David Tree

[1] The young performer's first exposure to the stage came at the age of six, when he played a bear in his mother's 1921 revival of The Tempest at the Aldwych Theatre in London and continued through his childhood years, as exemplified by his portrayal, at eleven-and-a-half, of Lieutenant Spicer in a January 1927 juvenile production of Quality Street.

[2] At the start of the wartime 1940s, he appeared in four releases, French Without Tears, Return to Yesterday, Just William and Major Barbara, but shortly after putting his promising film career on hold to aid the war effort, he lost his left hand due to a faulty grenade.

[1] From the mid-1960s he was a leading commercial lily grower and humorously chronicled his successes, failures and adventures as a postwar farmer in the autobiography, Pig in the Middle (Michael Joseph, 1966, reprinted by Noble Books, 2006).

[citation needed] He died at the Queen Elizabeth II Hospital in Welwyn Garden City three-and-a-half months after his 94th birthday, leaving his wife, Mary, daughters Belinda, Gay and Vicken, and son James.

[citation needed] Tree is fondly remembered in the autobiographies of fellow performer James Mason (Before I Forget, Hamish Hamilton, 1981), with whom he appeared in the supporting cast of Return of the Scarlet Pimpernel, and actor-turned-documentary-maker Kenneth Griffith (The Fools Pardon, Little, Brown and Company, 1994).