Please find below information about forthcoming events in Amersham. The Society’s lectures are usually in the Kings Chapel. If any member is unable to make his/her way to these meetings and would like transport to be arranged, please contact Geraldine Marshall-Andrew on 01494 433735.
(PLEASE NOTE THE SPEAKER/SUBJECT CHANGE)
“Homefires and Havens – Amersham during WWII” is a talk by Alison Bailey of Amersham Museum.
Despite the national economic downturn, in many ways Amersham was booming in the 1930s with new Metroland developments, the arrival of ‘talkies’ at the Regent Cinema and Sally Latimer’s Playhouse Theatre. But after months of speculation war against Germany was declared on Sun 3 Sep 1939 and everything changed overnight. Sandbags appeared piled up at the front of the shops, gas masks were issued and soon petrol and food rationing were introduced.
80 years after the war ended, this talk looks at our local stories, including fundraising to buy a submarine, spies who trained in nearby stately homes, the circus animals that lived in Chalfont St Giles and the evacuees and émigrés who found a safe haven here in the Chiltern countryside.
Coffee/tea and biscuits will be available from 7.30pm. The talk starts at 8.00pm. No booking necessary. Guests and new members welcome.
Lord Byron wasn’t just a poet, he was a rock star. The most prominent and outrageous celebrity of the Romantic era, he lived life to excess – but his relations with women were scandalous and often appalling.
This talk explores those relationships in the context of the social conventions of the time, Byron’s extraordinary rise to fame and legend, and his unparalleled notoriety for drink, sex and rebellion.
The speaker, Jeremy Holmes, was an English scholar at Oxford who has spoken to numerous literary and non-literary audiences.
Coffee/tea and biscuits will be available from 7.30pm. The talk starts at 8.00pm. No booking necessary. Guests and new members welcome.