When you’re doing The Knowledge, the world famous but fiendishly difficult test to become a London black cab driver, you’re presented with a series of tough challenges.
Firstly, you have to learn the name of thousands of roads, how they fit in to London’s road system, and how to navigate them.
But secondly – and this is a lot more fun – the exact location of thousands of points of interest scattered across the capital.
These can range from blue plaques of famous people to Embassies, churches, and the occasional oddity.
One of the oddest of these oddities, is the burial plot of Giro, the so called Nazi Dog.
At the south end of Waterloo Place as it meets Carlton House Terrace, is a small fenced off piece of land which most people walk straight on by without noticing.
But on closer inspection, you’ll see that contains an old London plane tree and an unexpected small gravestone.
Peer at the gravestone and you’ll see the engraving is in German. It reads ‘Giro, Ein Treuer Begletter’ – Giro, a loyal companion.
In 1934, at the beginning of tensions in the run up to WW2, the building at 9 Carlton House Terrace was home to the German Embassy. The German Ambassador at the time was a career diplomat by the name of Leopold Van Hoesch, who appointed by the German Weimer Republic before the rise of Nazi Germany, was no fan of Adolf Hitler.
He had a dog called Giro, who in 1934, chewed through some exposed electrical cables and sadly died. Von Hoesch, heart broken, had his beloved loyal companion buried here on this small plot of land.
Von Hoesch himself died of a heart attack 2 years later, and such was the regard he was held in by the British government, was given a state procession down The Mall.
Unfortunately, his successor was not such a nice chap. Joachim von Ribbentrop, a former ice cream salesman, became the German Ambassador and was an out-and-out and mean Nazi. After the war Von Ribbentrop got his just deserts though, being tried at the Nuremberg trials for war crimes, and executed.
But unfortunately, poor old Giro over the years has become tainted, being known as the Nazi dog, which he clearly was not.
Which reminds me, I must write to Transport for London who organise The Knowledge, to get them to change Giros description.