Charles Allberry

Charles Robert Cecil Augustine Allberry (9 November 1911 – 3 April 1943) was an English Egyptologist and Coptic scholar. A friend of novelist C. P. Snow, Allberry was a model^[1] for Roy Calvert in Snow's novels The Light and the Dark and The Masters, in the Strangers and Brothers series.

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 (from 1939).

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.^[2][3][4]

He was married to Patricia Katherine Grace Sandbach. They had a son together: David Charles Anthony Allberry, who was born after Allberry's death on 31 July 1943.

Sources

• CA Charles Robert Cecil Augustine Allberry (1911-43), Egyptologist, Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Cambridge
• Cambridge Universities Libraries Information Bulletin 47, 2000
• Mani and Manichaeism in the BPH, Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica, J.R. Ritman Library
• Snow P (2006) C. P. Snow Christ's College Magazine 231, 67–9

References

Further reading

• Charles Allberry: A Portrait. Patricia K. G. Lewis (E. and L. Plumridge, Cambridge, 1984)