Captain Square

Captain Square, CBE, DSO was a character of the BBC TV comedy series Dad's Army, set during the Second World War. He was played by Geoffrey Lumsden.
The character
Square was commander of the Home Guard platoon in Eastgate (a fictional town, but evidently quite near Walmington-on-Sea and part of the same Home Guard area structure).
He was a rather stereotypical military buffoon, with a handlebar moustache. The programme did not go into much detail about his military record, but it appears to have been a perfectly serious one, winning him several medals. He had been a Colonel in the regular army, had fought in the desert in the past (possibly alongside Lawrence of Arabia) and would regale people with boring stories about his military service. He was also a lay magistrate.
The significance of the role
His role was to act as a rival to Captain Mainwaring, along with ARP Warden William Hodges and Maurice Yeatman (the verger). Mainwaring and Square were two men with some similarities but also different personal histories. Square was even more pompous than Mainwaring, and rather condescending towards his less experienced rival. Mainwaring sometimes called Square a "pompous idiot". Square did have a sense of humour, although it may not have been to everyone's taste e.g. he would deliberately mispronounce Mainwaring's name phonetically, and on one occasion he deliberately got Mainwaring drunk in a drinking game ("being made a cardinal"). Square could be over-confident at times, and Mainwaring and the Walmington platoon did sometimes get the better of Square and the Eastgate platoon.

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