On 21st March I gave my talk on the Battle of Dettingen to the Probus Club of Royal Tunbridge Wells. I am a member of that Club and I normally give the Club one talk per year.
This talk was on a Battle which most of the audience knew very little about and it was extremely well received.
On 11th March, I gave my talk (Getting my Knees Brown” to Probus Cranbrook. This covers my time as a 21 year old 2nd Lieutenant in Aden (now in Yemen) in 1964/65. Yemen is in the news right now, so it was a topical subject.
This was a free talk to Probus Cranbrook in return for one of their members giving a free talk to the Tunbridge Wells Probus Club, which keeps the costs down for both clubs.
I did manage to sell (at a very discounted price) the last two 50th Anniversary Commemoration brochures.
On 7th March 2024, I gave my talk “The Story of a Medal” to the Friends of the Royal Engineer Museum. This talk covered my father’s World War II service as a Merchant Navy Officer on Gibraltar Convoys, Atlantic Convoys, Russian Convoys and D-Day Landings. It was well received and several members of the audience also had relatives who were on those convoys.
I have created a new talk on “The MacArthurs in the ’45” covering the participation of members of my Clan on both sides of the 1745 Jacobite Rising or Rebellion, depending on your point of view.
I have created this talk to give to members of the Clan at an International MacArthur Clan Gathering in Scotland in May 2024, but am happy to give it to anyone else who wants to hear it. Details can be found here.
On 10th January 2024, I gave my talk “Getting my Knees Brown” to the Crowborough Probus Club. This talk is about my time in Aden (now part of Yemen) as a 21 year old 2nd Lieutenant in 1964/65. It was very topical, since it was the day after the Houthi rebels in Yemen had launched multiple missiles at HMS Diamond and US Warships in the Red Sea, all of which were shot down, and the day before the US and UK struck back against the Houthi rebel bases.
I have been on HMS Diamond when I went to Malta in September 2017 for the unveiling of a plaque by their Prime Minister to commemorate the Royal Engineer Bomb Disposal teams serving in Malta during World War II. The evening after the unveiling we had a cocktail party on HMS Diamond, a Type 45 Destroyer, which visited Malta especially for the occasion.
Just before I left Aden in 1965, I also had a trip on a Destroyer, HMS Cambrian, in order to take part in a reconnaissance of Abd al Kuri island in the Indian Ocean, to see if it was suitable to build an airfield, I cover this interesting visit in my talk.
Rod's Military History Talks 