Angela Lansbury Speeches and Making Speeches

This speech was first given to HOD. I started with the story about speeches and the London bombing. Gil Ornstein liked the story about my uncle the most. So the next time I have the speech to Harrovians, I moved the story about my uncle to first place.

Motivational Speech

I’m wearing silver so that when ever you see silver you will remember my speech about every cloud has a silver lining. How many of you think that’s a cliché? You are right. That’s what I used to think. Until this week. When I opened my newspaper and read a story about a man who survived the bomb in Paris.

I’m going to tell you three stories, 

The first is about myself and how a bomb in London changed me , made me be prepared, so that I am always ready to give a speech any time. 

The second is about my uncle and how being colour blind in WWII changed his life.

The third is about somebody in the recent bombing in Paris and how a leg injury changed their life.

Let’s start with me and this club. How many of you have been a Toastmaster of the evening, or a club president, and had a moment of setback, disaster, when a speaker dropped out? How many of you have been to a meeting when the speaker dropped out?

I’ve been to several meetings where a vital person dropped out, or the VIP speaker. The most memorable was at Harrow Writers Circle, on the evening of the London bombings. 

We were lucky, nobody from the club was hurt. The trains weren't running, but we all got to the meeting, wanting to get away from the bad news and cheer up with an entertaining speaker, although the the trains weren’t running, we were all present, ready to hear our VIP speaker.

Only one problem. Can you guess what it was? No trains. No speaker. The VIP speaker. 

The club president was disappointed, crestfallen. He had done his best. He had a game to fill 20 minutes.  The jolly meeting, which could have taken our mind off the trouble, would have left 20 people going home early. He said, jokingly, “I don’t suppose anybody’s got a speech?’

"I have," I said, "in fact I have two."

In my bag, which I’d never bothered to empty, I still had my speeches from HOD and Harrovians, the two clubs I had visited the previous week. I had two speeches, and six funny props. 

Months afterwards people said to me, "I couldn’t believe you gave a speech without notes - and you even had the props. And then you gave a second speech without notes, complete with all the props."

"Well," I shrugged, "that’s just what I normally do."

The moral is, every cloud has a silver lining. But you must be prepared. Sometime, somewhere, you will be at a meeting where the speaker doesn’t turn up. If you have one good speech, and a small index card in your pocket, you can always step in.   

My second story is more dramatic. My late uncle was a colour blind musician. I went to visit my elderly uncle in hospital. He was dying and sitting in his hospital bed hunched over, reading a newspaper with a magnifying glass, beside an empty vase. I thought that was sad and offered to go down to the shop and get him some flowers. He said, I don’t want any flowers. I can’t see them anyway. I’m colour blind. 

I said, “You can see well enough to read. What are you reading?” He said, ‘Obituaries. 

I’ve outlived everybody.”

After he died I went to his house. a black and white house, with a grey paved front, no flowers in the garden. The walls and paintwork inside like a black and white film, completely devoid of colour.  

I realised that as a child and scholarship music student he had compensated for his poor sight by being extra sensitive to sound. That’s what made him a virtuoso musician.

My mother’s first husband couldn’t play the violin, but he had perfect vision. He was a pilot in WWII. He died during the first year of their marriage, at El Alamein in Egypt. 

Her brother, my uncle had volunteered and joined the RAF. wanted to be a pilot. He was rejected because he was colour blind. Being colour blind saved his life.

In the family deed box I have two documents, the notice that my mother's husband, aged in his twenties, was presumed dead, and the death certificate of my colour blind uncle who reached the age of 79.

Steve Jobs, the  … key developer in Apple, gave a talk when he knew he had cancer. He said, when you look forwards in life, you can’t necessarily see all the links, join all the dots. It’s only when you look back, that you can see how your setbacks were what gave you, or somebody else the opportunity or the motivation to succeed.

