Poet, playwright, translator, editor and freelance broadcaster Patric Thomas Dickinson was born on 26 December 1914. He studied at St. Catherine's College, Cambridge. Between 1936 and 1939 he was a schoolmaster, and he was associated with the 1938 Cambridge University Footlights Dramatic Club production Pure and simple. In the first year of the war, 1939-1940 he served with the Artists' Rifles before working with the BBC.