Fresh light on the siege of Weston-under-Redcastle

Many thanks to a reader for sending me the image below and alerting me to this video.

I blogged about the siege of Weston of Weston-under-Redcastle a few years ago and attracted some interesting comments from people with family connections to the events of 1968 in the Shropshire village.

The newsreel commentary here makes it sound more serious than the article I quoted in that first post as it tells us the gunman had his wife and four children with him for the 17 days of the siege.

We used to think that not rushing into such situations with guns blazing was the British way of doing things and thus superior.

In 1975 the authorities spent a week persuading a Provisional IRA gang holed up in a London flat to give themselves up and release their hostages.

Then in 1980 the BBC interrupted the snooker to show us the SAS storming the Iranian embassy and the modern world was born.