My third and last story is another story about a bombing in Paris, France. The terrorist reportedly walked along the line of survivors kicking the leg of every third body to see if they were still alive. He came up to one man, kicked the leg, got no reaction, and moved on. That man lived to tell the tale. He had not reacted because of an injury to his knee. One newspaper report said it was a prosthetic leg. A very memorable image. An injury most people would consider bad luck, yet it bought him good luck long term because it saved his life.

What’s the moral? I’ve read dozens of stories of people who have conquered difficulties. The actress Sarah Bernhardt lost a leg and acted propped up against a table. This week’s story was about a man who lost the use of his leg and it saved his life.

The moral is, learn, prepare, and make the best of life. Because every cloud has a silver lining.

Remember the man with the bad knew, who survived the bombing. Remember the colour blind musician who couldn't be a pilot but survived to read the obituaries of everybody else.

When you are feeling it’s hard to cope, just put your speech notes and your props in your bag, and remember my colour blind uncle reading the obituaries of others, knowing that being colour blind saved his life in WWII’ and the man with the damaged leg, who, because of that, was one of the lucky survivors. Some of you have a speech just as good as mine. Put the outline on a card index card, and keep it in your pocket. One day I might not be able to make the meeting and it could be your lucky day. Every cloud has a silver lining, for somebody.

-ends-

Angela Lansbury, CC, CL, ACG, author and speaker.

This is the draft of the speech. I delivered it without the alliterative title, and dropped the parts now in brackets.

When I stood up to speak, I was initially disconcerted by the fact that the previous speaker had started his speech with the same comment. So I reiterated by beginning, 'As x mentioned earlier ...'

In fact, this worked rather well, tying together the two speeches.

(Pearl Funeral Speech - Pearl was Our ‘Pearl’, Practical and Popular

by Angela)

Pearl had a long happy life, making family and friends happy.

The only reason there aren’t more people here today is that Pearl outlived most of her generation.

Pearl lived 98 years, a very long, happy life. 

Why did she live so long?

She didn’t need to follow a health food diet because she cooked family meals from fresh ingredients.

She didn’t need to exercise in a gym because she touched her toes every morning. She had worked standing up serving in shops such as her dress shop and hairdressers, after she retired a local manager phoned and begged her to go back to work part-time. And after retiring finally she continued to meet the other girls for tea .

(SUMMARY : I’m going to tell you about her early family life, her grandparents, mother, sister, wartime wedding, and happy times at Heath House.)

Early life

Pearl was born in 1916, in the middle of The Great War, but, she said, in ‘the no complaints department’. She spent her schooldays happily in the Roaring Twenties. At school she was not academic but she had elocution lessons so she learned to speak well. At home, the house had gas lights and Pearl remember looking up at electric lights being installed, wires coming through the ceiling.

Pearl’s late paternal grandfather had worked for the Singer sewing machine family and when he died in 1907, nine years before Pearl’s birth the Singer sewing machine factory sent a portrait of her grandfather, with the Singer insignia below. The Singer picture hung on the wall during her childhood. (Widowed paternal granny Julia sewed Pearl a dress with matching pants.) No surprise that Pearl grew up a keen sewer, on machines and by hand. She made her first dress at 12, instructed by her grandmother, and at 18 made all her own clothes. Pearl serving in her mother’s shop. Pearl said, “I could re-cut a dress to fit people, make it shorter, hem it. There’s nothing I haven’t done.” 

Daughter In The Thirties.

Pearl was a good daughter, had her widowed father, Bob, living with her for his later years as Steven and Trevor recall. Pearl told us she helped in her mother’s shop selling dresses and matching hats Kilburn High Road (The dress making workroom was at the back of the shop, serving and selling.) She could add and subtract and give the right change in her head without a calculator or even pencil and paper. To relax on the afternoon off, Pearl loved going out to tea to a tea-shop or grand hotel with her mother. (wth three tiers of cakes).

