Our first event of the New Year is a talk by Sheila Woolf, a well-known speaker in Coventry and Warwickshire who has about 20 illustrated talks to her name.

For us, she will be telling the story of one of her Welsh ancestors, Edward Baldwin Evans.

In the 1880s, Evans, the son of a Rhuddlan schoolmaster, found himself at the centre of international business and politics following the opening of the Suez Canal.  Recruited to military intelligence in Egypt and the Sudan, he played a key role until finally meeting a tragic fate.

His story, told through his own diary, and letters to family in Warwickshire, is now largely forgotten except for a magnificent memorial in Rhuddlan churchyard.