Richard Adams
Richard Adams was born on 9 May 1920 in Wash Common, near Newbury, Berkshire, England, the son of Lillian Rosa (Button) and Evelyn George Beadon Adams, a doctor. He attended Horris Hill School from 1926 to 1933, and then Bradfield College from 1933 to 1938. In 1938, he went to Worcester College, Oxford, to read Modern History. In July 1940, Adams was called up to join the British Army. He was posted to the Royal Army Service Corps and was selected for the Airborne Company, where he worked as a brigade liaison. He served in Palestine, Europe and the Far East but saw no direct action against either the Germans or the Japanese.
Clement Adams
The earliest mention of Adams in the printed literature of the sixteenth century is by his contemporary, Richard Eden, the father of English geography. From the pages of his little read and less known "Decades" we learn that Clement Adams was a schoolmaster and not a traveller. To Adams we owe the first written account of the earliest English intercourse with Russia. Eden writes: ‘Wheras I have before (p. 252) made mention howe Moscouia was in our tyme discoured by the direction and information of the sayde master Sebastian [Cabote] who longe before had this secreate in his minde, I shall not neede here to describe that viage, forasmuch as the same is largely and faithfully written in the Latyn tonge by that lerned young man, Clement Adams, scol mayster to the Queenes henshemen (i.e. pages of honour) as he received it at the mouth of the sayde Richard Chancelor.'