BSA is often asked to supply speakers for Rotary and other groups. Colin Marsh writes about his experience of giving a talk to a local group, and urges other BSA members to give it a go.

Colin Marsh

It began with a call from the BSA office - a willing volunteer was needed to speak about the BSA at a meeting of an Inner Wheel group in the Midlands. As I live locally, and was free on that particular evening, I was the ideal person to take on this task - wasn't I

Membership of Inner Wheel is made up of the wives and widows of Rotarians - but I soon realised that it is in no sense a cosy social circle. Like Rotary, it exists to provide a social Forum for its members, and to support and raise money for a variety of causes. The incoming Chair of the group had a particular interest in stammering, as her late husband had stammered throughout his life. She had decided that the BSA would be her charity of choice during her year in office.

Public speaking is a particularly fraught area for people who stammer. An issue for me though was that, because in my professional life I have to give presentations on a regular basis, I have developed techniques for concealing my stammer. This means I don't always sound convincing when talking about my stammer and the effect it has on my life. Since I cannot stammer 'to order' nor would I wish to fake it, I knew that I would have to play this event absolutely straight in the hope - perversely, perhaps - that my stammer would kick in and give my talk added credibility.

Another question was whether to use a computer presentation. I worked in a University till recently so I am a slave to the dreaded PowerPoint. However, there is a powerful argument that says that when talking about stammering you should let the stammer 'speak for itself', and that over-use of visual aids is something of a cop-out. But the BSA has a very good PowerPoint presentation for use by speakers, and it seemed a good idea to use this to help me get the BSA message across. So, armed with my USB device, a selection of BSA publicity material and my notes, I presented myself at the venue one evening in July.

The first thing I discovered was that the Hall Manager had misunderstood the instructions, and had provided old-fashioned technology in the form of an overhead projector, and not the PowerPoint kit I had been expecting - so I needn't have agonised over whether or not to use a presentation after all.

Retiring to the bar for a quick re-think, I found to my delight that the Steward had instructions to put any drinks I ordered on the Inner Wheel account! Tempting as it was, I resisted the desire to get well lubricated as, in my experience, public speaking and alcohol do not mix, and sat with a small glass of Shiraz, re-jigging my talk while waiting to be collected by my hosts.

"BSA has a very good PowerPoint presentation for use by speakers"

The usual pattern for these events is for the Inner Wheel members to start their evening with the formal business of the meeting before breaking for dinner, at which point their guest speaker joins them. Dinner was a relaxed affair, with the Chairman putting me at ease with small talk. She told me something of her late husband's struggles with his speech: this helped, as it gave a clue to the level at which I should pitch my talk.

Giving my talk

Apart from telling me to start and finish my talk with a joke, my wife, a former further education lecturer, stressed that how you start a speech sets the tone for what follows, so as the Chairman rose to introduce me, I was mentally rehearsing my opening lines. This was just as well, because the Chairman had lost my biographical details, which meant that I had to introduce myself - no time for false modesty, then!

My first dilemma was over the use of that very word 'Chairman' - I personally hate the terms 'Chair' or 'Chairperson' that have entered the language, but I also know that some women are offended by being addressed as 'Chairman'. I had a feeling that this would not be the case here, but I needed to find out. How did the Chair of the meeting like to be addressed? I remembered my wife's advice about starting with a joke, and remembered a story told about a formidable Liberal politician, Baroness Nancy Sear, who on one occasion when introduced by a young party activist as 'Chair' of a Committee, said in ringing tones "I am not a piece of furniture, and have never been sat on: I am a CHAIRMAN !" - after a brief pause for the laughter to die down, I referred to my host as 'Madam Chairman' - the nods of approval and the ripple of applause from my audience told me that I had hit the right note.

In passing, I would say that my closing joke, about the actor Bill Nighy effecting a stammer for a TV drama, fell flat - just to cut me down to size! - and I will not use that particular story again!

"I remembered that my audience were, in the main, professional people, but were also wives, mothers, grandmothers: some may well have had someone who stammers in their family."

