Robin Grimes retweeted
Military History - Platform 8, Victoria Train Station, London - 🌺Lest We Forget 🌺
Coin Street Community Builders are destroying Gabriel's Wharf a wonderful place on the south bank. @MayorofLondon can’t this be stoped?
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Robin Grimes retweeted
Throughout his life, Colin Anson remained mindful of his roots in Germany and the debt he owed to Britain for saving his life. But how did he feel towards Germany? The answer is aptly demonstrated by an incident that occurred while he and his wife Alice were travelling through Austria later in life:
"In our carriage there was an older man with a young boy. It turned out to be grandfather and grandson. The grandfather was explaining in German about the mountains we were passing through. Alice and I found it very interesting and I started to join the conversation in German. Then we talked about holidays, different countries and travel. He said that he had been in Sicily. And I replied, ‘Yes, me too, but that was only during the war.’
He then said, ‘Ah, I was in the Luftwaffe, a Stuka pilot.’ I was surprised and admitted that I had been hit by a Stuka. One thing led to another and it transpired that he remembered an operation over Sicily in which he and his mates had attacked Allied shipping in Augusta Bay. His memory was so accurate. ‘But,’ he said, ‘a smokescreen had been laid and obscured most of the ships – with the exception of one, so we concentrated our fire on that one ship that was laying the smoke screen.’ It was the moment when I realized that he may well be the very pilot who had dropped the bomb that wounded me! He was terribly embarrassed and I had to console him and explain: Why should I resent it? It was his job. It was his duty. Today I would not hold it against anyone for having been a Nazi. What else should they have done?
Alice and I always feel perfectly happy in Germany, especially now. The current generation are not Nazi and have no personal link to the actions of the Nazi regime. They are not responsible for the actions of their ancestors. They often feel guilt by association for what their parents or grandparents may have done during the war."
Not once in all the years that I knew Colin did I encounter any bitterness for what he had lost – the country of his birth and home, his father, his education and a future like those of his schoolmates in Germany. There were no regrets. He retained a sense of pride, and was even philosophical as he reflected back on his life. He would never accept that he had ever been a hero, and I learnt to acknowledge that: we would not make heroes out of him and his comrades. But his story did deserve to be told – that he finally accepted. I feel incredibly lucky and privileged to have been allowed to enter his world, his past, to understand his perspective as an eyewitness to history, and to have listened to a life which the intervening years could not erase.
(end).
Openreach just randomly cancelled fibre upgrade from copper without explanation @bt. I didn’t ask for it they contacted me…Total waste of my time.
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Robin Grimes retweeted
A rare glimpse of an abandoned haggis farm on Rannoch Moor, the now flooded holding pens visible from above
The farm closed in the late 1800’s due to criticism around intensive breeding methods, and the owners instead switched to mining tartan, although that venture didnt last.
Robin Grimes retweeted
Now there's a very, very good question.
Thames Water have now admitted that they are not treating (dousing) their sewage for phosphate due to a "supply issue". That by the way has a massive and negative impact on water quality and aquatic life.
Funny they didn't mention any of that until they were called out on it.
How many other WCs I wonder are having supply issues?
The @RiverChess test the Chess for phosphate levels and surprised to discover levels of up 1.99ppm at the @thameswater Chesham STW.
A spokesman said
“Due to a supply issue affecting one of the treatment chemicals" they were unable to fully treat effluent.
Reported to @EnvAgency
Bet he won’t hesitate to make us pay our taxes. bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy02…
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Robin Grimes retweeted
Views may differ on whether Olly Robbins should have somehow shared that issues had arisen in vetting. But his evidence shows that in a complex situation he took his responsibilities very seriously, did not act incompetently or with malign intent, and does not merit dismissal.
What do you expect from a corrupt organisation? bbc.co.uk/sport/football/art…
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Robin Grimes retweeted
Scotland is waking up to the devastating news that the Forth Bridge has been stolen.
I heard it on the radio and had to run along to see it for myself. The radio said they were following a positive line of enquiry with a local company that uses girders to make soft drinks.
Interestingly Travelodge is owned by the US company GoldenTree Asset Management. Strange that’s not being mentioned.
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Robin Grimes retweeted
On the 90th anniversary of the Spitfire let's remember Lucy, Lady Houston who donated the equivalent of £7,000,000 of her own money in 1931 to Supermarine to keep the Spitfire project alive
"Every true Briton would rather sell his last shirt than admit that England could not afford to defend herself" 🇬🇧
Robin Grimes retweeted
In 1943, Paris - a woman sits in a Gestapo interrogation room, her feet bleeding, her body broken.
The officers across from her know she's holding secrets. Names of British agents. Locations of resistance safe houses. Intelligence that could dismantle entire networks across France.
They've already started the torture. Her toenails are being removed, one at a time. Soon they'll use heated irons on her back. They'll lock her in darkness for weeks. They'll promise her life in exchange for just one name.
She's a 30-year-old mother of three. Not a soldier. Not a spy by training. Just a French-born housewife who was living quietly in England until Hitler's armies swallowed her homeland.
That's when Odette Sansom made a choice that most of us will never have to make. She left her three daughters behind and volunteered for Britain's Special Operations Executive, the shadow organization built to sabotage Nazi operations from within.
The SOE didn't want career military. They wanted people who could disappear into occupied territory. People who spoke native French. People willing to accept that capture likely meant torture and execution.
Odette knew the odds. She volunteered anyway.
By 1942, she was operating in occupied France under the codename "Lise," coordinating resistance cells, organizing sabotage, funneling intelligence back to London. She worked alongside Captain Peter Churchill, building networks that struck at German supply lines and communications.
For months, they were ghosts. Then a collaborator sold them out.
Now she's in this room. In this chair. Facing men who have perfected the art of breaking human beings.
And here's what they don't understand: Odette Sansom has already decided she won't break. Not for pain. Not for promises. Not even to save her own life.
Because she knows that every name she gives means another agent tortured. Another resistance fighter executed. Another family destroyed.
So she gives them nothing. Through months of interrogation. Through agony most of us can't fathom. Through solitary confinement and death threats.
Nothing.
The Gestapo eventually realizes they can't break her. They send her to Ravensbrück concentration camp, condemned under "Night and Fog" protocol, prisoners meant to vanish without trace.
She survives more than a year there by convincing the commandant she's related to Winston Churchill. It's a complete lie, but it keeps her alive.
When Allied forces arrive in 1945, that same commandant tries using her as a bargaining chip. The moment they reach American lines, Odette identifies him as a war criminal. He's arrested on the spot.
Britain awarded her the George Cross, the highest civilian honor for courage. The citation was clear: for refusing to betray her comrades despite torture that would break nearly anyone.
Then in 1951, someone stole the medal from her home. Months later, it arrived in the mail with an anonymous note. The thief had researched what it represented and couldn't live with keeping it.
Even criminals recognized what that medal meant.
Odette Sansom Hallowes lived to 82, spending decades honoring fallen comrades and embodying quiet strength. She always insisted she'd simply done what anyone should do.
But that's not true. What she did was extraordinary. She proved that the most powerful resistance to tyranny isn't violence. It's the absolute refusal to break, no matter the cost.
📷© Imperial War Museums (Restored & Colorized)
© Daughters of Time
#drthehistories
