Arthur Marshall, MBE (10 May 1910 – 27 January 1989) was a British writer, raconteur and broadcaster, born in Barnes, London in the UK. He was best known as a team captain on the BBC's Call My Bluff. Early life Charles Arthur Bertram Marshall was the son of Charles Marshall, an electrical engineer from Colchester and Dorothy, née Lee, from Manchester. He was enrolled at the kindergarten section of the Froebel Institute in Hammersmith in 1916, for two years, and then went to Ranelagh House, a co-educational school overlooking Barnes Common. In the summer of 1920 his father moved the family to Newbury in Berkshire and Arthur was sent away to a preparatory boarding school, Stirling Court, on the Hampshire coast where his brother was already a pupil. He described it later as a 'traumatic experience'. He was educated at Oundle School from 1924 to 1928, and Christ's College, Cambridge from 1928 to 1931, where he studied modern languages, became President of the Cambridge University Amateur Dramatic Club, and wanted to be an actor. His obsession with the theatre had begun at the age of four when he had been taken to see Peter Pan, played by Madge Titheradge, at the Kings Theatre, Hammersmith. At Cambridge Marshall appeared as Elizabeth in Somerset Maugham's The Circle in 1929 and his performance was praised by George Rylands. The last play in which he appeared for the ADC was directed by Rylands, a production of George Bernard Shaw's Captain Brassbound's Conversion, starring Michael Redgrave in the title role and who was, according to Noel Annan, 'acted off the stage by Arthur Marshall as Lady Cicely'. Early career As Marshall could not find enough acting work, or convince his parents that they should support his desire to pursue a career in the theatre, in 1931 he became a teacher of modern languages, again at Oundle School. His first work in entertainment was writing scripts for three-minute radio sketches. In 1934 a BBC producer asked him to appear on Charlot's Hour, a late-night revue on the Home Service. He signed a contract in 1935 with Columbia and made five gramophone records featuring sketches involving headmistresses and schoolgirls – he was an avid reader of books for girls from childhood and had been performing skits from the early thirties for his friends. He began reviewing for the New Statesman in 1935 too at the invitation of