The Speaker at our Monthly Meeting on Wednesday 24 April 2024 was Singer and Song Writer Jill Goldman. Jill is a member at Kenton & District u3a and is launching out into fiction. She gave us a taste of her forthcoming publication. Jill plays the guitar, banjo and ukulele, and specialises in Dinner Jazz material and music for the over-50s.

Set in the 1950s and 1960s, her fictional persona, Julia, was growing up in an amateur musical family, and working for a local insurance company. The job at the insurance company eventually comes to an end, and she manages to get a job in London with a clothing manufacturer, working in the typing pool. She takes over from a girl in a flat share, and starts concentrating on her guitar playing and singing. Largely self-taught on the guitar, with the assistance of Bert Wheedon, she finds that she needs help with singing as she lacks on-stage confidence. She finds a singing teacher who runs classes, and that leads to her widening her circle of acquaintance through the others attending the classes.

Eventually, the singing teacher is engaged to provide the entertainment at a concert evening at an Old Folks Home, with the start turn at the event being Jack Warner, famed for playing Dixon of Dock Green amongst many other roles. Each of the pupils will perform songs in their own style, whether it be from La Boheme or Harry James or John Denver or Linda Ronstadt. The roles the other pupils play in their own working lives helps our narrator, Julia, advance in her own career, and she eventually launches out into a musical career.

Jill illustrated her talk with snippets of recordings she had made of several of the artists whose music would be performed at the concert, and that was much appreciated by all those present.

Our next Monthly Meeting will be on 22 May 2024 at 10:00am, and will feature Mike Barbakoff talking about the World War 2 History of Bletchley Park which housed much of the code breaking activities of that conflict.