The Ladies had asked me to talk about stammering and the BSA, which is what I did, while interspersing the talk with anecdotes about my own and other people's experiences. Fortunately, as many of the group were about my own age - born in the years just after World War 2 - a lot of my references to being a child with a stammer in the 1950's struck a chord. When, for instance, I mentioned that left-handed children were made to write with their right hand at school when I was growing up, and that it has been suggested that this may be why some adults of 60+ stammer, there were murmurs of understanding round the table. I did not dwell on the causes of stammering - although, to be sure, I got questions about that afterwards - concentrating instead on the positive side of stammering and, in my case, living with it and making it an essential part of who I am. I remembered that my audience were, in the main, professional people, but were also wives, mothers, grandmothers: some may well have had someone who stammers in their family (I didn't ask!) but I picked up enough from the body language to know that the Chairman was not the only Inner Wheeler present to have some experience of living with a person who stammers.

I didn't want to hit my audience with a volley of facts and figures about stammering, so I slipped in personal anecdotes and topical references - mention of Gareth Gates and Rowan Atkinson struck several chords - although my observations about the ratio of males to females who stammer being about 4:1 did come as something of a surprise, and prompted quite a lively debate during questions.

Of course - and this was the point of the exercise - I also spoke about the BSA, what it is and what it tries to do. I stressed that stammering was not a 'glamorous', high-profile cause, but that it - the BSA - does punch above its weight: I remembered the words of one former BSA Trustee who remarked that the problem with stammerers was that we were not cuddly, furry or endangered - my audience seemed to like that!

I cannot judge whether or not my talk was what they wanted: I am always over-critical of my own performance, but they listened politely, they asked searching questions, they laughed at (more or less!) the right places, and applauded at the end. I know that I was exhausted at the finish, as I always find these occasions difficult. Fortunately, I had stammered quite a bit during the talk, which underlined the points I was trying to get across.

A gracious 'vote of thanks' followed, the Treasurer handed me a cheque by way of donation to the BSA, and I left the ladies to the rest of their evening.

Lessons

I learned a number of lessons from the experience. First, no matter how many presentations I do as part of my job, talking to an unfamiliar audience about something as deeply personal as my stammer is not easy. It was quite different from talking to my students who know me and are used to me. But there again, a talk like this is a situation where you are expected to stammer!

Second, we - BSA - need to look rather more closely at the examples we use. In my opening remarks, I referred to having something in common with a number of famous stammerers - George VI, Nye Bevan, Jonathan Miller, etc. The response was not what I expected. When I asked, rhetorically, what all these people had in common, responses varied from "they are all dead" to "they are all famous" and the significance of the shortage of female names on that list passed them by completely - and that did surprise me. These were, after all, an audience of sophisticated, well-educated women, many of whom grew up like me in the 1960's. I remember listening to George VI's Christmas broadcasts, and hearing him struggle with his speech. Should I have been surprised that my audience that night did not pick up on the significance of the inclusion of King George on that list? I was rather more surprised, I have to say, that so many of them had not heard of either Jonathan Miller or Margaret Drabble - but they all knew that Gareth Gates has a stammer, and that Michael Heseltine is dyslexic. Maybe there are lessons here for us to learn at BSA when trying to raise our profile?

Lastly, I am firmly convinced that events such as this are an excellent way of helping to raise the profile of BSA. Those 19 ladies will, I hope, talk to their husbands, partners, children, friends and colleagues about what they heard from me that evening and, hopefully, further invitations to address groups like Inner Wheel, Rotary, WI, etc., will follow.

"events such as this are an excellent way of helping to raise the profile of BSA"

Getting involved

I would urge any BSA member who feels that they would like to help the BSA by giving talks like this to put themselves forward. I know that public speaking is not easy - and can be doubly hard for people who stammer - but it is a wonderful way of 'letting the stammer be heard' and raising the profile of stammering and the BSA. "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself" as a former US President once declared. I understand that many who stammer would find it terrifying to actually get up in front of a strange audience to talk about their stammer. I can only tell you though that in my professional life I have mentored many trainee Careers Advisers, and even the most confident and fluent of them sometimes go weak at the knees at the thought of getting up in front of an audience.

Stammering, sure, is hard - but talking about it helps no end, and if you benefit the BSA at the same time, so much the better. Once I had conquered my nerves, and realised that without the IT technology to help, I was on my own, I had a great evening, made some new and useful contacts - and got a free dinner out of it!

Extended version of article in the Winter 2008 Speaking Out, page 5.