a minority of indubitable letters, would in itself be a remarkable performance; to have produced plausible, often ingenious translations from such ruined materials, where lack of context and strangeness of subject-matter might well have discouraged more experienced scholars, is an achievement on which Mr. Allberry—whose first publication this is—deserves our congratulations and our thanks.

[5] In 1939, he succeeded Battiscombe Gunn as the editor of the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, and continued in the role until joining the Royal Air Force.

Putt, who knew Allberry as an undergraduate in the early 1930s, characterised him in a 1987 article as "an impish mystic" with a "rich comic sense", who could display "reckless, crazily joyous dare-devilry".

[citation needed] During the Second World War, Allberry worked in intelligence at Bletchley Park and then joined the Royal Air Force,[1][6] where he served as part of Bomber Command.

Whilst a flying officer, Allberry and five other men were killed during a raid on Essen on 3 April 1943 when their Handley Page Halifax was shot down by Oberleutnant Eckart-Wilhelm von Bonin.

Navigator Allberry and air gunner Sergeant Thomas Henry Webb were found at the wreckage, the former dead, the latter alive, but fatally wounded.

[6][13][14] In a 1985 letter, she wrote: While the physical description of Roy Calvert was very like my husband, as were his gaiety and charm, liveliness, brilliance and kindness; the manic-depressions, the immorality, the baiting of others, the pro-Nazism, and the final despairing act of joining the Air Force as an attempt at possible suicide, were completely untrue.