Major Thomas Arthur Bird DSO, MC & Bar (11 August 1918 – 9 August 2017) was a distinguished British soldier and architect whose inspirational command of the anti-tank company (‘S’ Company) of 2nd Battalion, The Rifle Brigade, at Outpost Snipe during the Second Battle of El Alamein helped destroy the armoured counter-attack of General Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps. ‘When all seemed to be lost, there would be Dicky boy, calm and seemingly aloof from the dangers around us…’. The Daily Sketch described Snipe as ‘the finest action of the war’. He later became a noted architect working in collaboration with Richard Tyler (as Bird & Tyler Associates) from 1955 to 1985 in the neo-classical genre, having rejected an earlier flirtation with modernism.