Sutton Coldfield Speakers’ Club hit the ground running in January with two meetings, a competition against Lichfield Speakers’ Club and an evening judging Youth Speaks.
People join Speakers’ Club for many reasons but often it’s to gain skills for work presentations. Claire Worsfold-Morris used her slot on our program at the beginning of January to tell us about ‘The Alcohol Wholesaler Registration Scheme’ and gained some useful feedback in advance of giving the talk at work.
Mid-month the inaugural competition between Lichfield and Sutton Coldfield took place at the Holiday Inn, Shenstone. Each club put forward two speakers and, despite the competitive edge, it was a warm and friendly evening. The Sutton speakers were Sally Jenkins, who told the audience how to make money out of murder and Bob Green who compared the recipe for bread pudding to that for life and provided samples of the pudding for tasting. Sally was declared the winner of the contest and Giles Blackburn from Lichfield was a close second after speaking, without notes, on how to inject more energy into our lives.
At our second January club meeting we had confident maiden speeches from Tom Hughes and Roger Scrannage. Both were working on the first module in our Speakers’ Guide manual, ‘Making a Start’.
We finished the month by providing judges for the annual Youth Speaks competition, organised by the Rotary Club of Wylde Green. Five teams from local secondary schools took part at Senior and Intermediate level. The winner of the senior competition was Highclare, who put together a dramatic presentation entitled ‘Is the supernatural just another superstition?’ The intermediate competition was won by Bishop Vesey’s Grammar School with a challenging presentation entitled ‘The Olympics’ which questioned the value of being an Olympic host nation. All the talks were of a high standard and provided a hugely entertaining evening for the audience.
