David Craig, Baron Craig of Radley
British air marshal (born 1929)
Marshal of the Royal Air Force David Brownrigg Craig, Baron Craig of Radley, (born 17 September 1929) is a retired Royal Air Force officer and member of the House of Lords. He was a fast jet pilot in the 1950s, a squadron commander in the 1960s and a station commander in the 1970s. He served as Chief of the Air Staff during the late 1980s, when the Boeing Airborne early warning and control system was ordered and the European Fighter programme was being developed. He then served as Chief of the Defence Staff during the Gulf War. He was granted a life peerage as Baron Craig of Radley after his retirement from active service in 1991, sitting as a crossbencher. As of 2026, he is the oldest serving British parliamentarian and the last living officer in the British Armed Forces to have held a five-star rank whilst on active service.
Early life
The son of Major Francis Brownrigg Craig and his wife Olive Craig, Craig grew up in the Irish Free State, and was largely unaffected by the events of the Second World War. In 1943 he came to Britain and started at Radley College where, in addition to his studies, he rowed, captained the school's first team at rugby and later became Head of School. He gained a place at Lincoln College, Oxford, where he graduated with a degree in mathematics, and joined the Oxford University Air Squadron.
RAF career
Craig was commissioned as a pilot officer on 19 September 1951 (with seniority from 19 December 1949).
“David Craig, Baron Craig of Radley” enters the record as british air marshal (born 1929). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what David, Craig and Baron can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1174088. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1929, 1991, 2026 and 1943.
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This entry incorporates text from “David Craig, Baron Craig of Radley” 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.