About our speaker
Edmund Hall served in the Royal Navy in the 1980s, passing out of Britannia Royal Naval College in 1987. His brief career was cut short when he sacked for being gay, an event which led to him starting the successful legal campaign to lift the ban on gay people serving in the military.
He went on to have a career as an award-winning investigative journalist for the BBC, Channel 4 and Thames Television on subjects as diverse as the civil war in Yugoslavia, the global trade in genetically modified pigs, and his work exposed a drug-smuggling gang at Heathrow.
He has been the author of several books, including a collection of poetry about the Thames and its lifeboats, to be published in November 2025.
Ed is an accomplished yachtsman, competing in his tenth Fastnet Race in 2025, and winning a number of races and offshore series over the last 25 years. He has been a volunteer on the crew of the lifeboat at Chiswick since the station opened in 2002, where he serves as a navigator. His own yacht, Coconut, is based in Sicily, where, of course Nelson's Dukedom of Bronte is to be found.
Ed is well known for re-creating the Battle of Trafalgar with cutlery and crockery, and in the event of any planned re-animation of the heat of battle, is a surprisingly good shot with a Malteser!
