Pilot Officer, RAF
Born: May 22nd 1909
Died: January 10th 1942
Age at Death: 32
Killed on active service, January 10th 1942
Peter was born in Holborn, Middlesex, on 21 May 1909, the son of Rev. Herbert Close, a vicar, and his wife Olive (née Thrale). His father was teaching at the College when Peter entered the Junior School – this was a time when public school masters were much more commonly in holy orders than now. At some point after leaving the College Peter went to South Africa for a time, and by 1939 was a headmaster’s secretary, living in Croydon, Surrey.
During the war he served as an air observer in 49 Squadron flying the Hampden bomber, known as the Flying Suitcase because of its cramped conditions. He was based at RAF Scampton in Lincolnshire.
Close’s aircraft went missing while flying a mine-laying mission near the French port of Brest on 10 January 1942. The mission was designed to hem in the German battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, the month before their famed ‘Channel Dash’, an attempt to relocate to Norway to counter a possible British invasion of the country. Although minesweepers secretly cleared a way for them, allowing the ships to escape, the ships only made it as far as Germany. Close’s body was never recovered, and his name is inscribed on the Runnymede Air Forces Memorial.