Former Inverness Courier and STV journalist Mike Edwards dedicates the OBE he was awarded in the Queen’s platinum jubilee birthday honours list to two fallen British Army regimental friends
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A former Inverness Courier journalist has dedicated the OBE he was awarded last week to two friends killed in action in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Author, army reserve officer and retired reporter Mike Edwards received the award in the Queen’s platinum jubilee birthday honours list for his public and charitable service in Scotland.
Mr Edwards, originally from Inverness, was a newspaper, radio and television journalist for 40 years and became the nightly face of STV news for more than a quarter of a century.
Now living in Rhu, near Helensburgh, he was taken aback to be honoured.
“I was deeply humbled to be awarded the OBE,” he said.
“Since I retired from journalism, I have been a trustee of military veterans’ charities and I want to dedicate my OBE to my pals John McDermid and Russell Beeston, who served in the same regiment as I did and were killed in action.”
Mr Edwards is a Major in the Army Reserve and, in nearly 30 years of service as an infantry officer, he was mobilised for operational tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.
When he retired from STV, he became a full-time carer for his mother Margaret, a former nurse and tutor at Raigmore who was living with dementia.
After she died in 2019, he devoted himself to charity work.
He sits as a trustee of the Erskine veterans charity, the Royal Highland Fusiliers trust, the Highlanders Regimental Museum at Fort George, the Loch Lomond Rescue Boat and the Glasgow Humane Society.
He is also a caseworker for the armed forces charity SSAFA. In 2020, he was appointed a Deputy Lieutenant of Dunbartonshire.
The sorrow of losing his close companions during conflict has never left the former Inverness High School pupil, Napier College and Open University graduate.
“Russell was from Glencoe, and he and I were both reservists. I remember him well as a keen young man who wanted to do his bit. He was killed in Iraq aged just 26 in August 2003,” Mr Edwards said.
“John was 43 and an exceptional soldier when he was killed in Afghanistan in 2007. I attended his funeral at the cathedral in Inverness and he was buried in Kilvean.
“It was my privilege to know them both.
“Soldiers don’t have a choice where they are sent. I think there is a human side to our armed forces which often gets forgotten, and these men and women give so much.
“I was lucky - I came home. My two friends didn’t even become veterans. The least I can do is dedicate my OBE to them.”
Mr Edwards was on holiday in Switzerland last month and nearly didn’t receive the award at all.
A message to check his emails urgently seemed like a possible scam or wind-up by one of his pals.
Empty on date, he eventually managed to obtain a Swiss sim card and, to his great shock, the Cabinet Office’s email dropped saying he had been awarded an OBE.
When he then called as requested, he was told that, had he called an hour later, he would have been off the list.
Mr Edwards’ novel ‘Friendly Fire’ was published in 2006. A volume of autobiography in 2018, ‘The Road Home,’ also charted a coast to coast road trip across the USA via five towns named Inverness.
