The November guest speaker was author James Ellson. James began his presentation by telling us why and how he became an author. His first main career was as a police officer, initially joining the Metropolitan Police in London, before transferring to Greater Manchester Police. He became a Detective Inspector in that force and worked in… Read more

Norman Harris, a much-travelled retiree, presented ‘Atlantic to Pacific – The story of the Panama Canal’. Having already completed a journey by that route, Norman set the scene with a short history about when, why, and how, the canal came about.  The country of Panama was first mentioned in 1513 by a Spanish explorer who… Read more

The guest speaker was Steve Barrett, a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Physics at the University of Liverpool and his topic was ‘The End of Everything’. For over an hour, Steve told us about what has been predicted to happen in the future. His first message was that although it took only three… Read more

This was the second visit from our guest speaker, Brian Topping, who is a retired customs officer and had more stories and information about his career. He told us about the many roles and responsibilities of customs officers, carried out every day. These are often connected with other authorities, who give customs officers the power… Read more

Unfortunately our original guest speaker was unable to join us. But Michael Astrop, the vice chair of our branch, stepped in at short notice and presented ‘Lady Killers’. Michael told us about five cases of homicide where the accused was female and, after each one, he asked his audience whether they thought she was guilty… Read more

Our guest speaker Sheila Antrobus set the scene by describing the enormous differences between the population during Queen Victoria’s reign. The Queen and her consort, Prince Albert had nine children during their marriage, five girls and four boys. All of these children would have been brought up mainly by ‘wet nurses’ and other servants, educated… Read more

The guest speaker at the May 2024 u3a Todmorden Members Meeting was Chris Helme, who presented ‘So You Want to be a Pirate’. He began by telling us how this particular talk came about. Chris had once thought of giving up public speaking, after cruise ship audiences didn’t like talks about his local area, and… Read more

This month's guest speaker was Dave Weldrake. He began by describing how Christianity was introduced by the Romans around the year AD312, when the Roman emperor Constantine had made Christianity the main religion of Rome. This is evidenced by the discovery of Christian mosaics in Roman Villas in Britain around this time. Dave said that… Read more

This month's guest speaker was Dr Julian Somerville who spoke about the case of Dr Crippen. Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen was born on the 11th of September 1862, in the United States. At the age of 21, he qualified as a doctor. While working at a New York hospital, Crippen stitched a wound sustained by… Read more

The guest speaker was Professor Stephen Westland, Professor of Colour Science and Technology in the School of Design at the University of Leeds. His main interest is colour, and his approach to studying colour spans some quite diverse areas such as design, science and technology, and machine learning. He began by answering the question posed in… Read more