BBC shows Jock & Maggie Dempster at Poppy Messsage launch

The BBC website, in a short piece on the launch of an imaginative Remembrance Day initiative at Edinburgh’s Omni Centre in Greenside Row, focused on a photograph of a two unidentified guests at the event, looking at the displays.

On the displays are messages, attached to Poppies, sent from all over the world to veterans of World War II and the Falklands War. These can be added to until and including 11th November.

For Argyll’s hawk eye recognised the uniformed gentleman as Jock Dempster, sent a quick email and had it confirmed that the couple in the shot are Jock and Maggie Dempster.

Jock is the author of a piece we recently published: Jock Dempster: hell and healing – two voyages to Murmansk. In fact, his wife Maggie was the photographer who took the two stunning shots we used of the unforgettable sculpture that is the Russian memorial in Murmansk to the Great Patriotic War.

He served on the Arctic Convoys, was one of the founders of the Scottish branch of the Russian Convoy Club, was in the RAF, and recently gave an address in Russian at Murmansk, on behalf of the convoy veterans, to a special reception of dignitaries from the Government of Murmansk and the Northern Region and from the Russian Navy’s Northern Fleet. (This is the story of an amazing event made possible by documentary film maker, Des Cox – and which we have also reported: Voyage to Murmansk: Convoy of Memories.)