Tribute to a brave man

The Colin Grazier Hotel is a puzzle to most visitors to Tamworth. Who was he, they ask, and they assume he was a local businessman or politician.
In fact he was an ordinary sailor who died in action in World War Two, when he showed amazing courage in entering a sinking German U-Boat, to find and retrieve some codebooks that were known to be in it. Sadly he died returning yet again into the U-Boat. Those codebooks helped the Allies later to intercept and interpret German signals.

For some odd reason – probably the British obsession with secrecy – the story didn’t emerge for many years, when Grazier was finally, posthumously, awarded The George Cross.

To me, it’s admirable that this pub company decided to name their pub after him – even though it must have known that few visitors (and probably very few young people) would even know who he was.