DEBATING & PUBLIC SPEAKING 55
Debating and Public Speaking
One of the challenges of organising boys for debating is that they have a lot of opinions, sometimes based on nothing very much at all and not always allied to attention to detail. Rather like herding cats, then, they have to be shaped to the moulds of the different competition formats.
When faced by the trenchant pedantry of, say, a judge who is an accountant from Yeovil, it suddenly becomes very clear to them why they need to have read the rule book. Substance matters but so too does format. This becomes more significant as teams progress from local rounds to regional rounds. One judge this year delivered a fascinating verdict based largely on hair styles.
Fortunately for our ESU Public speaking team, coiffeuring was no obstacle, as it comprised Fred Batstone, Christian Holland and Alex Thomas. Dubbed ‘the silver tongued trio’ by The Evening Post they saw off all comers in the opening Bristol heat with a great speech from Fred entitled ‘Yes we can’, in which he drew on some unlikely parallels between Barack Obama and Bob the Builder. Alex and Christian chaired and questioned a slightly sinister and maniacal presentation on ‘Violence is always the answer’.
In the Bristol final, hosted here at QEH, Fred once again reached the heights on the topic of ‘What is normal is defined by the society we live in’. Fred clearly has a fairly broad ‘Kingsdown’ definition of normal but it was enough to win him the coveted Eric Dehn trophy for Best Speaker and the team progressed to the regional final at King’s Taunton in March. For this round Fred exposed his academic skill and wowed the judges with a nuanced speech on the idea that juries are not needed in a modern legal system.
Once again he won Best Speaker, which is a tremendous achievement at this level of competition, and the trio were overall runners up. They will return next year and William Hill has stopped taking bets.
In the English Speaking Union Mace Debating Competition we wheeled out the big guns of George Bamber - hardened by the relentless tide of school assemblies - and Alistair Roweth, whose wily ways had recently been sharpened by a successful Cambridge interview. They swept aside the local competition in the first round up at Marling in Stroud, out-thinking and out-arguing some formidable opponents on the motion that religion should not be brought into schools. And so to the regional final in Taunton in March, which saw them arguing against the motion that the media should not publish material from Wikileaks. Julian Assange has found some friends.
We also had teams in several other national competitions. Mike Beck and Roweth (again) sallied forth in the Cambridge Schools’ Competition which took place in arctic conditions at St Mary Redcliffe, where they were variously convincing on the topics of violent rap music and size zero models. They were then undone in the Bristol Final, despite being fluent on aid, women’s rights and badly behaved football fans. In the Rotary Club ‘Youth Speaks’ competition, also hosted at QEH, Alex Murden, George Bamber and Mike Beck all performed strongly and lost narrowly on the night.
It is vital to keep new talent coming through and so we always take teams to the International Competition for Young Debaters which is open to students below Year 10. This year it took place in the Oxford Union and under the watchful gaze of diverse luminaries ranging from Mother Theresa to Boris Johnson our teams of Pat Krause and Joe Goodsall alongside Alex Thomas and Christian Holland participated in a field of sixty teams from all over the country. Alex and Christian finished in the top third, which is a real achievement in this difficult British Parliamentary format. Relevantly in the circumstances, they initially debated the idea that Western governments should pay dictators to stand aside.
House Debating is also a great testing ground for our national competition teams. This year Carr’s reined in Hartnell’s dominance from last year and won the Junior competition on the motion that UK gun laws should be relaxed. Hartnell’s continued to dominate higher up the school, winning both the Intermediate and Senior competitions. It is good to see some green shoots of promise lower down the school - Benedict M’Caw and Christopher Allen are two to watch.
The boys are challenged by the demands of Public Speaking and Debating and they enjoy it. The repartee in B4 and in the B corridor certainly suggests that this is the case. The groundwork is already being laid for when the competitions once again crank into gear in October and success this year augurs well for next.
JEM
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