RIP Henry Allingham

[ponolops]

The words hero and celebrity are thrown around like rubbish nowadays. You only have to kick a ball into a net (whilst earning a salary which reads like a telephone no.) to be called a hero.

True heros are people like Henry Allingham and Harry Patch (who is still with us) and we will never see their likes again.

Although they went to war for their country , they hated killing and death and destruction, but they did it because it was expected of them, it was their duty and in those days, duty was everything.

I have a Godson who is a soldier as is his brother, who is fighting in Afghanistan, in Helmand Province. What must these old soldiers think of what we have all become? They fought so that we might live in peace.

They must be looking down upon us with great sorrow, that mankind still hasn't learnt it's lesson.

God rest you Henry and all those who went before you. Hopefully one day, we will learn.

Ponolops

[chuckskull]

Things he has lived to see.

1901 - Queen Victoria dies
1914 - WWI begins
1929 - The Wall Street Crash
1945 - First atomic bomb detonated
1953 - Everest scaled for first time
1963 - President Kennedy assassinated
1969 - Neil Armstrong walks on moon
1977 - Death of Elvis Presley
1989 - Fall of the Berlin Wall
1990 - Nelson Mandela freed from prison after 27 years
2008 - US elects first black president

(from the BBC web site)

Amazing....

Even more amazing when you realise just how much that list is missing, including many inventions and discoveries we all take for granted. In no particular order;

The first Nobel prize
The first trans-atlantic radio signal(he only missed the invention of the radio by a year)
The Boer war
The first powered flight
The invention of TV, movies, computers and the internet.
The Panama canal
Women's suffrage
The Geneva convention
Typoid Mary
North and south poles reached for the first time
Bubonic plague in asia.
The Titanic
WW2
The cold war
Apartheid
Invention of Penicillen
Stalin
Al Capone
Lenin
Mata Hari
The model T
Invention of plastic
San Francisco Earthquake
Einstein's theory of relativity
Founding of the BBC
Castro
Pol Pot
St. Valentine's Day Massacre
Chinese revolution
Tienanmen square
Invention of sliced bread!
Amelia Earhart
Bonnie and Clyde
Invention of the cheeseburger
Trotsky
Mount Rushmore
Warsaw Pact
The ballpoint
The T-shirt
Monopoly
Gandhi
Discovery of DNA
Discovery of Pluto
Polio
Rosa Parks
Martin Luther King
Foundation of Israel
Lego
The bay of pigs
Picasso

I could go on and on, he lived to see so many amazing things and the world change so much in his lifetime. Cant help but wonder what the world will look like when I'm his age and hope I can take it all in my stride as he did. I intend to live that long by following Henry's fine longevity plan of "Cigarettes, whisky and wild, wild women".

[peterb]

And, from my recollection of TV interviews, a very humble man too.

[Zak33]

Well, he's passed on now, the old boy, and I've not been so effected by the death of someone I never met for a long time.

Glad you all feel the same. S!