Monthly Archives: October 2018

The Wars of the Roses – a Tale of Two Halves

On the 17th of October the Forum welcomed Gillian Waters who entertained members with a talk titled The Wars of the Roses (a Tale of Two Halves). Gillian teaches at York University and has also worked at the Leeds Armouries.

The first point she made was that the War of the Roses was nothing to do with the rivalry between the counties of Lancashire and Yorkshire but was caused by the competition between two dynasties for power. These dynasties were headed by two sons of King Edward III, the Dukes of Lancaster and York. The war started in 1455 with the Battle of St. Albans and finished in 1485 but in these 30 years there were only 428 days of campaigning and many parts of the country were not touched by the civil war. Gillian described how battles were fought in medieval times, each side employing the same (English) tactics resulting in stalemate, illustrating her talk with pictures of medieval warfare.

Eventually the two sides met at Towton where occurred the bloodiest battle to ever take place on British soil, it being one of the only two British battles to last more than four hours.

Richard III (a Yorkist) took the throne in 1483 and Gillian mentioned the famous case of the Princes in the Tower whose murder, she believes, was not caused by Richard but by Margaret of York who had ambitions for her son Henry Tudor who eventually invaded Wales and defeated (and killed) Richard at Bosworth Field bringing the War of the Roses to a close.

Mike Earle proposed a vote of thanks for an excellent talk.

In Grandmother’s Footsteps

On the 10th of October the Forum welcomed its guest speaker Alan Hemsworth who had travelled from Settle.  Alan entertained the members with a talk about the Yorkshire dialect which he titled In Grandmother’s Footsteps.

He was brought up in Pudsey and, as a boy, was a regular visitor to his grandmother’s house which was a typical terrace house – two up and two down with an outside “privy”.

From his grandmother he learnt a great number of Yorkshire words and phrases which he passed on to the Forum members and explained the source of the words from the original Anglo-Saxon and compared them with words in modern German and Danish.

Although England abounds with local accents actual dialects are dying out, only being of interest to academics.   Alan has accumulated many poems written in the Yorkshire dialect and he finished his talk with a selection delivered in true Yorkshire.

Chairman Mike Earle thanked Alan Hemsworth for a most entertaining talk.

Forum Deputy Chairman Duncan Verity has arranged an evening event for Sunday the 14th of October in the form of a buffet meal and film show for Forum members and their guests.  This takes place at Wetherby Golf Club when the film featured is The Glen Miller Story.

 

Keeley Donovan

The Forum’s Speaker Finder John Spinner was a school teacher in Grimsby during his working life.  At the meeting on the 3rd of October he introduced one of his former pupils, Keeley Donovan, the BBC Look North television presenter.  Keeley began her television career at the age of 14 at a local channel in Grimsby and her presentation gave the Forum a light-hearted insight into her career so far.  She began her BBC career as a local reporter operating around Hull before being transferred to Leeds.

The BBC had begun a policy of presenting weather forecasts using reporters rather than meteorologists and Keeley was appointed in this role.  Since then she has expanded her career into general reporting and has appeared in national programmes such as Breaking Britain and Countryfile Diary. 

She illustrated her talk with short video clips taken from some of her appearances.  Currently Keeley is presenting Inside Out, a current affairs programme dealing with local issues, and she revealed to the Forum some of its coming items. 

A lively question and answer session followed which unfortunately had to be cut short so Keeley could keep a filming appointment in Sheffield. 

Forum Chairman Mike Earle thanked Keeley for an entertaining talk. Her speaker’s fee will be donated to the Yorkshire Air Ambulance.