19/08/2026
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In 1940, amid the ruins of Poplar in London's East End, an Air Raid Warden named Mr E King came across a stray mixed breed terrier wandering the wreckage of a bombing raid. He had no collar, no owner ever came forward, and by any reasonable expectation he should have vanished back into the rubble once the scraps King gave him ran out. Instead, the dog stayed, and King's Civil Defence colleagues at post B132 on Southill Street adopted him as their mascot. They called him Rip.
Nobody trained Rip for search and rescue work. There was no programme for it in Britain at that point in the war. But almost immediately, he showed an instinct nobody had asked for. When bombs brought buildings down, Rip would move towards the wreckage, sniffing and scratching at the debris until he found signs of life, then barking to bring the wardens running. He worked through the worst of the Blitz alongside King and the rest of the Southill Street patrol, night after night, treating collapsed houses and shattered streets as his job.
In the space of twelve months between 1940 and 1941, Rip is credited with locating more than a hundred people trapped beneath the ruins of bombed buildings. He became, by most accounts, the first search and rescue dog to serve in that role in Britain, and his success is thought to have been part of what pushed the authorities to begin formally training dogs for the same work before the war ended.
In July 1945, Rip was awarded the PDSA Dickin Medal, the award established two years earlier and often described as the animal equivalent of the Victoria Cross. His citation read simply: for locating many air raid victims during the Blitz of 1940. He wore the medal on his collar for the rest of his life.
Rip died in October 1946. He was buried at the PDSA's cemetery in Ilford, Essex, the first of twelve Dickin Medal recipients to be laid to rest there. His headstone remembers a dog who served with Civil Defence London and was honoured for bravery in locating victims trapped under blitzed buildings. In 2009, his medal sold at auction in Bloomsbury for £24,250, a record for a Dickin Medal at the time, a small measure of how much his story still means to people more than sixty years on.
