MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Famous Three on Falklands Cruise Chip Governor and General Among Lecturers.

The influx of cruise ship passengers to the Falkland Islands in January year includes three eminent personalities of the 1982 Conflict -- former Governor Sir Rex Hunt; the outstanding land forces commander, Major General Julian Thompson; and Margaret Thatcher's Chief Press Secretary, Sir Bernard Ingham.

With their wives, they will be aboard the liner Saga Rose as lecturers when she calls for the first time under her new name on a round-the-world cruise at the Falkland Islands (on January 27) as well as Buenos Aires (January 24), Rio de Janeiro (January 20) and Montevideo in Uruguay (January 23).

Saga Rose, modernised by the Saga Travel Organisation, is a former Cunard liner which previously called at the Falkland Islanders as the Sagafjord. Saga Rose passengers will be treated to first hand accounts by men whose actions helped shaped the momentous events of 1982.

Sir Rex Hunt CMG is an extraordinary diplomat who endeared himself to the Falkland Islanders during his eventful and at times tumultuous six years there from 1980 to 1986. He combined the dignity and authority of a Governor with an enviable ability, along with his wife, Mavis, to get on with everybody -- except invading Argentine Generals. He was often to be found quaffing a pint, playing snooker or darts with the Islanders, or lodging with them in remote and often humble dwellings, as he recounts in his book "My Falkland Days" (David and Charles).

A thirty-four- year diplomatic career took him and his wife to some of the toughest diplomatic posts in the world, among them Malaysia during the confrontation with Indonesia (where he also served), Saigon at the climax of the Vietnam War when the city fell to the North Vietnamese (delete:" and the Vietcong,) and Uganda, his first colonial post after four years' Royal Air Force service as a Spitfire pilot.

He rejoiced in one of the longest titles in the Diplomatic Service: "Governor, Commander-in-Chief and Vice Admiral of the Falkland Islands and their Dependencies and High Commissioner of the British Antarctic Territory, presiding over one of the largest, scattered British territories, with one of the smallest populations, little more than two-thousand, as well as 600-thousand sheep, several million penguins, and other prolific wildlife. Of the Islanders, he declared: "They are more British than the British and intensely patriotic. Who else knows the Second Verse of the National Anthem"?

He was told to expect "a tranquil and absorbing way of life". "Absorbing" it certainly was. "Tr