South Tyneside Branch - March 2015 Meeting

[Pat Pierpoint]

The March 2015 meeting of NDFHS South Tyneside Branch will be held at 7.30 pm on Wednesday 18th March 2015 at St. Hilda's Church Visitor Centre in South Shields Market Place, and will feature a talk about the River Tyne by Freda Thompson entitled "Down by the Riverside".  Please come along - everyone is welcome.

[VAJ]

Hi, I was wondering whether it would be possible to put up a summary of this talk (or even better any handouts, slides etc) after the meeting?  One side of my research centers largely on North Shields, Tynemouth and obviously the river and I would really be interested in hearing/reading what is said  about "Down by the Riverside".  Unfortunately, I am too far away to attend the meeting.  Thanks, Victoria

[geoff]

Victoria:

     We usually do summarise the meeting, but deliberately do not give many details.  That is because (a) it would make for a very long report and (b) we want people to actually attend, not just rely on reading about it here.  A long report would need to be written by someone prepared to spend a great deal of time, both making copious notes at the meeting and in writing them up.  With the numbers attending that we get, I doubt very much that such a person could be found.  I apologise for there not having been a summary of our last meeting but that was very much an exception.  When the NDFHS was first founded there were no branches and we had just one "main meeting" each month.  At first we did publish summaries in the Journal but that proved so difficult (getting the speaker to produce notes: editing them to make them presentable, or else writing everything up from scratch) that we decided to stop.

     Although the subject of the meeting may sound as though it holds a lot of promise, you should also realise that most (though not all) of our speakers are keen amateurs but not academics, so the content of their talk is as put together by themselves and very much reflects their own approach to the subject.  Also, many - probably the majority - of speakers used to give us a "slide show with commentary".  Nowadays we should perhaps read that as "a powerpoint-based show with commentary".  That will also mean, I'm afraid, that even the speaker will not have a detailed set of notes, if any!  If there is a branch near to where you live I can only suggest you ask the branch secretary to organise the same speaker for that one.  If not, then apart from starting one, there seems little you can do.

                              Geoff Nicholson, Branch Chairman

[VAJ]

Thanks Geoff,  I do appreciate a detailed report would be a bit much and totally understand your points about numbers, amateurs, powerpoint presentations etc :-) Saying that though, I would still have been interested in seeing at least what the content was about, just in case there was anything that might have piqued my interest in terms of relevance to my general research.....background to how my family lived you might say :-)  I live in New Zealand, so am sure there isn't a branch here...though maybe I should think about starting one lol ;-)

Kind Regards
Victoria