Britain’s nuclear test veterans are finally being remembered

Some wars get forgotten (viz Korea and Malaya); others are constantly refreshed in memory. As the manager of an Asian investment trust in the late 1980s, some 44 years after the Second World War, I was asked by my board to cough up a large sum of money to fund a statue of Field Marshal, Viscount Slim, the general who led British forces in India and Burma.

This was indeed a huge error of omission. Slim had won arguably the greatest victories of British forces in the Second World War: the Battle of Imphal in India and the Battle of Irrawaddy River in Burma. His splendidly executed statue was duly unveiled in 1993 and sits proudly in Whitehall. Even later, despite a somewhat less obvious case of omission, following a novel Animals in War [1984] by Jilly Cooper, a memorial of the same name was erected in front of Hyde Park’s Brook gate in 2004.