Nine new speakers have signed up from the beginning of 2012, the topic areas include, travel, culture, literature, writing, nostalgia, health, history, disaster relief, and humour from a legal point of view.  The new speakers are flagged with a “new” graphic to make selection easier.

Yesterday I did a very successful talk on Parlington Hall to Garforth Probus Group, it was the first outing of my newly crafted version, which included some unique nineteenth century photographs of the old place along with some more recent, as the hall was in a state of serious decay. I will be doing this same talk to Wetherby Wives Ladies Group in early May, so hopefully it will be similarly well received as yesterday’s talk.

I have introduced a new talk on Parlington and the military, which includes details of the war in Sudan in 1885 in which Colonel Frederick Richard Trench-Gascoigne, “Dick” to his friends, was a member of the party attempting to rescue General Gordon in Kartoum!

Also information of the army at Parlington during World War Two

Link here: Military Talks Section Select Military from the option menu on the page.

To keep abreast of changing circumstances and by popular request, the site is being re-designed to allow business oriented speakers to add their details in a bespoke section, targeted at Yorkshire Business, as a ‘B2B’ resource. So if you have a message to get out to Business in Yorkshire and the neighbouring areas, please add your details. To add an entry to the new section please vist: Add your entry here.

Work is underway to produce the 2009-10 printed version of the Yorkshire Speakers Directory series. The publisher Chris Helme, has recently sent out an application form to all listed speakers, if you have not received one and would like to be listed in the print versions, then please contact us.

The price for an entry is £5.00 for the first directory (1 of 3) and £2.50 for each thereafter. So if you wanted an entry in the North, South and West Yorkshire publications, the cost would be £10.00. To purchase a copy of each book is £7.99, less 25% for speakers listed in the respective volume. 

The books are used extensively by Speaker Finders and enable people who are less confident with the Internet to contact a prospective talk giver.

You can now add a picture to your profile on the directory site, this should be a photo file 60×60 pixels at 72dpi like this one:

Mugshot

Simply send me a picture and I will do the rest!

Yorkshire Speakers features a Bookshop, which is designed for low volume publications, the sort of thing that historical societies produce. It is no competitor to Amazon! but I thought it would be useful for speakers as another route to the public. For those who are new to publishing it is now extremely easy to self publish through websites like http://www.lulu.com

If you are a speaker finder and you have had a recent talk which you feel others may benefit from, you could post your recommendations here. Your insight could be very productive to other “Finders” and indeed help “Speakers” to be the focus of attention.

The idea for this “Blog/Forum” was suggested by Tony Morris a recent recruit to the Yorkshire Speakers Directory website. He said…”I wonder if you could add a forum to the Yorkshire Speakers Directory site so people could discuss the issues we’ve been writing about and share their experiences.”

The issues were all the usual suspects, no need to mention them here, what would be better is if other users started to set out their own views and then we can see if this site can be of real benefit?

To improve the service offered by the Yorkshire Speakers Directory I have set up a “Blog” to allow people to communicate and offer comments and advice!