Good evening, and thank you all for being here — in this room, and online. My name is Miles, and I am the Acting Chair of the London Branch of the English-Speaking Union. And with the good grace of people in this room, I may soon be able to drop the word ‘Acting’.

I want to begin somewhere that might seem unusual for an AGM. Not with the year just gone, or the year ahead — we’ll get to both — but with a single paragraph written into our Royal Charter. It is the statement of our aims, and it goes like this:

The aims and objects of the Union shall be to promote the mutual advancement of education of the English-speaking peoples of the world, in particular respecting their heritage, traditions and aspirations, the events and issues of the day affecting them, their interrelationships and the use of English as a shared language and means of international communication of knowledge and understanding: provided always that the foregoing aims and objects shall at all times be pursued in a nonpolitical and non-sectarian manner.

I’d ask you to sit with just how extraordinary that sentence is. Because here is what I keep coming back to: that paragraph is radical. And it is 108 years old.

There is something faintly absurd about standing here in 2026 and calling a century-old idea radical. We tend to assume radicalism has a sell-by date — that yesterday’s daring becomes today’s furniture. But Evelyn Wrench’s idea has not aged into furniture. It has aged into something we must still build.

I often think about what Wrench had lived through when he founded this organisation – in the aftermath of the First World War — a war that killed a generation, conducted by governments, between peoples who, by and large, didn’t really hate one another. And the lesson he drew was not a comfortable one. It was this, and I quote, “international relations are too important to be left to governments alone”. That peace is not only signed at conference tables; it is built between people — through interrelationship, through curiosity, through the patient, unglamorous habit of trying to understand someone who is not you.

That is the radical core of this charity. Not the English language as a possession to be guarded, but as a conduit — a way through to one another. Not advancement of some, but the mutual advancement of all. A vision grounded in civility, in tolerance, in the genuinely difficult discipline of taking another person seriously.

And to understand quite how radical our founding vision is, let me take you a few hundred yards up the road.

I did my undergraduate degree at UCL — a stone’s throw from where we sit tonight. And in the very decade Wrench was building this charity on the idea that all peoples were worthy of mutual understanding, UCL housed the country’s first Chair of Eugenics — endowed by Francis Galton, the man who coined the word ‘Eugenics’. A dominant ‘respectable’ science of the day, Eugenics was devoted to the proposition that some peoples were emphatically not equal, and could be ranked, sorted, and ‘improved’ into non-existence.

UCL finally took Galton’s name off the lecture theatre in 2020. They replaced it with… “Lecture Theatre 1.15.”

I say all this because, against the intellectual fashion of his moment, Wrench’s inclusive vision was not the safe option. It was the brave one. And the values that made it brave then — civility, curiosity, the basic willingness to grant that the person you disagree with is still worth listening to — are not less embattled now. They are arguably more so.

In 2021 Mary McAleese, the former President of Ireland, delivered the Wrench Lecture next door in the Churchill Room, and she said something I have never been able to shake:

If you’re not uncomfortable, you’re not listening properly.

That is the whole thing, isn’t it. That is Wrench’s charter rendered into a single sentence. Mutual understanding is not agreement. It is not comfort. It is the willingness to sit in discomfort long enough to actually hear someone — and that is hard, and it is rare, and it is exactly the discipline this charity exists to teach.

So — what does any of this have to do with an AGM of the London Branch, the largest membership branch of the ESU in England and Wales? Everything. Because when you look at how this charity has done some of its best work — through our competitions — it started with members, in branches, who simply believed in Evelyn Wrench’s founding vision and decided to do something about it.

Our flagship Public Speaking Competition began in 1960 — spearheaded by the Brighton & Hove branch. From that grassroots beginning it grew into the largest public speaking competition for young people in England and Wales, and ultimately into the International Public Speaking Competition — which the ESU now runs as the largest of its kind in the world, bringing together young speakers from more than fifty countries.

The Schools’ Mace Competition was born in the imagination of a single ESU London member — the journalist Kenneth Harris of The Observer newspaper. In 1947 the ESU sponsored Harris on a university debating tour across the United States; that trip changed how he understood the power of speech for young people; and ten years later he created the Observer Schools’ Mace. The ESU was in its genetic code from day one — so when The Observer stepped away from sponsoring it in 1995, the Mace simply came home.

The Performing Shakespeare Competition? Started by the London Branch in 2012 working with the then Director-General Peter Kyle.

The four pillars, then, of our educational work today did not just appear. They bubbled up from below — from members who took Wrench’s vision for a better world seriously and acted on it. The branch structure is not some charming quirk of history. It is the engine room. It is where Wrench’s vision is lived and built today.

So when anyone wonders aloud what members are for, history answers plainly. Members are not how the ESU just happens to deliver its mission. Membership, lived fully, is the mission in action. And tonight, with a new committee about to be elected, with members carrying out the role members have always played, we are not going through the motions, trudging along some antiquated path. We are being radical.

Which is the right moment to talk about the year just been — because it has been quite a year.

This year the Branch funded a Discover Your Voice workshop at Moreland Primary School. Barbara Firth, a Branch committee member and Vice-President of the Charity, attended and told the committee it was beautifully run and warmly received. A second school is in the pipeline.

