Ian Gardiner will be delivering the Saturday lecture on The Battle of the River Plate, 1939.

In the first few months of the Second World War, the German ‘pocket battleship’ the Graf Spee sank ten British merchant ships and was a major threat to British communications in the South Atlantic and South Indian Oceans. This is the story of how she was found and brought to battle by three British cruisers, and how she met her dramatic end in the estuary of the River Plate in December 1939