Sister, Aunty - The Thirties

In the 1920s and 1930s and war years Pearl was a devoted sister to Daphne, six years younger.  They visited their maternal grandfather, Nathan, ancestor of both Trevor and myself, as we are second cousins. Pearl’s grandpa Nathan (died 1926 when she was ten) employed a driver for the horse and carriage. Nathan, Pearl said, was ‘a very comfortable man’.

The Forties & WWII

When Pearl spoke of wartime (WWII) she was brief about problems, and concentrated on the jolly parts. 

In WWII Pearl’s parents moved to Slough. Pearl’s entrepreneurial mother Sally immediately found an East End source of hard to find much needed pots and pans to sell. She gave a free set of new pans to each the neighbouring shops, those either side, one of whom was a greengrocer, and the one opposite, who was a butcher. During the war, when everybody was on rationing, Pearl said, 'we were never short of food. (We never wanted for anything!)'

When evacuated, living in Slough, Pearl went out dancing and met David, her handsome husband-to-be who was in the army.  David  who was a hairdresser who cut hair for the (other men and) officers (for privileges). 

She enthused about the three tier ice cream cake at her wartime wedding in 1940. . 

Postwar when both Pearl and her younger sister Daphne were married, Pearl, was a doting auntie to Daphne’s two daughters,  Elizabeth here today.

WWII She was a good mother, in effect a single mother

Her oldest son, Stephen was born whilst Pearl’s husband David was away in Egypt in WWII. After the war ended she had a miscarriage so she was very pleased with the arrival of Trevor, an energetic younger brother for studious Stephen.

Pearl Reconciled Family

Pearl was first cousin to my mother Netta who she’d played with for the last time when Nathan’s will was read. (After grandfather’s death, and a fall-out over the will, Pearl’s mother, and my mother’s father, did not meet or speak again.) 

In later life, Pearl and her cousin Netta met again, reuniting the family and introduced their single children, which is why Trevor and I are here, with our son, Pearl’s grandson, Anthony.

Pearl was Practical  

After Trevor and I got engaged in 1975, in addition to sewing Pearl did crochet, so she made me a blue crochet bikini. She hand-knitted little jackets for grandchildren. 

Ever practical, she cooked wonderful blackberry and apple crumble from our garden apples and berries growing wild which her husband David picked from the garden, woods and hedgerows. (When I went through her box of broken necklaces I found she had linked the broken loops with a safety pin. I once phoned and asked what to do with loops hanging down the front of a jersey. Should I cut them. No, she said, take a needle and thread the loop through to the back.) 

Pearl was Proud

She was very proud of her older son Stephen becoming a Professor and Sociology, of her younger son Trevor becoming a lecturer in statistics, her grand-daughter Tali on TV, her grandson Dani, and his wife Ayala whose award winning film was shown at Pearl’s 90th birthday party.

(She kept in touch with our French au pair girl, Caroline Jouy, Mention, and visited France, them taking gifts of English books.) 

Pearl was full of Praise

(Pearl was a great saleswoman, running the dress shop in South Oxhey. She chatted up customers and altered clothes to fit them. 

She told me, ‘If you want to run a shop, you have to chat, and smile, and be nice to everybody’.)

Years later she was still chatty, enquiring, complimentary,ingratiating herself and making friends everywhere, the hotel, the hospital.

When she went to a day centre, she was asked to show the others how to thread a sewing machine and use it.

She would introduce the staff at Heath House, when she forgot names she would grin and grab the arm of Sharon, the manager of Heath House, enthusing, ‘this is my friend’. (Pearl would compliment me on my clothes, shoes, bag or hat.) She welcomed visitors, such as grandson Anthony. She always asked what work he was doing. She didn’t understand the answer, Search Engine Optimisation - most people don’t - but she always asked.

In the 1980, when David had dementia, he asked who is that lovely lady who visits me every day?

 When he was told, ‘That’s your wife,’ he smiled, ‘Aren’t I lucky!’