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Adventurer, explorer, a founder of the Chelsea set
Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning
© 2022 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. (modern)
During the second world war, the writer Michael Alexander, who has died aged 84, was one of a small group of British officers who, as prisoners of war, were segregated from the others in Colditz because of their family connections with prominent Britons.
Gerald Lascelles was a nephew of the king, John Elphinstone a nephew of the queen, Giles Romilly was related to Winston Churchill, Charlie Hopetown was the son of the Marquess of Linlithgow, Viceroy of India. Michael Alexander was believed to be a close relative of Field Marshal Alexander; he was not. He had managed to persuade the Germans of the connection when it seemed that he was about to be shot as a spy, after he was captured on a mission behind German lines in North Africa in August 1942.
He was a member of the Special Boat Service, and his troop had the task of blowing up German ammunition dumps. The job done, he and a companion were separated from the rest and found it impossible to reach the pickup point for the boat; they decided to walk 30 miles back to the British lines at El Alamein. On the second morning, they were resting in an abandoned tent when they were discovered by the Germans. Michael was wearing a German officer's cap, which he had picked up to protect his head from the sun. This classed him as a spy, outside the safeguards of the Geneva Convention.
Both his heedlessness about personal safety, and his resourcefulness at getting out of resulting predicaments, were typical. Later, he and Romilly wrote about their wartime experiences in The Privileged Nightmare (1952, reprinted in 1975 as Hostages At Colditz).
The son of Rear Admiral Charles Alexander, Michael was born in London, educated at Stowe, went to the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, and was commissioned into the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry on the outbreak of war. He volunteered for the commandos and went to the Middle East.
After capture, he was held in solitary confinement in prison camps in Germany until he arrived at Colditz in January 1943. There he shared a cell with Romilly, and could mingle with the other prominente, as they were called. They were allowed books and a wind-up gramophone; they lectured each other on subjects of their choice - Michael on the 19th century novel. He was officially appointed Colditz laundry officer, because he looked unkempt; Michael remarked the Germans seemed to be learning an English sense of humour.
As the war drew to a close and allied armies advanced into Germany, orders were said to have come from Hitler that the prominente were to be shot. They were moved deeper into Bavaria. At a prison-castle at Tittmoning from which escape seemed impossible, Michael and four others had themselves bricked up in a cavity in a wall, with supplies of water and food, to hide until the Americans or Russians arrived. It was meant to seem as if they had escaped, but, after three days, the Germans found them.
The German commander, however, said he would disobey Hitler's orders and hand them over to whoever would give him reasonable terms. The Americans took the prisoners over at Innsbruck.
After the war, Michael had just enough family money to do as he liked. He rented a large top floor flat in South Kensington, where there always seemed to be a party going on; the partygoers were another sort of prominente : would-be writers and artists who became known as the Chelsea set. They were making up for time lost in the grimness of war and formed a freemasonry, in which those who did not have money were often subsidised by those who had.
At a party in the early 1950s, Michael heard that an old friend, the eccentric Yorkshire landowner West de Wend Fenton, who had joined the French Foreign Legion complaining of a broken heart, was now regretting his folly, and appealing to friends to rescue him. Michael, seeing the chance of adventure and making money, arranged a deal with a tabloid newspaper to fund his expenses and buy the story if the plan succeeded. The tabloid stipulated he should travel with the girl who rejected West.
This was impossible, so it was suggested that any suitable female might do. Lady Marye Rous stepped into the part; she, Michael and myself (I had joined at the last minute), set off for Sidi Bel Abbes, in Algeria, a Legion headquarters on the edge of the Sahara. We discovered where West was stationed, and the whereabouts of a cafe legionnaires frequented in the evenings. By this time, the journalists and a camera man, who were following in another car, had decided that my presence ruined the romance of the story, so I came home.
Michael and Marye found West in the cafe and agreed a plan. Michael contacted the captain of a Polish boat in Oran, who agreed to take West to Europe for a bribe. Michael picked up West, drove him by night to Oran, and West returned to England, where he lived happily, if eccentrically, ever after, and married the girl who had jilted him. Michael's book about this was The Reluctant Legionnaire (1955).
He went on more adventures - explored the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico in a hovercraft, and the upper reaches of the Ganges. He sailed round Scotland in a small inflatable boat. He also wrote books about other people's adventures - notably Mrs Fraser And The Fatal Shore (1972), the story of a sea-captain's wife shipwrecked in 1836 on the coast of Australia, who survived among aborigines until she was rescued by an escaped convict; and The True Blue (1957), the biography of Colonel Fred Burnaby, who rode through remote parts of Russia and crossed the Channel in a balloon.
Michael was extremely attractive to women, and two or more beauties of the day always seemed to be in love with him. He was kind and funny; he kept the affection of nearly all of them. In the 1960s, he was briefly married to Sarah Wignall, owner of derelict Skelbo Castle in Sutherland, which together they repaired and enhanced. Her health was fragile, and Michael helped to nurse her through her last illness.
Sometimes it is said of people like Michael that they lived in the wrong century. But Michael was at home in the 20th century. He knew how to fit in with the volatile style of the times, to use it and enjoy it. He was an explorer and a life-enhancer.
· Michael Charles Alexander, explorer and writer, born November 20 1920; died December 19 2004

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