Largely self-taught watercolourist, engineer and soldier, born in Ramsgate, Kent. After attending Rugby School as a scholar, then the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, where he won the King’s Medal for best academic achievement, Anderson gained a first-class honours degree in mechanical sciences at Cambridge. From 1927 was a junior sapper in India’s Northwest Frontier area, being made Member of the British Empire, 1937, and winning the Military Cross (MC), 1938. When World War II broke out, Anderson with the Royal Engineers engaged in intensive fighting in France; captured outside Dunkirk, in 1940 winning a bar to his MC, he was eventually sent to Colditz Castle. Painting had fascinated him from childhood, and he now used his artistic talents in two ways: to forge documents and make clothing to aid escapers, make a camera out of old spectacles and repair fighter ace Douglas Bader’s artificial legs; and to record the life of the camp, sending work home to his wife, the cellist Kathleen Hunt, to raise awareness of prisoners’ needs.