Tuesday the 11th of November, 1941.

The Second World War had reached on for two long years, and Britain was losing the fight.

Still reeling from the evacuation of Dunkirk,

German troops were masked at the English Channel, poised to invade,

and an eight-month blitzbombing campaign had reduced many cities to smoking and smouldering ruins of rubble.

Hitler's plan was to pummel the British people into submission. Only it had failed.

For most Londoners, the bombings had become a bit of a nuisance.

Fires lit up every skyline. Guns were commonplace, and with each street,

tinged with the stench of rotting bodies, they carried on with life.

That day was Armistice Day, later known as Remembrance Day and Veterans Day, where with fresh irony, the people marked the end of hostilities between the Allies and Germany just 23 years before.

And with the paper poppy pinned to their lapels, at 11 a.m. sharp, the city would fall to a two-minute silence.

As a typical middle-class suburb in Chisig, West London, Foster Road was full of neat

semi-detached houses on a peaceful treeline street, where you rarely heard a sound above a softly spoken whisper.

At 8.45 a.m. as per usual, 28-year-old Leslie Ernest Ludford left his home at 11 Foster Road.

Dressed in a smart suit and clutching a briefcase, he worked as a solicitor dealing in divorces

and conveyancing. This half-mile walk took twice as long. As being born with dwarfism,

this diminutive man seemed even smaller, as the curvature of the spine had left him with a hunched back

and propped up by a pair of crutches.

To some, he may have stood out as weak, but his father always said, it didn't stop him,

as the only thing he couldn't do was run.

Leslie was well respected, a keen player of the card game Whist,

and was chairman of the Brentford and Chiswick Junior Conservative Club

...