Lee Brockhurst Women's Institute (WI) were in for a huge surprise, when they found that a high-ranking former Royal Navy officer would be giving a talk called "The Biscuit Club".

Victoria Graham was a Lieutenant Commander in the Queens Alexandra's Royal Naval Nursing Service who gave a presentation about her six-month tour as nurse at the British Army's main base in Afghanistan, Camp Bastion.

Lt Cdr Graham spoke about the camp conditions and local area and mentioned both the unbearable heat and the way they could defend themselves from Taliban attacks and about treating injured British military personnel and Afghan civilians.

Cups of tea and biscuits were used to deal with the stress of the job and they sampled 50 different type of biscuits sent by friends and family while on tour.

A spokeswoman for Lee Brockhurst WI said: "They devised a wall chart scoring the different biscuit varieties, and a clear winner was a chocolate and sultana cookie from M&S.

"Victoria then wrote to the chief executive officer of M&S telling him of their biscuit chart and M&S sultana cookies being the team’s favourite.

"He was delighted to know that M&S biscuits were doing their bit to help keep morale high and responded by sending them parcels of all the different M&S biscuits including of course the team’s chosen favourite.

"What was even better, at the end of her talk Victoria had bought several packets of her favourite biscuit with her, which we raffled off among our members."

Other issues discussed included the annual skittles match in March between six of the local