He left the Army Technical School and went home to his parents' pub at Little Ouseburn, a village on the old Roman road between Ripon and York.
On the outbreak of the Second World War Claye volunteered for the Royal Air Force and was accepted as an aircrew trainee, but he did not pass his final exams.
It was at this time that Claye started calling himself the Honourable Douglas St Aubyn Webster Berneville-Claye and enlisted as a private soldier in the West Yorkshire Regiment.
He then supposedly inherited his father's title and became "Lord Charlesworth" and volunteered for L detachment of the Special Air Service, reportedly in a quartermaster role.
He was invited to dine with the III Corps commander, Obergruppenführer Felix Steiner, where he explained that although he was a captain in the Coldstream Guards and a member of the British peerage, "Lord Charlesworth", he was a firm anti-communist and had volunteered to fight to preserve Europe from the communist threat.
'[1] Claye told the Corps members 'that he was the son of an earl, a captain in the Coldstream Guards and was going to collect two armoured cars and lead them against the Russians.
He was court-martialled again for wearing the ribbon of the Distinguished Service Order, which he claimed he had been awarded, and as a result was demoted to second lieutenant and lost his seniority.
He appeared as a witness for the defence in a murder trial in 1950, then in the late 1950s surfaced near Hemel Hempstead, where he secured a managerial position with Rank Xerox.
Claye played the role of an ex-Guards officer, riding to hounds, chairing village committees, and wearing his decorations at Remembrance Day parades.
In Australia, Claye worked for a time as a radio announcer before becoming a schoolteacher at St Gregory's College in Campbelltown, New South Wales.
Like Douglas Berneville-Claye, Preston is a gifted impersonator of the English nobility, but is in reality a man of humble origins and a petty criminal.
Despite his reluctance, Preston is coercively attached in 1943 to an Abwehr mission in which a Fallschirmjäger unit parachutes into the fictional Norfolk seaside village of Studley-Constable and attempts to kidnap Winston Churchill.
An extremely brutal and cowardly man, Preston is also a true believer in Nazism and is accordingly viewed with disgust by every member of the German unit.