Cannock’s role as hero after a terror attack that rocked the country – a look back at the West Midlands in the 2000s

It was a sunny Thursday morning in July and Paul Dadge was on his way to work.

The former firefighter from Cannock had recently started a new IT job in London and hopped the Tube on his way to the office. He didn’t think too much of it when passengers were told to get off at Baker Street due to a ‘power outage’. What happened next would have a profound impact on his life.

Within hours, the 28-year-old from Heath Hayes would see his picture beamed around the world as one of the most recognized heroes of one of the worst terror attacks ever seen on British soil.

The image of him helping ‘The Girl in the Mask’ – 24-year-old lawyer Davina Turrell – in the aftermath of what would become known as the 7/7 terror attack even made the cover of the world-famous Time magazine.

The ‘power outage’ was not a routine problem with the electricity supply. The train immediately in front had been blown up by suicide bomber Mohammed Sidique Khan at Edgware Road Tube, killing six people plus himself.

The attack, at 8.50am, was the second of four suicide bombings carried out on July 7, 2005, unlike anything that had happened before in Britain. Just under four years earlier, the world watched in horror as 2,977 people died in the attacks of September 11, 2001, when 19 members of the terrorist group Al-Qaeda hijacked a number of planes and crashed two into the airport’s Twin Towers. World Trade Center in New York. The West’s response was swift, with Britain quickly joining US-led operations to invade Afghanistan, believed to be the base of al-Qaeda and its leader Osama bin Laden. Britain also played a prominent supporting role in the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Our country has been on high alert since the September 11 attack, but the events of July 7, 2005 marked the first time that a suicide bombing took place on the country. this scale took place on British soil.

Mr Dadge later told an inquest how he found Miss Turrell with the mask clamped to her face after she suffered horrific facial injuries. He described how he came across the shocked and injured survivors of the attack and set up a victims’ station in the Marks & Spencer near the station.

“The medical resources on site were limited to the two paramedics and the small number of London Emergency Medical Team staff,” he said in a statement read out at the inquest.

“We had run out of oxygen and bandages and had become dependent on first aid supplies from Marks & Spencer and the Hilton Metropole Hotel. Nurses, counselors and even an NHS priest arrived at the hotel, although I think it’s worth mentioning at this point that it was great, but without the medical facilities there wasn’t much they could do.