King Alfred Probus Club Winchester
Website Under Re-development
A Warm Welcome To Our Website
King Alfred Probus Club (KAPC) is open to ladies and gentlemen, in Winchester and the surrounding areas, who have fully or partially retired.
The Club was founded in 1988 and aims to encourage friendship and promote fellowship, by having regular meetings, along with occasional social activities and visits. We are principally a luncheon club where members can meet to exchange views and interests and enjoy a good meal.
Lunch meetings are held on the third Wednesday of each month. Our venue is at Chilcomb Down House 124 Alresford Road Winchester SO21 1HA. We meet and greet in the bar for drinks and to socialise, at 11.45 am and then assemble in the dining room for lunch followed by a Speaker. Guest speakers are invited from all walks of life and members are welcome to give talks on their own life, work, hobbies, and experiences.
We hope you will browse our site to learn more about our club. Should you wish to obtain further details, or enquire about membership, please either download the application form, or contact our Secretary via our enquiry form following which we will be able to invite you to one of our meetings.
Richard Ings
President. 2023-24
President 2023-24
Next Meeting:
17 April 2024
Steve Foster
"First Contact - Last Stand"
About Our Speaker
Steve Foster was born in Grantham in 1949. He joined the Royal Navy in 1966 as an Engine Room Artificer apprentice and went on to serve in numerous ships as a Chief Petty Officer prior to being commissioned from the lower deck as an Engineer Officer. He served as the Chief Engineer Officer in the Frigates HMS Andromeda and HMS Sheffield and the Destroyer HMS Cardiff. He was promoted to Commander in 1997. After retiring from the Royal Navy in 2003, he and his wife lived in Brittany where they restored a farmhouse and returned to the UK in 2009. Since then he has researched the story that will be told in his forthcoming talk and was published as a book in 2018.
Summary Of Talk
Exactly 84 years ago a small, hastily prepared force of British part time soldiers took on the might of the German army in the first battle of the Second World War, an operation that has now been all but forgotten.
They never stood a chance. The first British soldiers to face the might of Hitler’s Wehrmacht in the Second World War were poorly trained, poorly equipped and confused by orders that changed from day to day.
The mission was to stop the German invasion of Norway and seize its strategically important ports. But with the regular Army already committed to the battle in northern France, the generals turned to part-time territorials, sending two Midlands battalions made up of civilian clerks, cooks and tradesmen, into the snow covered frozen wastes of Scandinavia.
Armed with only First World War rifles and wearing only standard battledress, the 8th Sherwood Foresters were expected to halt the march of Hitler’s crack mountain and armoured troops.
It was a debacle which would end with the battalion destroyed; dozens killed, hundreds wounded and captured and lead to the fall of Neville Chamberlain’s government.
Yet today, overshadowed by the dramatic escape from Dunkirk, the Norway campaign is all but forgotten, the bravery and sacrifice of those soldiers relegated to a footnote in Second World War history.
“First Contact – Last Stand” will tell the story of this fateful engagement.