Group captain leonard cheshire biography of rory

By Alenka Lawrence

The Tablet – 8 August 1992

Group Captain Lord Cheshire VC, OM, DSO, DFC, bomber pilot, observer at the dropping of the atom bomb on Nagasaki and founder of 270 Cheshire homes for the disabled worldwide, died on 31 July, aged 74.

It was an extraordinary life, the stuff of filmscripts or, perhaps for Christians, miracles.

Leonard Cheshire, the hedonistic student, became the RAF's most decorated wartime pilot. He witnessed one of the greatest cataclysms of modern times. He found God, deeply and permanently, on hearing a chance remark by a tipsy woman in a London nightclub and his post-war purpose in life after singlehandedly nursing a destitute cancer victim whom no one else would take on.

Group captain leonard cheshire biography of rory

He proceeded to change the lives of thousands of sick, disabled and despairing people all over the world. During the war he impulsively married a twice-divorced film actress 18 years his senior. It failed but, later, he found h