Charles Allberry
Charles Robert Cecil Augustine Allberry was an English Egyptologist and Coptic scholar. A friend of novelist C. P. Snow, Allberry was a model for Roy Calvert in Snow's series of novels Strangers and Brothers.
Allberry attended St Dunstan's College, Catford and Christ's College, Cambridge, and become a fellow of Christ's in 1935.
Allberry translated Manichaean manuscripts, and is particularly known for translating and editing the first edition of A Manichean Psalm-Book, Part II, in 1938. He also compiled a Coptic dictionary, unfinished at his death. He served as editor of the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology.
During the Second World War, he joined the Royal Air Force and 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. The aircraft crashed near Weert in the German-occupied Netherlands. Navigator Allberry and air gunner Sergeant Thomas Henry Webb were found at the wreckage, the former dead, the latter alive, but fatally wounded.
He was married to Patricia Katherine Grace Sandbach. They had a son together: David Charles Anthony Allberry, who was born after Charles' death on 31 July 1943.
