Damien Lewis

You could pretty much wear what you wanted, what you felt comfortable.

Yeah.

So they turn up and they're rather aghast at the sense of dress of particularly the SAS officers.

And so they put a kind of dictum out saying, you know, from now on, officers will dress formally for dinner, you know, in the middle of a training camp in North Africa.

And they know that Hugh Pinckney is a real maverick and an absolute champion of his men.

And so one of them comes to Hugh Pinckney and says, look, you know,

You need to understand, you need to wear a tie to dinner.

So Hugh Pinckney says to his men, gather at the officer's mess tonight so you get a good view, right?

And he proceeds to turn up at the officer's mess, last to dinner, walks in wearing only a tie and nothing else.

There's absolute silence in the mess.

And then a few seconds later, the first laughter starts.

Everyone bursts out laughing and it's kind of like he pulls it off.

He sits through the whole of the dinner naked apart from a tie.

But seriously, for a moment, while he was such an amazing commander, he'd injured his back recently, just before this, in a parachute operation.

This is the measure of the man.

And he'd said to himself and the few people he confided in,

I can't let Bill Sterling know or any of those in command, because if they know, they will ground me and I won't be able to deploy into Italy.

So he tells one of his men, Horace Stokes, the sergeant on the patrol, the only way I can actually operate and deploy is if you spray this.

It's a painkiller spray onto his back where he's injured it.

So Horace Stokes, his sergeant, has got the