Top of the morning to you, London Walkers. Wherever you are.
Let’s get the show on the road by playing this card.
Five men in bronze. A familiar London monument. And the moment looking becomes seeing.
London Calling. London Walks connecting. This is London. This is London Walks. Streets ahead. Story time. History time.
And today, something about London. And about the way London works on you.
Something I’ve experienced hundreds of times. Maybe thousands.
You’re out and about. Walking. Looking. Taking it all in.
And London, bless her, is doing what London does best.
Stimulating you. Surprising you. Giving you something to think about.
The thing is, sometimes it’s something you’ve seen before.
Something you’ve walked past a hundred times. Something you know perfectly well.
Except you don’t.
Not really.
Because on this particular day, for some mysterious reason, you stop.
You take another look.
A closer look.
Something catches your eye. Something draws you in.
And suddenly you’re seeing something that was always there, but which you’d never really seen before.
And then it happens.
BANG.
A door opens.
A question presents itself. Then another. And another.
You want to know more.
You absolutely have to know more.
And London has done it again.
She’s taken something familiar and made it utterly unfamiliar.
Which is precisely what happened to me the other day.
I was in Whitehall Court, just off Whitehall Place. Near the old War Office.
And there they were.
Five soldiers.
Five men in bronze.
The Royal Tank Regiment Memorial.
I’ve known that memorial for years. Walked past it goodness knows how many times. Looked at it. Admired it.
But this time something was different.
This time I stopped.
And I started looking at the faces.
Really looking.
One by one.
Five very different faces.
Five individual human beings.
And I found myself wondering about them.
Who were these men?
Where had they come from?
London? Liverpool? Glasgow? Some little village in the Yorkshire Dales?
What had they done before the war?
Had one of them been a schoolteacher? Another a mechanic? Perhaps one had worked in a bank. Perhaps another had never had a proper job. Perhaps he’d been barely out of school when the war started.
Did they have sweethearts?
Wives?
Children?
Did they survive the war?
And if they did, what happened afterwards?
Did they go back to their old lives? Did they marry? Raise families? Grow old?
Or had the war changed them so completely that they never really came home?
Now, these aren’t portraits of five identified soldiers. They represent the five-man crew of a British Comet tank.
But that didn’t make the questions any less urgent.
Because there really were men like these.
Thousands of them.
Each with a name. A home. A family. A life.
And there they were, standing right in front of me.
So I took out my camera.
Started taking photographs.
And then I moved closer.
A close-up.
One face.
I filled the frame with it.
And something happened.
The moment I isolated that face, the group disappeared.
The military memorial disappeared.
The history-book abstraction disappeared.
And what was left was a man.
A human being.
Somebody I wanted to get to know.
There was something about that face.
The eyes. The expression. The set of the mouth.
What had those eyes seen?
What had that man experienced?
And what on earth was it like to be a soldier in a tank?
Well, that’s when the door really opened.
And that’s how this London Calling episode was born.
Five faces in a London street.
And a photograph.
Now, let’s get to know them.
The memorial represents the crew of a Comet tank.
The A34 Comet.
A British tank that entered service in the closing months of the Second World War.
And quite a machine it was.
About 33 tons of steel. A 600-horsepower Rolls-Royce Meteor engine. A formidable 77-millimetre gun.
Speed. Firepower. Armour.
One of the most capable British tanks of the war.
But here’s the thing.
You stand outside a tank and admire its engineering.
You get inside one and suddenly engineering is the least of your concerns.
There were five men in a Comet.
The commander.
The gunner.
The loader.
The driver.
And the hull machine gunner.
Five men.
Five jobs.
And five lives utterly dependent upon one another.
Now, imagine yourself inside.
Getting down through that hatch.
Lowering yourself into the steel interior.
Look around.
Metal everywhere.
Machinery. Ammunition. Controls. Equipment.
A great gun occupying the turret.
Not much room to move.
And certainly no room to get away from your fellow crewmen.
The engine starts.
Six hundred horsepower roaring away.
The tracks begin to move.
The whole vehicle shudders and rattles.
There’s dust. There’s heat. There’s noise.
And outside, somewhere beyond those steel walls, there’s an enemy trying to kill you.
Now the gun fires.
Imagine that concussion.
The loader gets another round into the breech.
The commander is shouting orders.
The gunner is searching for a target.
The driver is trying to manoeuvre this great steel beast across broken ground.
And all the time you’re conscious of one dreadful possibility.
Fire.
Because the very thing that’s protecting you, that steel armour, can suddenly become your prison.
I’ve been reading Norman Ferguson on tank warfare.
And there’s a particularly chilling detail about a burning tank.
Ninety seconds.
That was the frighteningly short escape time I came across.
Ninety seconds.
A minute and a half.
Five men.
Now, divide ninety seconds by five and you get eighteen seconds per man.
Of course, that’s not how an evacuation literally works. There are different hatches, different positions, different circumstances.
But eighteen seconds.
Just consider it.
And what if the shell that started the fire has twisted the metal?
What if the hatch is jammed?
What if somebody’s wounded?
What if the man ahead of you can’t get out?
What if you can’t get past him?
The heat.
The smoke.
