Rod’s Military History Talks

Earlier this week, I gave my talk on “The Roman Invasions of Britain” to the Cranbrook Probus Club. That was part of an exchange of talks given between the Cranbrook Probus Club and my own Tunbridge Wells Probus Club. The talk went down very well.

I gave two talks recently to raise funds for Help for Heroes for Armed Forces Week (22nd to 28th June 2026).

The first talk was my latest talk “A Blue Beret in Cyprus” which I gave to the Bexhill Historical Society. This was the first outing for that talk and it went down very well. It covered a brief history of Cyprus, explained why UN was deployed there, my time as Military Public Information Officer to the United Nations Force in Cyprus (UNFICYP) for two years in the mid 1980s and concluded with the situation today.

My second talk was “Getting my Knees Brown” which I gave at the Retirement Village which I now live at. Again this was very well received. It covered my 9 months in Aden as a 21 year old Second Lieutenant in 1964/65.(mainly serving 200 miles north of Aden itself in Beihan, of the edge of the Rub ‘al Khali, the “Empty Quarter” of 1,000 miles of desert across the Arabian Peninsula).

The two talks between them raised £149 which was donated to Help for Heroes.

On 5th March I gave my talk on The Roman Invasions of Britain to the Friends of the Royal Engineers Museum. The talk was in the museum itself, which is only a few miles down the River Medway from where the Romans forded it during the Battle of the Medway in 43 AD.

The talk was well received and raised a considerable amount for Help for Heroes.

On 12th February I gave another talk on The Roman Invasions of Britain, This talk was to the Crowborough Probus Club and was well received.

This was my first talk of this year. I have two more bookings for this talk later this year. I also have provisional bookings for two different talks later in the year.

In November 2025, I gave two more talks on Royal Engineers Bomb Disposal. The first on 10th November to a Care Home in Tunbridge Wells and the second on 18th November to the Bexhill Historical Society.

Both talks raised funds for the Felix Fund, a charity supporting Bomb Disposal personnel, serving and retired, plus their families, whether Army, Navy, Air Force or the Metropolitan Police. Felix is the cartoon cat with nine lives that was adopted as the badge, and radio callsign, of the Bomb Disposal teams in Northern Ireland.

On 18th October 2025 I gave a talk on The Battle of Waterloo to the Royal British Legion Branch in Tunbridge Wells.

I have given them several talks before and this one went down equally well.