A Posthumous award of the George Cross to the Rev. Herbert Cecil Pugh, RAF Sea are, formerly of Friern Barnet (Middlesex) Congregational Church, is announced today. When a British trooper, carrying a mentor West Africa, was torpedoed in the Atlantic in July 1941, the padre came on deck and, knowing that injured men in the flooded hold could not be going out, he insisted on being lowered to them. When he knelt to pray with the injured and dying men, the water reached the shoulders. Although you knew that going into the holes meant certain death, the Padres insisted that he should be where his men were. A few minutes later the ship plunged and sank and the heroic padre was never seen again. 1 April 1947