Midshipman's Blog
Reunion Update 3/24 - Email dated 30 Sep 2024
Ahoy,
This week thirty-nine years ago (for most of us) we were probably all in a state of bewilderment and extreme bulling. That also means that it is now only a year to run until our 40th anniversary reunion in Pompey. It is time to offer a glimpse into what excitement we have planned and an early call for numbers.
In terms of the planning process, you will appreciate that with a year to run things may change, but this is what we have in the pipeline so far….
LONGCAST (all timings aspirational)
Fri 19 Sep 25
A/R Act independently, arrive Pompey.
1700 RPC – Admiralty House, HM Dockyard. We are in preliminary discussions with Second Sea Lord’s team. VA Martin Connell has very kindly offered us the use of his official residence.
1900 – Buffet – Either at Admiralty House, or The Old Custom House, Gunwharf Quays.
2100 – Muster - Pubs (various)
Sat 20 Sep 25
Act Independently, visits to Naval themed attractions across the wider Portsmouth Area.
Including – HM Dockyard Museums Ultimate Explorer Ticket (at a very reasonable £20 per person as we are all Armed Forces Veterans. The Committee can offer advice for those struggling to prove it!). The pass includes…..
Unlimited access to all attractions
The Mary Rose Museum
HMS Victory
HMS Warrior
HMS M.33
The National Museum of the Royal Navy
Explosion Museum of Naval Firepower
Royal Navy Submarine Museum
Action Stations
Harbour Tours
Boathouse 4
Dockyard Apprentice
Additionally, we have a very kind offer from Dave Cunningham to have an afternoon guided tour of the RN Trophy Store, exclusive access to all that magnificent silver finery and historic ship’s regalia. Numbers in advance please.
We have a couple of other options under consideration too.
Sailing – given the complexities of getting out on the water for a short time from Gosport or anywhere in Portsmouth Harbour itself, we are not organising sailing as an “official” activity this time. If folk want to sort themselves out, then we can provide contact details for those who may want to make their own arrangements and have access to yachts/dinghies etc and need some willing volunteer crew.
1800 – Muster HMS EXCELLENT (Whale Island) – pre dinner drinks.
1930 – Mess Dinner
2200ish – Volunteer Band, sea shanties.
0100 – We are required to be clear of HMS EXCELLENT
Sun 21 Sep 25
1030 – Brunch – proposed Old Custom House
O/C – Disperse - Endex.
Any other ideas or offers for nautical themed (or otherwise) activities on the Saturday would be welcome. Drop the Committee an email.
In terms of accommodation, there are several of the usual options available in Portsmouth if you search for Premier Inn and Holiday Inn Express, they are very close to the Dockyard. The nearest Travelodge is handy for Whale Island. In addition, we have provisionally been offered rooms in the Royal Maritime Club (Hotel) which is ideally placed for both Pompey Harbour station and for all dockyard related activities. Prices are very reasonable, if you want to share with your oppo, or even someone else’s oppo, then let us know. Or, if you’d rather not share, single room occupancy is available too. Just state when you respond whether you wish to take up one of these rooms.
Costs for the weekend’s activities, including the mess dinner, will be around £120 per person. Maybe less depending on Friday’s options. We will be looking for 50% in January to secure our bookings and the balance no later than a month before the event.
Please now let us know your intentions; are you - attending in full, attending partially and over which days, or not attending at all (we can then stop bothering you with updates). AND also let us know if you wish to put an early marker down for a room at the RMC.
Deadline - 31 October 2024.
Again, please mention this update to all your 85 contacts, and please continue to track down those who have not been in touch with us or attended previous events. You can download the college lists from the BRNC 85 website and help us to boost numbers.
Please also visit the website for a trip down memory lane - there are lots of great phots from the college, DTS and previous reunions. We encourage everyone to add to the content or contact us here at the Flagship for ideas on content.
Yours aye,
Keith, Kev, Simon, TC and Wiggy
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Reunion Update 2/24
E Mail dated 08 Aug 24
Thank you to everyone who responded to our Reunion Update 01/24 of 13 June regarding options for 2025.
The people have spoken! And the upshot is that the BRNC 85ers Reunion 2025 will take place in the Wardroom HMS EXCELLENT on 20 September 2025. The Reunion event will again be spread out over the weekend 19-21 September to make the most of the opportunities available.
Many expressed disappointment that our established routine at BRNC was no longer possible in the format we preferred. We have written to the Britannia Association to explain why we will not be there next year and we do hope that it will be possible to return to the College in the future.
The programme for 2025 is shaping up. We have some ideas for an RPC on the Friday evening followed by the usual buffet style of informal event thereafter.
