Vincent Parker
Australian RAF officer
Vincent 'Bushy' Parker(11 February 1918 – 29 January 1946) was an Australian Royal Air Force flying ace, a prisoner of war and a serial escaper. He participated in the Second World War.
Parker emigrated to Australia as a child with his adoptive parents. After school, he worked for Kodak and trained as a magician and an escapologist, working with famed magician Leslie George Cole (The Great Lavante).
After travelling to Britain in 1938, he trained as a fighter pilot at an RAF flying school, and subsequently participated in the Battle of Britain. In August 1940, he was taken prisoner after landing in the English Channel.
As a prisoner of war, Parker dedicated himself to escape attempts, including escapes from Stalag Luft I and Stalag Luft III, as a result of which he was imprisoned in Colditz Castle.
Post liberation, in January 1946, Parker was killed in an aviation accident. Townsville City Council named Vincent Bushy Parker park in Rollingstone, Queensland Australia after him.
Early years
Parker was born in Co-operative Street, Chester-le-Street, on 11 February 1918, to Vincent and Lydia Wheatley.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Vincent Parker” is australian RAF officer. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Vincent, Parker and Australian, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q116307190. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1918, 1946, 1938 and 1940.
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This entry incorporates text from “Vincent Parker” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.