Wow, what an incredible meeting! It was a pleasure to welcome seven guests to our club meeting 1st August 2019. Members and guests were greeted with a friendly welcome from Deborah Goodman (hospitality) and the meeting commenced with more warmth and smiles from Margot Glover, our Sergeant at Arms.
Our President, Christine Morrell
Christine Morrell
Although it was the second meeting of the Toastmasters year, it was the first for our new President, Christine Morrell. Wearing the Presidential ribbon with pride, which has 27 names of the past Presidents of Bromley Speakers on it, Christine told us that she was delighted and honoured to be our President this year.
Talk to Us
Christine was happy to take on the role as President because she knew that she would have a great team of committee members supporting her. She invited the members to let the committee know what is required from them to meet their personal objectives and to ensure that the club has a successful year ahead and therefore her message to our members is… please talk to us!
The Past President, David Henson, did an amazing job last year and implemented some of his own ideas, such as ‘success stories’ and ‘what have we learned?’
Christine is carrying on in this vein and our newest member, Jamie Simpson told us how – after just three times as a guest – Bromley Speakers helped him to deliver his wedding speech recently. Congratulations Jamie, we wish you all the very best for a happy and healthy life together – with your wife and with your new Toastmasters family!
Word of the Day
Congratulations also went to the rhapsodic Richard Green who has been a member of Toastmasters for ten years this week. Richard was our grammarian for the evening, introducing our ‘word of the day’ which was Panacea. Panacea means a remedy for all ailments, a cure-all. Four people managed to shoe-horn it into the evening and Richards’s mystery prize was ….. that there was no mystery prize!
Paul Goodhill
Our Toastmaster was Paul Goodhill, who entertained us with an interesting and fun warm up and put us in touch with our inner Julie Andrews! Paul guided us through the evening as he introduced us to the speakers and members taking on the roles.
Prepared Speeches
Speech One – P.A.D by Haluk Resitoglu
We had three prepared speeches in the first half of the meeting. The first was from a visiting member of Beckenham Communicators, Haluk Resitoglu.
Haluk took us on a car journey which was both serious and humorous and shared with us his thoughts about receiving dating advice from a ten year old lad.
He went on to deliver a more serious message of how our Perception will influence our Actions and therefore our Decisions.
Speech Two – Three Letters From France by David Henson
“Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori – How sweet and fitting it is to die for your country.”
David’s speech was a powerful and emotive story, fully meeting with the speech objective which was to bring history to life. He had us all captivated by his moving story of a family whose 19 year old son William had gone to war. William wrote to his family, “This war is bloody awful. It ain’t right.”
David’s speech was delivered with the expertise of a very experienced speaker. He acted out the characters in the story with control and emotion and used props to enhance our experience.
The Grammarian, Richard Green later picked up on a phrase that David used; ‘this letter had the power to smash her already-broken heart into a thousand pieces’.
Well done to David Henson for winning the best speaker of the evening.
Speech Three – My Life by Eddie Barnes
Although Eddie has been a member of Toastmasters for almost twenty years, he was delivering his Icebreaker – which is traditionally a member’s first speech – on the new Pathways programme. Eddie’s objective was to introduce himself to the club by engaging humour and he certainly did that.
Eddie is by nature a humorous man and he delivered his speech with ease and wit. He told us that he joined Toastmasters all those years ago because someone told him that it would help him to become a better salesman. Now retired, he continues on his journey with Bromley Speakers purely because he enjoys it. He told us about his life and his travels to India and Japan.
It seems that Eddie Barnes is becoming more adventurous the older he gets as at 72 years old he is snowboarding, windsurfing and taking lessons in an autogiro aircraft! He has also recently taken up the trumpet and has learned to read music. What an inspiration Eddie is to us all!
Other News from the Evening
Every role at Bromley Speakers involves an opportunity to stand up and speak. Our Timekeeper for the evening was Simon Philbin who did a fantastic job of explaining his role and delivering his report.
The three speeches were evaluated by Robert Parker, Neil Pettigrew and Marot Glover and the award for the best evaluator went to our guest, Robert Parker. A very well done for a great evaluation.
As it was such a lovely evening, some of our members enjoyed their tea break in the garden of Ripley Arts Centre before reconvening for the Table Topics session.
Table Topics
The session was delivered by Simon Maggs and was inspired by a study, the results of which were published as “The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness”.
The worthy winner of the Table Topics impromptu speech was our newest member, Jamie.
Our ‘Ah’ counter for the evening was the lovely Shaun Brennan who reported that not one of our prepared speeches included any ‘ums’ or ‘ahs’, which is pretty good don’t you think?
David Hampton concluded the reports by delivering his evaluation of the entire meeting and stressing that ‘the most important thing in a meeting like this is enthusiasm’ and boy, did we have that in abundance last night!
Best Table Topic, Jamie Simpson.
Bromley Speakers is a non-profit organisation. We meet at Ripley Arts Centre on the 1st, 3rd and 5th Thursdays of each month. Guests are welcome to come along free of charge. Please see our website for more details or contact us @vppublicrelations@bromleyspeakers.co.uk. See you there!