Michael Croft

Michael Croft
Born	John Michael Croft 8 March 1922 Hengoed, Shropshire, England
Died	15 November 1986 (aged 64) Kentish Town, London, England

John Michael Croft, OBE (8 March 1922 – 15 November 1986) was an English actor, schoolteacher, and writer. He founded, and was the lifelong director of, The National Youth Theatre of Great Britain. Based upon his own experience of supply teaching in tough secondary schools, he wrote the controversial anti-corporal punishment novel Spare the Rod, which was later released as a film.

Croft was born in Hengoed, Shropshire (near Oswestry). His mother, Constance Croft, was unmarried, and at an early age he and an older sister went to be fostered by an aunt in Manchester. Croft attended Plymouth Grove Elementary School, and later obtained a place at the Burnage Grammar School, where he would remain from 1933 to 1940. While at Burnage, he developed a love of poetry which was to last all his life, but the fondness for classical music which took him fairly often to concerts by The Hallé orchestra was not to last to a similar extent. His ambitions at that time were either to become a writer or to play cricket for Lancashire County Cricket Club.

World War II ended any chance of a career in cricket, and Croft joined the RAF in 1940, becoming a sergeant-pilot. Despite taking part in daylight bombing raids over occupied France, however, he apparently lacked the manual dexterity demanded in flying, and he was offered the option of a discharge. There followed a period in which he tried various casual jobs – as a repertory actor in Lancashire, an ARP fire guard messenger, a credit salesman and even a lumberjack – but he returned to the services in 1943, this time with the Royal Navy. He spent some time on Mediterranean convoys and was a radar operator by the time the war ended in 1945.

In 1946, Croft, along with many other ex-servicemen, obtained a grant to take a short-course university degree. His was at Keble College, Oxford. Because of the backlog caused by the war it was a remarkably talented and relatively mature intake at university, and he counted among his friends there such people as Kenneth Tynan, Chris Chataway and Lindsay Anderson (all at Magdalen), Ludovic Kennedy (Christ Church), Robin Day (St. Edmund Hall), and John Schlesinger (Balliol). He read English but, as he put it, he did not do much "reading", and graduated with a modest BA Honours degree (3rd class). It nevertheless gave him the opportunity to indulge his love of literature, theatre, writing and sport.

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