Directory of Previous Talks

Lavinia Jones, who graduated in Fine Art at Sheffield, is an artist in oils and watercolour. She lectures on art history and appreciation. She moves to Oxford shortly, but we hope she’ll return to give us another superb lecture. “Can you hear me because my husband never does,” she began. As it was, her excellent … Read more

In our second consecutive talk by one of our own club members, Peter Ivey started his excellent talk with a musical introduction, the title of which is noted above. He then posed the following questions: What are fibre optics, why are they so important and how did they come about? In the 1960s, a three-minute … Read more

Our American member, Prof Gerry Meininger, has a keen interest in American history, and one particular incident which has found its place in folklore through books and films since it took place in the Wild West in 1881. Violence was happening all over America. It started to develop in the 1870s with the discovery of … Read more

Bill Skipworth, who qualified as a dentist in 1981, gave us talk not only about his early life but also about his journey through the traumatic loss of sight that he experienced as a result of glaucoma, his partial recovery and the unusual side effects of his blindness, in his case synesthesia. Bill was born … Read more

The last time I absorbed such a huge amount of information in such a short time was around ten years ago when, on a visit to London’s theatreland, I watched The Reduced Shakespeare Company act out the complete works of William Shakespeare in 97 minutes. Peter Stubbs, a regular and popular visitor to Stumperlowe Probus … Read more

Dick Birks, our current chairman, qualified in Sheffield in 1973 and was appointed to the post of Consultant Anaesthetist at the Jessop and Royal Hallamshire Hospitals in 1983, specialising in obstetric anaesthesia. He led a distinguished career, not only as a practising anaesthetist, but as an Examiner at the Royal College of Anaesthetists, then elected … Read more