Have you noticed since ‘er nibs celebrated 86 years of free food and holidays, and 60 years on the throne, how many war related programmes have been aired?  We don’t like to mention it, although we still do with regularity.

Why don’t they just record a song with a chorus of, “Two World Wars and one World Cup,” and be done with it?  I know we have to remember the ultimate   sacrifice the men and women made for their country, and label it under, ‘Never again’, but has anyone stopped to think what the war dead would make of it?
Would they want a street party celebrating how many naughty Germans they killed?  I doubt it.  My guess is they would probably rather forget it all happened.

However, there were some internal casualties higher up the chain of command, not deaths as such, more, ‘Thanks for all you’ve done – you’re fired’.  Once Hitler discovered his mother didn’t really like him much either, he went for early retirement and it’s probably just as well, he really was a little shit wasn’t he!  And Churchill of course was ousted from government as soon as WWII ended.  But there were others, and like our Brandy swilling PM, and most of them were completely off their respective trolley too. 

Here’s a name you may not have heard of before and he was instrumental in pioneering the use of the country’s radar defenses and his name was Air Chief Marshal Hugh Caswell Tremenheere Dowding.   Now there’s a name to go to bed with!  This was big stuff during the war, and it gave our ‘Brillcream boys’ in the Battle of Britain, a 20 minute advantage over any German squadron who popped over for a sight-seeing trip, then decided to bomb our chip shops.

Dowding was passionate about his work and his pilots.  He was also a pain in the arse, but that’s par for the course I feel.  Airmen aged 19 could go up in a Spitfire once never to return, so Dowding went to the Air Ministry with a request for 2 inch bullet proof glass for the cock pits and they just laughed at him!  It makes you wonder what the pen pushers sitting in a nice warm office were on back then. The only lead they faced were in their pencils. 

It’s probably just as well the country wasn’t aware that Churchill suffered with manic depression, it wouldn’t have looked very good on paper back then.  Position: PM.  Illness: Mad as a bear that’s been poked with a stick a lot. 

Hugh Caswell Tremenheere Dowding, on the other hand, was further out of the tree than Churchill.   He was a member of the Fairy Investigation Society and he believed that fairies were “essential to the growth of plants and the welfare of the vegetable kingdom.”  I’m not even going to write the next six words, but you can imagine what the Germans most burning question still is can’t you…

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This entry was posted on Monday, June 18th, 2012 at 3:01 am and is filed under Neils Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.