The Saturday will be given over to exploring the maritime history of Portsmouth, for those that wish, and we will be contacting various visitor attractions on your behalf to enquire about group bookings, discounts(!) and guided tours. There is much to see and for those non-Pompey natives, it includes the award-winning Historic Dockyard, HMS ALLIANCE - Submarine Museum, Naval Firepower Museum, Mary Rose, HMS WARRIOR, D Day Experience, etc. There is much more to do in Pompey these days when compared to the culture vacuum of the mid nineteen eighties! However, regrettably for some of us, there will be no visits to the RN School of Dancing as Joanna’s Night Club closed some years ago.
Sailing will also be back on the agenda, and we will see what options there are through our established contacts and possibly the Joint Services Sailing Centre at Gosport.
There were several requests to include partners next year. We have taken the decision to maintain the “stag” approach for the formal mess dinner, purely a numbers consideration as much as anything. HMS EXCELLENT has a limit which we very much hope to get close to. We aim to make 2025, our 40th anniversary, to be the best attended event yet. We are looking into the logistics of possibly including partners for the Friday evenings activities but again numbers will be the limiting factor. Keep a good all round lookout for further updates.
The BRNC 85 Website will be updated shortly with this new information and updates will be posted via the Midshipman’s Blog Pages as usual.
Our efforts to re-establish contact with fellow 85ers continues, of the 170 or so contacts we have on the data base, around 25% of our emails are not registering as being read. We know from our planning software who has read each update. Again, it is worth each of us making sure our shipmates are in the loop and receiving these updates. Please mention our changed venue and the date to any 85ers in your social circles and let us know if there are any updates. We will continue to track people down too and work from the college lists we have. A reminder too that these lists can be downloaded from the website if you fancy a bit of detective work to get in touch with those from you may not have seen for 39 years!
Finally, your generous donations to the Royal British Legion in memory of our shipmate, Vice Admiral Sir Clive Johnstone raised £900 directly, and we know some folk also made personal donations too, thanks very much for your amazing generosity. This has been passed on to the RBL and we will publish a letter of thanks from Mark Atkinson, Director General, on the BRNC website in due course.
Carry On!
17 June 2024
2025 Reunion Planning - Update 1/24
Ahoy,
The Reunion Committee met recently to consider our options for 2025. In the wash up to our delayed 2022 reunion, we had previously allocated the weekend of the 20/21 September 2025 for our 40th celebration and published that on our website. You may have noticed that the website has now been updated to a new version and with those changes the countdown clock has disappeared. The new version has created a few challenges too in terms of our communications. Hopefully we are now back on track.
In terms of planning our next event, those of you who are members of the Britannia Association (BA) may have spotted that the outgoing Captain of the College, Sarah Oakley, introduced a new format for reunions in January this year.
It involves allocating only one weekend per term for reunion events, limiting them to significant anniversaries, 25, 40, 50 etc and providing a pre-arranged package of events for a set price, currently £85 per head. The package looks remarkably similar to our reunions of old. This means that holding an event for a single year’s entry will no longer be possible. If we were to return to the College next year, we would be sharing our event with two (as far as we know at present) other groups, a 50th and 60th anniversary reunion. We have double checked, and despite having agreed a date for 2025 with the college in 2022, we have been told we would need to move that to the new pre-arranged date along with the other groups, 13/14 September 2025.
The Committee were somewhat disappointed that our arrangements have been changed, and given the size of our group, we discussed other options. Our opinions are that we would not wish to participate in a more general reunion and it would spoil the dynamic of our group where our common bond is the experiences we all gained at BRNC and on DTS in 1985-1986. However, others may have a different view.
We pondered other options and decided to put these forwards for your consideration, there may be other ideas which we would welcome, but having now done three similar events at BRNC, perhaps it is now time to move on anyway?
These are our thoughts so far.
Option One – We continue to hold a weekend event in Dartmouth. We hold a mess dinner in one of the hotels, either the Dart Marina or the Royal Castle on the Saturday night. We would probably not be able to access the College at all as organised groups, but individual members of the BA may be allowed access. The advantages being we can enjoy our old haunts and familiar activities, the disadvantages being it is not at BRNC!
Option Two – We look to hold our mess dinner at another RN wardroom, the suggestion being somewhere in Pompey. There is a plethora of naval activities that we could organise, including group trips to the National Museum of the Royal Navy, the Mary Rose, HMS ALLIANCE and the submarine museum at Gosport, HMS VICTORY and others. Again, the haunts of Old Pompey will be familiar to many, and sailing, and other water activities are possible. The event would maintain the full weekend theme and most of us will be concentrated around one location. Our suggestion would be HMS EXCELLENT.
Option Three – We scrub the weekend style event and instead hold a reunion mess dinner on a Saturday night in London. The central location may suit some people and we can look at a suitable military/naval setting for the event. We briefly considered the Painted Hall at Greenwich, but the price is prohibitive. The disadvantage for any London centric event is that people will be scattered across the city, and it would be more difficult to replicate the sense of camaraderie and occasion that we have managed at previous reunions.
