ambush at Soloheadbeg three months earlier, in January, 1919, in which two RIC men were murdered during the first ambush of the 'Anglo-Irish' war.

But back to 1940 and Britain's 'Finest Hour'. So how low is British self-esteem, if our neighbours think the only reason that country didn't surrender in 1940 was Churchill and his rhetoric? For what large island nation with any sort of history -- never mind that of Britain -- would capitulate merely because of a few weeks of aerial combat over a half-dozen counties in the south-east?

Had Churchill perished of alcoholism in 1940, by what democratic process would the British people have surrendered their sovereign authority to Hitler without invasion and conquest? Yet Hitler sought neither. Nor was there any peace faction in the Houseof Commons, though poor Lord Halifax -- who merely sought to know what the German terms were before the British government rejected them -- is usually traduced as some sort of treacherous caricature in film and TV portrayals of this time.

BUT what about the inspirational words: "Never in the field of human conflict, et cetera"? So what about them? For who really believes that 19-year-old fighter pilots would ever attend to the vapourings of a drunken, sexagenarian politician?

Seventy years on and the soundtrack to the summer of 1940 is again filling the British airwaves -- 'Bluebirds Over the White Cliffs of Dover', 'A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square', 'A Foggy Day In London Town'. Ah yes, the musical essence of Old England.

Except that 'Bluebirds' was written by two