stuart ireson

[Daniel J. Devane 🇬🇧 @DanielJDevane]

The Trot Past to the music, The Keel Row

[celtic Jaime 🍀 @celtic_jaime]

Blast from the past 💥

[𝐌𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐜 - 𝐌𝐨𝐯𝐢𝐞 - 𝐀𝐧𝐝 𝐌𝐨𝐫𝐞⭐️❤️ @NgocThach74]

Drake Milligan is Called 'The New Elvis of Country' With Sounds Like Something I'd Do❤️

[Dr Helen Fry | WWII Historian @DrHelenFry]

Lieutenant Colonel “Mad Jack” Churchill stormed into battle playing the bagpipes, armed with a Scottish broadsword and longbow.

He captured 42 German soldiers single-handedly with just his sword and remains the last known man to kill an enemy with a bow and arrow in combat.

[Martin Whincup @whincupm]

How was gallantry recognised in #WW2?

As Group Captain Leonard Cheshire - the recipient of a VC, three DSOs and a DFC - intimated, it often took more than just a gallant act to earn a decoration.

[FinleyFinn @FionnualaFini]

One of the Narrowest Ship Passages on Earth

[On This Day RN @OnthisdayRN]

#OnThisDay 1855 @RoyalNavy Lt’s Cecil Buckley & Hugh Burgoyne from HM Ships MIRANDA & SWALLOW, with Gunner John Robarts from HMS ARDENT landed to destroy 73 Russian Vessels, stores and provisions during Crimean War under heavy fire. All survived to receive their Victoria Cross.

[Andy @AndyAitcheson]

Ladies and gentlemen: Charles Hazlitt Upham VC and Bar.

This Is Your Life, 1985. Holy smokes.

Listen to how he got his VC here https://t.co/xSkH3bgNWV

[John Foreman CBE @John_ForemanCBE]

'What spirit, what courage, what men! Go on sailor, have this one on us!'

[stuart ireson @navystuart]

@pegge49 Fabulous trip was on Boxer

[Love Music @khnh80044]

Imagine walking out in front of 72,000 people, with millions watching around the world, then sitting at the piano and performing one of the greatest songs ever written with pure confidence and passion.
Freddie Mercury truly was the ultimate rock star ❤️🎹

[Brown Plus @E40_brown]

This million dollars yacht can fly....😍😍😍

[stuart ireson @navystuart]

@pegge49 @RoyalNavy Old ship was on her then

[Hidden History @HiddenHistoryYT]

85 years ago today, in the freezing grey water between Iceland and Greenland, the most famous warship in the world died in under three minutes.

HMS Hood. 48,000 tons. The pride of the Royal Navy for twenty years. The ship British schoolchildren drew in their notebooks. "The Mighty Hood."

She was hunting the Bismarck.

At 05:52 on 24 May 1941, Vice Admiral Lancelot Holland gave the order to open fire at 26,500 yards. He was closing the range hard on purpose, because Hood's weak deck armor could not survive shells falling from above at long range. He needed flat trajectories, and he needed them fast.

He was three minutes too slow.

Bismarck's fifth salvo straddled Hood as she turned to bring her rear guns to bear. A single 15-inch shell punched through her thin armored deck and detonated her aft magazines.

Witnesses on Prince of Wales described a column of flame that rose higher than the mainmast, eerily silent at first, the sound arriving a moment later. Hood broke in two. Her stern rose vertically out of the sea, guns still pointed at the sky, and slid under. Her bow followed.

Of 1,418 men aboard, three survived.

Signalman Ted Briggs, Able Seaman Bob Tilburn, Midshipman Bill Dundas. They floated on a raft of debris in near-freezing water, watching their ship's oil burn around them, until the destroyer Electra found them two hours later. Briggs was 18 years old. He lived until 2008, the last man who had stood on the Mighty Hood.

The Bismarck won the battle. But Prince of Wales, only just commissioned with shipyard workers still aboard fixing her main guns, had landed three hits before retreating. One ruptured a forward fuel tank. Bismarck began trailing oil across the Atlantic like a wounded animal.

Churchill's order to the fleet was simple. Sink the Bismarck.

Every available British warship turned to the chase. Three days later, at the edge of the Bay of Biscay, a Swordfish biplane from HMS Ark Royal, flying through a gale at near sea level, dropped a torpedo that jammed Bismarck's rudder hard to port. She could only steam in a slow circle, straight back into the Royal Navy.

King George V and Rodney closed at dawn on 27 May. They fired on her for ninety minutes. Bismarck absorbed over 400 shells and at least a dozen torpedoes before she rolled over and went down with roughly 2,200 of her crew.

The Royal Navy answered for Hood in 72 hours.

[Hidden History @HiddenHistoryYT]

85 years ago today, May 9, 1941, a 20-year-old British sub-lieutenant named David Balme rowed across the freezing North Atlantic, climbed down the ladder of a captured Nazi U-boat, and stepped into a scene out of a ghost story.

The lights were still on. Meals sat half-eaten on the tables. And bolted to a desk, still wired up and ready to encrypt the next signal to Berlin, was an Enigma machine.

The submarine was U-110. Her commander, Fritz-Julius Lemp, was the same officer who on the first day of the war had torpedoed the civilian liner SS Athenia, killing 117 passengers, children among them. He died in the water that morning beside the boat he had just abandoned, convinced his scuttling charges would send her to the bottom before the British could climb aboard. They didn't go off.

HMS Bulldog hooked the U-boat under tow, then deliberately let her sink the next day so Berlin would never know she had been boarded. The surviving German crew was shipped to a camp in Iceland and kept incommunicado for the rest of the war. The British sailors who saw it happen were sworn to silence. The Americans weren't told. Most of the Royal Navy wasn't told.

The Enigma machine, the codebooks, and the bigram tables for the Offizier cipher were rushed under guard to Bletchley Park, where Alan Turing's hut was waiting for exactly this. Within weeks they were reading the Atlantic U-boat traffic in near real time.

King George VI personally pinned the Distinguished Service Cross on Balme and called the boarding "perhaps the most thrilling episode of the war at sea."

The official British intelligence history estimates the codebreaking that followed shortened the Second World War by roughly two years and saved untold millions of lives. Churchill called the codebreakers "the geese that laid the golden eggs and never cackled."

The entire operation, codenamed Primrose, stayed classified for 30 years.

In 2000, Hollywood released U-571, a film in which Americans capture the Enigma machine. Prime Minister Tony Blair called it "an affront to the memory of the British sailors who lost their lives in this action."

The truth is that the course of the war turned, in part, on a 20-year-old going down a ladder alone, into a still-warm submarine, on a Friday morning in the middle of the ocean.

[stuart ireson @navystuart]

@ClarkeMicah in answer to your questions about the bell from H.M.S Trump. All Royal Navy Bell's,name boards etc are kept in storage from decommissioned ships.
They are sometimes sold on the open market. I hope this helps I'm a Royal Navy veteran of some 23 1/2 years .

[stuart ireson @navystuart]

@n_beckyxxoo Yep

[Ricky D Phillips - Military Historian @RDPHistory]

Love it 🤣

[𝐬 🇬🇧⸆⸉ @redelitist]

The Falkland Islands were claimed for His Britannic Majesty before Argentina even existed.

They have never belonged to Argentina and never will

Cry harder, god save the king