SquareMilePlod

Today marks the 83rd anniversary of the #DambustersRaid. On 16 May 1943, the brave airmen from 617 Squadron embarked on a daring mission: to breach the German dams Möhne, Eder and Sorpe. Today we remember the 53 airmen who never made it home. ➡️ rafbf.org/dambusters

Welcome to the club 👏

The night of 10/11 May 1941 saw what was arguably the heaviest air raid on London of #WWII. On the morning of 11 May PC Frederick Tibbs of @CityPolice went out to photograph the damage - and captured this - now famous - shot in Queen Victoria Street in the City of London.

An incredibly important day for my parents' and grandparents' generations and provided a very different world for me to grow up in not very long after.

Remembering #VEDay80 on #VEDay2026 #lestweforget

The correct answer is, of course, that I was standing on step no.29 of the 311 leading up to the top of the Monument to the Great Fire of London! Here are some snaps that I took from the top that day.  Goodness, how the City skyline has changed over those 20 years...

@squaremileplod The dangers of working on a roof during high wind predated the raiways. Hampshire Advertiser Sat, 4 Apr 1840

Having safely negotiated the dangerous railway thingey, today saw me back in the city of dreaming spires which I once called home. Still a place of heroes and student protest though back in my day it was the miners’ strike #showingmyage

Passing through Reading railway station (platform 7a to be exact) and came across a sobering reminder of the early and rather unexpected dangers of this, at the time, new fangled railway thingey ….. #railwayhistory

Secret Sussex by the sea bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…

John Sheppard, born in 1915 in Lubico, Australia, joined the City of London Police in February 1937. In WWII he served in the Royal Navy on board the aircraft carrier HMS Dasher. Sheppard was killed in 1943 when the ship exploded in the Firth of Clyde #policehistory #AnzacDay

As a uniformed officer being instructed to wear plain clothes and go and keep watch on a house on behalf of CID for the whole night shift. The resident was suspected of nighttime burglaries. Found out later the suspect had been remanded in custody several days before 🙄

Almost 30 years ago. Seems like yesterday #lestweforget

“There is a forgotten, nay almost forbidden word, which means more to me than any other. That word is England." - Winston Churchill #StGeorgesDay 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

@ludgatelarry Did a really interesting guided walk near there a few years back - it’s not far away from where a WWII emergency landing strip was built on the forest - only used once, by an American bomber geograph.org.uk/photo/4902884

Oh, what a beautiful day! Had the very good fortune to be invited to lunch at the Ashdown Park Hotel (ashdownpark.com). Most enjoyable, as always. Can never resist a leisurely trot around the grounds afterwards...

Lieutenant John Chard, who famously commanded the British forces at the Battle of Rorke's Drift in 1879... At 31 years old, with eleven years of military service and not a single day of combat behind him, John Chard assumed command of 150 men — thirty of them hospital patients — and held a fortified station against 4,000 Zulu warriors. He had spent his career as a Royal Engineer. Bermuda, 1870. Malta, 1874. Constructing fortifications. Improving sea defences. He was a lieutenant assigned to repair a pontoon bridge at the Rorke's Drift mission station when, on the morning of 22 January 1879, news arrived from Isandlwana: over 1,300 British soldiers had been killed. And 4,000 Zulu warriors were crossing the valley. Chard was the senior officer present — not by merit, by the date of his commission, three years earlier than his counterpart's. Command fell to him by technicality. He ordered them not to retreat. A garrison of 150, moving through open ground with carts of hospital patients, would be run down. He directed the rapid construction of a defensive perimeter from mealie bags and biscuit boxes. When the hospital was breached and set on fire, he ordered an inner redoubt built from biscuit tins to save those still inside. For ten to twelve hours, he held that line. The Zulus attacked in mass waves, hand to hand. Seventeen of his men died. Four hundred of theirs did not leave the station alive. The Victoria Cross citation was published in the London Gazette on 2 May 1879. Queen Victoria invited him to Balmoral in October of that year and presented him with a gold signet ring. Historical analysis of the defence, conducted across the following century, concluded uniformly that his specific engineering decisions — the perimeter, the inner redoubt — were the reasons the garrison survived. The institution had a different conclusion. In the months following Rorke's Drift, those above him privately characterised Chard as a dull, heavy man scarcely able to perform routine work. They placed eleven Victoria Crosses at Rorke's Drift alongside political calculations they resented, and Chard absorbed the consequence. He was quietly assigned to Cyprus. Then Singapore. Then Perth, Scotland. He held these posts for eighteen years. He did not see combat again. He accepted each posting without recorded complaint. He continued to serve as a Royal Engineer — doing the work he was given in the garrisons he was sent to. In January 1893, he was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel. On 8 January 1897, he was promoted to Colonel. Ten months later, on 1 November 1897, he died of cancer of the tongue at the age of forty-nine. Every subsequent military analysis of the defence of Rorke's Drift has confirmed the same conclusion: his decisions — made in the first minutes of command, without experience, without preparation, on the basis of engineering logic applied to desperate necessity — are the reason 133 men came home. Military historians have, in the decades since, systematically dismantled the characterisation that followed him through the last eighteen years of his career. © Reddit #drthehistories

Still the best boss I ever had and still proud to have served her.

A red ‘Police’ lamp was fairly common in the counties until the move to blue in the mid-1900s. This one was outside Horsham’s previous police station in Barttelot Road (West Sussex) which accommodated John Haig, the ‘acid bath murderer’ before his court appearance in the town.

Battlefield crosses in the porch of St Bartholomew’s Church in Burwash, EastSussex. Within the church can be found a memorial to John Kipling, son of the writer Rudyard, whose home was nearby #WWI #lestweforget

Here's one taken exactly 10 years ago today.  Not sure why I was in King Edward Street at 19:02 on that fine evening.  Perhaps I was taking the scenic route to City Thameslink ... via 'The Hand and Shears' in Middle Street, possibly...