UK branches > Taunton and District

Activities

• Monthly lectures
• Debating and Public Speaking
• Educational Grants

Local news

15th April: Sir Robert Corbett’s personal recollections of the Fall of the Berlin Wall were hugely enjoyed by members, a number of whom had been there at the time. The talk fitted well with the Branch’s predilection for speakers who have first-hand knowledge of their subjects.

20th May: Tom Burr maintained that theme with his illustrated account of his employment by the National Trust over 39 years, during which he played an active part in turning it from a landowners’ club into a national institution with 3.5million members.

June: Following a well-attended AGM, the Branch’s year ended with a masterly survey of the life and career of Siegfried Sassoon, given by Dennis Silk, CBE, former Warden of Radley College and President of the MCC. Matching pictures and poems to his narrative, he took members through Sassoon’s pilgrimage from the favoured and cosseted son of an idyllic rural Kentish upbringing to the searing experience of the trenches on the Western Front that turned him into one of the greatest of the War Poets, with a power to move through an economy of words that was as telling for members on that evening as it must have been when his work was first published. But this was not simply an impressive academic study, as through cricket and the proximity of Heytesbury, Sassoon’s home, to Marlborough College, where Denis Silk taught, the two became firm friends, thus bringing members into direct and privileged contact with Sassoon himself for a memorable evening.

The Programme for 2010/11 will be publishes as soon as it is to hand

The Branch organises lecture meetings on the third Thursday in every month except, August, September and December including luncheon or supper for those who wish to stay.

In addition the Branch organises a District Public Speaking Competition and the Regional Competition.

Speke on Speke

Alexander Maitland, the biographer of John Hanning Speke, was unable to come and so the Branch had the privilege of hearing a fascinating account of the amazing exploits of the explorer from Peter Speke, his great, great nephew, who stood in at short notice. He focused on the competing claims of the three explorers, Speke, Burton and Baker, each of whom was convinced that his Source was the right one, as he described the fortitude with which they set off into dangerous unmapped territory in search of the Victorian geographical holy grail. Although members were saddened by John Speke’s death at the age of 37 in a shooting accident on the eve of a projected RGS debate in Bath on the disputed claims, they were heartened that their speaker’s forbear was right in his identification of Lake Victoria. The whole session was enlivened by Peter Speke’s personal touch and wonderfully rounded off when he described how on a private visit to Uganda in 1967, the lone guard at a remote frontier post immediately recognised his name and saluting him said, ‘May you see what he saw.’

Public Speaking Competition

Park School, Yeovil swept the board in the Branch Public Speaking Competition held in Queen’s College, Taunton and the team consisting of Thomas Sankey, Adam Coppard and Aaron Newbury go on to the Regional Round in Exeter. Thomas Sankey won the Keith Knott memorial Salver as the best speaker, with Aaron Newbury as the best questioner. Tamsin Eddy, also from the Park School, took the chairman’s prize.

Events

Programme 2009-10

Download Taunton Branch programme for 2009-10