Option Four – As you were. We stick with the offer from the BA and BRNC and opt in to the broader Reunion Weekend Package alongside alumni from other years/terms.
Of those options, and after long discussions, the Committee’s preference would be to hold a weekend event in Pompey. We all felt it best maintained the successful theme of previous events, had most to offer in terms of activities and provides a change to the format that we have been familiar with since 2010. However, we wanted to canvas broader opinion too, and there may be other formats that are worth considering. To that end, please respond to this email with your thoughts. We cannot promise democracy, but we can promise the illusion of democracy!
It would be helpful too if you can reply to the email even if you have no preferences, as, mentioned earlier, the BRNC 85 reunion website has been recently rebuilt by the provider. We have lost some of the previous saved correspondence and the format of our contact database has changed. We need to ensure we have the correct email address for all the 170 or so people we try to maintain contact with. Mention this email to your oppos, if they look bemused, they may be one of those we are struggling to reconnect with.
A final reminder that the BRNC 85 website remains live and retains all the old content, updates from many of us about what we have been doing in the past 39 years, photos from earlier events and from back at our time at Dartmouth. Please add to the content where you can or contact the Committee with suggestions to improve what we have. The number of people visiting the site increases dramatically in the run up to a reunion. Our email address remains active too, and if you have any questions, drop us a line.
Looking forward to it already!
Yours aye,
Kev, Keith, Simon, Tony and Wiggy.
24 May 2024
Vice Admiral Sir Clive CC Johnstone KBE CB - A tribute.
Like all who knew him, the Reunion Committee were shocked and deeply saddened to hear the news of Vice Admiral Sir Clive Johnstone’s sudden passing on the 12 May 2024.
Clive was able to attend day one of the 2022 Reunion and was great company as always. He was enthusiastic about catching up with his old shipmates and spinning dits going all the way back to Blake Division in September 1985 and from his stellar career thereafter.
Those in our group who were closest to Clive will want to remember him in their own personal way, but many of us may also want to make some contribution to the organisation that Clive led as National President for a year before his sudden passing, the Royal British Legion. Camaraderie is a huge part of their remit and Clive recognised those same bonds forged during our time in the RN are maintained within our own group of BRNC 85ers. When we all get together, it’s always great fun and the intervening years just seem to fall away.
If you would like to donate to RBL in Clive’s memory, then we will co-ordinate a collection and in due course, once the dust settles, pass whatever we have on to RBL with a suitable tribute from those who knew him best. Hopefully they will include it in whatever they plan to do themselves to remember Clive.
We have sent out an email to all contacts with details of how to contribute - although with the new website set up, we have struggled a bit with some of the contact data transferring across. If you have not had an email from us this week, get in touch and we will update your details.
Yours aye,
Kev, Keith, Simon, TC and Wiggy
Dear Shipmates,
We are all no doubt saddened by the death of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth and our Commander-in-Chief for the whole of our naval careers.
We have been in contact with the College and, despite the fact that they are closed to all visitors until Monday 26th they have given us the opportunity to either postpone the reunion, or go ahead with a somewhat more sombre tone. Your committee are unanimous in our perspective that Her Majesty would be one for carrying on, therefore the reunion events are planned to go ahead.
In order to mark Her Majesty's extraordinary service to our country we intend that the Dinner be a focus not only for reconnecting with old oppos, but also reflecting on Her Majesty's life and the themes of Duty, Commitment and Steadfastness.
The timings will be as per the Longcast, however we propose that at the start of the meal we observe a minute's silence and toast Her Majesty. The dinner will then commence as normal and we will drink a loyal toast to His Majesty King Charles III in the traditional manner, along with absent friends and then ourselves! After the speeches there will be an opportunity for you to share any reminiscences of Her Majesty with the gathered throng. In order to be sensitive to those still serving we will be clear of the College by 2359.
There are still a small number of you who have not yet paid your deposit and therefore remain TBC. We have to confirm numbers by 1200 Monday 12 and pay for dinner by 1600 13 Sep in order for the event to proceed. Therefore, all attendees need to be paid up fully by 1200 13 Sep. Please pay your balance to Wiggy by then.
The bank details have been included in previous emails.
Right - Pin your ears back, Switch on, Clutch In. You need to take action:
In order for the administration of the weekend to go smoothly, and more importantly for you to gain access to the college you are required to provide the following information for each of the events inside the college that you are attending:
Title/Rank. Name. If entering the grounds in own/oppo's car - details (Reg, make, model, colour). Whether intending to walk into the college. Whether intending to arrive by taxi.
Therefore, if you are attending the College Tour, Dinner and Church you need to provide the details for each. We will need this confirmation by 1200 on Monday 12th as well.
We hope that you will all be able to attend as planned and look forward to catching up over what will be a slightly different Reunion weekend to what we had planned.
Yours aye,
The Flagship