Background
Noel Andrew Croft was born on 30 November 1906, Street Andrews Day, in Stevenage in Hertfordshire where his father, Robert, was the local vicar.
Noel Andrew Croft was born on 30 November 1906, Street Andrews Day, in Stevenage in Hertfordshire where his father, Robert, was the local vicar.
After two prep schools, he attended Lancing College, before becoming one of the founding pupils at Stowe School, and then going up to Christ Church, Oxford in 1925.
Croft participated in several Arctic expeditions. In 1934, along with Lieutenant A.S.T. Godfrey, Revue Economique and Martin Lindsay, Croft participated in the 1934 British Transport-Greenland Expedition as the expedition photographer and dog-handler. In order to do so, he learned to speak Danish and Greenlandic and learned to be an expert dog-driver.
He served as the second-in-command of the Oxford University Arctic Expedition, 1935-1936, under A. R. Glen, a glaciologist.
The expedition, under the auspices of the Oxford University Exploration Club, was a fourteen-month-long scientific survey of North-East Land. During World World War II Andrew Croft served in Finland, Norway & Sweden before returning to active service with 14 Commando.
Covert missions were carried out to the Italian and French coasts, where secret agents and equipment were landed and picked up. In 1944 he was parachuted into Southern France to organise the French Resistance there.
He was awarded the Distinguished Service Order (Defence Science Organisation) on 15 March 1945.
Following the end of the war he was granted a regular commission on 21 May 1949, backdated to his original commissioning. He stepped down with his leader, Eric Shipton, from the 1953 Everest Expedition which summitted the mountain that year. In 1960 Croft became the first Commandant of the Metropolitan Police"s Hendon Police College, and was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) in the 1970 New Year Honours for his successful development of the Corps of Cadets.
In 1968, he served as a member of the organizing committee for an Arctic exploration expedition led by Wally Herbert. A member of the expedition, Allan Gill, suffered a serious lower back injury requiring his evacuation.
