Archive for November, 2013

Club Report – Wetherby Speakers Club 7.11.13

Wednesday, November 20th, 2013

The meeting was opened by the President, Niki Boersma and after short business session, the gavel was passed to Jocelyn Brooks, the chairman for the evening.

 It was a well-attended meeting and Niki Boersma was able to do a practice presentation for 10 minutes. One of the advantages of the Speakers’ Club is the opportunity it gives to members to run through a presentation they may be giving in either a work or social situation and to receive constructive feedback. This feedback was provided by Mavis Cryer who gave a helpful and encouraging evaluation.

 For his impromptu speech, John Holian was asked to choose one title from three suggestions and had ten minutes in which to prepare the speech. John chose the topical subject Spies and he spoke with confidence and insight, qualities which were emphasised by Scott Stephenson in his following evaluation.

 The chairman asked Terry Ryan to talk to the group about a television programme he had seen which highlighted some of the greatest speeches of recent times. This prompted an interesting discussion centred on which speakers were included and which were left out.

 The topics session was chaired by Jan Millar who asked people to draw a card bearing a ‘first line’ around which they were asked to create a story. This proved humorous and highly inventive as Howard Herbert stressed in his evaluation.

 Chris Clissitt gave many useful observations when he presented a thorough general evaluation of the conduct of the whole meeting, following which the chairman finally handed the gavel back to the president who closed the proceedings.

National President’s Dinner, York

Sunday, November 10th, 2013

The ASC may no longer hold a Speaker of the Year dinner, but Lindsay Dutch more than filled the gap with a National Presdent’s dinner which boasted not one but seven speakers! And there’s more….with Yorkshire double act Terry Harrison and Chris Birch perfoming “Eee Ba Gum” and Lindsay himself , we had ten speakers, all delivering short entertaining pieces. 

Wetherby were very well represented at the dinner, with enough members present to hold a decent Speakers Club meeting! Niki Boersma was on duty as official photographer and Chris Clissitt was the final speaker of the night. He said “It was a little disconcerting to know that I would be following so many accomplished speakers, and that was certainly on my mind during preparation. But the audience were marvellous, probably the most responsive and encouraging audience I have ever faced, and delivering the speech really was a great pleasure.” 

The other speakers came from far and wide, and have held quite a number of speaking trophies between them! They were Joe James, Katherine Inglis, William Warren, Diana Douglas, Michael Ronayne and Susan Allan. 

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