In August 2015, the BBC reported: "When Ash died aged 96 last year his obituaries noted that he was said to have been the model for Virgil Hilts, the lean, leather-jacketed airman played by Steve McQueen in the 1963 film "The Great Escape"". The character Hilts, nicknamed "The Cooler King" because of the time he spends in the prison camp's punishment block (which the prisoners call "the cooler") for his persistent escape attempts, steals a motorbike and tries to escape to Switzerland but is caught while using it to jump barbed-wire barricades. The BBC report noted that "Ash modestly denied the claim. For one thing he didn't ride a motorbike, he said. For another, he did not take part in the breakout from the Stalag Luft III camp, on which the movie is based. But the reason he did not participate is that he was locked up in the 'cooler' […] as punishment for another escape attempt".