Robert Hancock, the pseudonym of Douglas Howell, was born in Surrey in 1920 and educated at Monmouth School and Queen's College, Oxford. During the Second World War he was a lieutenant in the Royal Artillery and was taken prisoner at Tobruk. He was a POW in Italy and then Germany until the end of the war.

After the war he entered journalism and became a reporter for the Daily Mirror until 1953, when he joined the Sunday Express. In 1955 he left the Beaverbrook Group to become a features writer on Woman's Sunday Mirror and a regular contributor to The Spectator. In 1957 he joined the Sunday Pictorial (later the Sunday Mirror) as a features writer. In 1969 he worked on secondment for nine months as Special Assistant to the Postmaster General, John Stonehouse MP. He returned briefly to the Sunday Mirror but was then offered the job as Group Public Relations Adviser at Lew Grade's ATV. When ATV became Central Television he was Head of their London Press Office until he retired in 1985.

Robert Hancock was married, with four sons, and lived in London. He died in 2007.