Our members continued to judge the ESU’s competitions — the Public Speaking Competition, the Schools’ Mace, Performing Shakespeare — giving their time so that thousands of young people across London can take part.

And while I won’t dwell on the detail, many of you know that much of this branch’s energy this year was absorbed by questions of the future of Dartmouth House, membership and governance: by the Extraordinary General Meeting initiated by this Branch and called for by 107 members. It was demanding. It asked a great deal of a great many people, and whatever one’s view of any particular question, I think it proved something rather encouraging — that this is a Charity whose members care, deeply, about the institution they belong to, and are willing to turn up for it.

None of it would have been possible without the committee, and I want to thank every one of them. But let me single out four.

Ann Armstrong and Jane Reid have given this branch decades of dedicated service — between them, over half a century. Ann has served as both Chair and Treasurer of this Branch, and her warm humour, sharp eye for detail and kind encouragement have made every new member’s first experience of the London Branch a happy one.

Jane has also served as Branch Chair, and has been a long-standing Events Officer. I am forever indebted to her encyclopaedic knowledge of the events this Charity has put on over the years — many of which she organised herself. And I know they were a success, because people still talk about them to this day.

I am delighted that both Ann and Jane will continue with us in an Emeritus capacity — because, frankly, we would be much the poorer without them.

Barbara Firth steps down from the committee this year, having first joined the Charity as a trustee in 2018. I am thrilled she will remain as Chair of the International Committee — though I suspect a few of us will be trying to catch her eye this evening, as she has recently ascended to the title of Lady Mayoress of Malmesbury. I also owe Barbara my ESU international debut: in 2022 we travelled together to Karachi for the ESU International Council Meeting, where, after leaving a dinner, I found myself swept into an evening parade and obliged to dance in front of several hundred people in the street. Barbara — being the kind and thoughtful soul she is — filmed the whole thing and posted it in the international ESU WhatsApp group. I have not heard the end of it since.

And finally, David Baker — our Chair, who this year had to step back to undergo medical treatment. David, I think I speak for the whole room when I say how glad we are to see you well, and how glad we are that you are standing again for the committee. We have been each other’s strength this past year, and I am very glad to have your support in the year ahead.

To the whole outgoing committee: thank you. You held things together in a year that asked more of you than most.

And my thanks, too, to the Director-General and the staff team at Dartmouth House — and particularly to Harry Hodges, who joins us tonight. Ours is an ambitious charity, and ambition is rarely simple to deliver. I’m grateful to those who do the patient, day-to-day work of turning it into reality.

Now, for the year ahead, I’ll keep these as headlines. They were drawn up and agreed with the outgoing committee, but I want the incoming committee to take them, challenge them, and sharpen them. If there’s one thing this charity should believe in, it’s that the best ideas survive being argued with. We are, after all, in the listening business.

First, the London Branch is to develop a targeted fundraising project, provisionally titled: Levelling the Playing Field. And this is because there’s an uncomfortable truth in our Public Speaking competition: independent schools arrive with debating societies, oracy lessons and speech coaches; many state schools arrive with none of that. They enter, they lose in the first round, and some don’t come back. One state-school headteacher told me it was “leading lambs to the slaughter.” That is not what this competition is for. So this year the Branch will start to develop a fundraising project for a pilot that goes into two London state schools and trains the teachers for a whole academic year — because one well-supported teacher shapes far more young speakers, over a career than any one-off workshop ever could. It’s a real equity gap inside our own flagship competition, and we look forward to working closely with the brilliant ESU Education Team on this, who have already done so much to increase participation among state schools and have built out some wonderful CPD programmes for teachers.

Second, we want to do two flagship events at Dartmouth House before it closes at the end of the year. Substantive, rooted in oracy and debate, a magnet for new volunteers, with any surplus going back into the Branch’s charitable work.

Third — membership itself. The ESU is, at heart, a charitable membership organisation — its mission carried not only by competitions, but by the people who champion, attend, fund and spread the work. This year we’ll use the Branch’s advisory capacity to develop real, concrete ideas for membership growth and renewal.

Before I close, a word on the building itself. As Miles Young has shared with members, the extraordinary generosity of an anonymous donor means Dartmouth House will close at the end of this year for a major refurbishment — and reopen as a true home for debate and oracy. That is a remarkable thing for Miles Young, the Board and ESU staff to have secured, and the possibilities it opens for this charity are thrilling.

Let me close where I began.

A hundred and eight years ago, a man who had watched the world tear itself apart staked everything on a stubborn, hopeful, faintly outrageous idea: that ordinary people, talking and listening to one another across every line that’s meant to divide them, could do what governments alone could not.

It was radical then. It is radical now. And the remarkable thing — the thing I hope every member leaves here tonight believing — is that we don’t just administer that idea. The Charter recognised a body of members who were already living it; we are the continuation of that body. We are its custodians, and on our best days, its authors. Brighton & Hove proved it. Kenneth Harris proved it. This branch, with Shakespeare, proved it in 2012.

Now it’s our turn.

Thank you.