After a long break in the far east, where the Kings alternated between border duties in exotic sounding places like Lo Wu and Man Kam To  to name just a few, the Battalion returned once more to Northern Ireland.
This time the battalion's duties encompassed a much wider area while being based in Ebrington Barracks near the Waterside district of Londonderry. The patrol area's included Claudy, Strabane, Sion Mills, Londonderry, and the surrounding countryside. Static VCP's were manned at The Camel's Hump and the Letterkenny road as well as in all the usual urban area's. Units were rotated through the various base camps at 18 day intervals as a general rule. A main QRF force was billeted at Ebrington Barracks and tasked to support other units anywhere within the Province as well as fulfilling standard patrol and intel tasks within the City and surrounding urban locations.
On this extended tour the battalion lost Sgt. Dennis (Tom) Dooley in an RTA and Kingsman Pete Kavanagh, who died in tragic circumstances in Ebrington Barracks.
During the so called 'Cease fire' by the PIRA during the second half of the tour, units of the battalion experienced serious incidents on an almost daily basis.

The regiment returned to Belfast in 1979. Three Kingsmen died: Kingsman Shanley and Lance Corporal Rumble were killed in the same vehicle by a PIRA sniper, while Lance Corporal Webster was killed by a remote-controlled bomb.
Note: If any Kingo's out there have any further details regarding this tour, please email the admin from the link on the front page.

1980-2000

Back to Northern Ireland - 1984 On 2nd June 1984 the advance party arrived in Belfast yet again. The deployment looked like this:
 

Events were organised in 1985 to observe the tercentenary of the regiment's foundation in 1685 as the Princess Anne of Denmark's Regiment of Foot. After returning to England, to be based in Chester, the 1st Battalion paraded with its territorial 5th/8th (Volunteer) Battalion in the presence of the Queen Mother and many guests.
That same year the Regiment travelled to Kenya for an excise (Nov-Dec 85)
The Regiment was soon posted to the Falkland Islands on a six-month deployment.
On their return the Regiment was once again posted to Northern Ireland.


May-September 1987
The deployment looked like this:
 

Northern Ireland remained the British Army's largest operational commitment in the early 1990s. Violence had declined in frequency and casualties reduced in number; however, a new method of attack emerged during the regiment's second two-year posting to County Londonderry as a resident infantry battalion in 1990. The attack on 1 King's was the first in a series of vehicle-delivered "proxy bomb" attacks against multiple targets in 1990, three of which occurred on 25 October. Three men accused by the PIRA of collaborating with the security services were abducted and their families held hostage. Employed by the British Army as a civilian cook, Patrick Gillespie was instructed to drive his vehicle, laden with explosives, to a designated checkpoint on the border with County Donegal, Republic of Ireland. Approximately 1000 pounds of explosives contained within Gillespie's vehicle was detonated remotely when it reached the permanent checkpoint on Buncrana Road, near Derry, wounding many and killing Lance-Corporal Burrows and Kingsmen Beecham, Scott, Sweeney and Worrall. Structural damage to buildings in a nearby housing estate and to military infrastructure was extensive.

While based in West London, in 1992, the regiment sent two companies to the Falkland Islands for a four-month posting. Another tour-of-duty to Northern Ireland occurred in 1995. The following year, the regiment was stationed in the Sovereign Base Areas in Cyprus. Brief deployments to Northern Ireland followed in 1998 and 1999.

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