The panic.
The terrible realisation that the seconds are running out.
And here’s where we encounter one of the grimmest pieces of black humour to come out of the Second World War.
The American Sherman tank.
The Sherman was one of the principal Allied tanks. Thousands upon thousands of them were produced. British tank crews fought in them too.
And they acquired a dreadful nickname.
The Ronson.
Named after the cigarette lighter.
The joke, if you can call it a joke, was that the Sherman would light up just like a Ronson lighter.
There was a widespread perception among crews that Shermans were dangerously prone to catching fire.
The reputation was exaggerated, as subsequent research has shown. But the nickname has endured.
And what a nickname.
The Ronson.
A cigarette lighter.
A machine containing five human beings.
That tells you something about the way men cope with the knowledge that they might die at any moment.
They make jokes.
Terrible jokes.
Black humour.
Because sometimes the alternative is to think too hard about what’s actually happening.
Now, the Comet was a different machine. A newer British design. And a formidable one.
But no tank, however powerful, could make the men inside invulnerable.
And that’s what brings us back to Whitehall.
Back to those five bronze faces.
The memorial was unveiled by Queen Elizabeth II in June 2000.
The sculptor was Vivien Mallock, working from an earlier design by George Henry Paulin.
And there’s something particularly telling about the whole enterprise.
The men responsible for commissioning it wanted a memorial to the soldiers.
Not the machines.
And Mallock understood that.
Her husband had served in the Royal Tank Regiment.
She was creating something about comradeship.
Five individuals.
Five different personalities.
Five separate human lives.
But one fighting unit.
That’s what makes a tank crew so extraordinary.
They’re not simply fighting alongside one another.
They’re fighting inside the same machine.
A tiny, enclosed world.
And their lives depend upon one another to a degree that’s difficult for those of us who’ve never experienced combat to comprehend.
One man’s mistake might cost five lives.
One man’s quick thinking might save five lives.
One wounded man might prevent the others from getting out.
The bond between them must have been extraordinary.
And here’s something else.
The memorial doesn’t show the men fighting.
There are no flames. No explosions. No heroic assault.
No tank at all.
Just five men.
Standing together.
In the open air.
And the more I think about that, the more affecting it becomes.
For months, perhaps years, men like these lived with the possibility of being trapped inside a steel machine.
And now look at them.
They’re out.
They’re standing in the open.
Nothing enclosing them.
Nothing restricting them.
No engine roaring.
No guns firing.
No enemy waiting beyond the next hedgerow.
They’re free of the tank.
And yet, there’s a final irony.
A remarkable irony.
Because they’re still in metal.
They’ve been cast in bronze.
Forever.
The sculptor has given them the very thing from which, in wartime, they might have desperately wanted to escape.
Metal.
But this time it’s different.
This metal doesn’t imprison them.
It preserves them.
It ensures that the men, and the thousands of men they represent, won’t simply vanish into history.
One generation passes.
Then another.
The war recedes.
The machines become museum exhibits.
The battlefields become farmland.
The veterans grow old.
And then, one day, the last of them is gone.
But these five remain.
Standing there in Whitehall.
Waiting for somebody to stop.
To look.
To wonder.
To care.
And I suppose that’s really what happened to me.
I’ve walked past that monument so many times.
Known it was there. Known what it represented.
But until the other day, until I began looking at those faces, I hadn’t really met the men.
And that brings me back to where we started.
London.
This astonishing, inexhaustible city.
You never finish with London.
Never.
You might think you know a street. A building. A statue. A monument.
And then, for no reason you can explain, something changes.
You look again.
You look more closely.
You ask a question.
And suddenly you’re off on a journey.
You hadn’t intended to go anywhere. You were just out for a walk.
And London has taken you somewhere completely unexpected.
That’s one of the great privileges of living here. And one of the great pleasures of walking here.
The familiar becomes unfamiliar.
And then, when you’ve discovered its story, it becomes familiar again.
But familiar in a completely different way.
You’ll never quite see it as you saw it before.
And I know that next time I walk along Whitehall Court, I’ll stop.
I’ll look at those five faces.
I’ll think about the men who fought inside those steel machines.
And I’ll remember that extraordinary paradox.
In life, enclosed in metal for protection.
In remembrance, immortalised in metal for posterity.
Five men.
Forever out of the tank.
Forever a crew.
And that, my friends, is London.
The walk ends.
The London you’ve discovered stays with you.
Ok, Word of the Day: Has to be Comet
Today, a comet is a celestial body made largely of ice, dust and rock that travels around the Sun. When it approaches the Sun, it may develop a spectacular glowing tail.
The word comes from the Greek koh-MAY-tays komētēs, meaning “long-haired”, derived from koh-MAY komē, meaning “hair”.
To the ancient Greeks, a comet looked like a star with flowing hair.
A hairy star.
I love that.
And here’s the connection.
The British Comet tank was named for that celestial phenomenon. A machine bearing the name of something that flashes across the heavens.
But our story today isn’t really about the machine.
It’s about the men inside it.
Men who had their brief moment beneath the sun.
And who, thanks to a remarkable London monument, will be remembered long after their own lives have passed.
See you tomorrow.