Sublime

After being briefed by Stirling on an impending attack on Benghazi, and the way that the SAS represented ‘a new form of warfare’ which had ‘awesome potential’, Churchill quoted to Smuts the lines from Byron’s Don Juan: ‘He was the mildest-mannered man / That ever scuttled ship or cut a throat.’ The next day, he summoned Stirling to the Embassy to

Introduced to a party of people who ignore their own chauffeur, he protests: “I have not met this gentleman

Another enduring name for the force as a whole is of course the Old Bill, originally a cartoon character of the First World War who was portrayed as a grumbling Cockney soldier with a walrus moustache. The ‘police’ meaning emerged when the character, this time wearing police uniform, appeared in posters during the Second World War giving advice on