Month: March 2022

In this event report, our newsletter editor Frances Lloyd summarises the informative talk given by Amanda about how her organisation is working to support refugees who come to live in Shropshire.

Amanda started her talk by telling us about her background. She had worked with children with disabilities and those in care during her 20s and 30s. She then had a baby and found she had time on her hands. She was horrified when she saw footage of the camps at Calais where 10,000 people were living in tents with accompanying violence and hunger. She read that Kate Bedano had decided to take a caravan to Calais and was inspired to do the same. She gathered funds and the WI in St. Albans offered to renovate it. Meanwhile Amanda took thousands of pounds worth of items to Calais. She was very shocked by what she found in the camps which were completely lawless and where many vulnerable children were living.

In this event report, our newsletter editor Frances Lloyd summarises the presentation given by Dr. Kelcey about Mary Shelley and her novel Frankenstein.

Colin’s talk, illustrated with videos and pictures, was about Mary Shelley, her novel Frankenstein, the science at the time and how that science has progressed in the present day.

Mary was born in 1797 to Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. Both her parents were great philosophers her mother being a feminist and her father a writer of political tracts. Mary’s mother died soon after her daughter was born and this coloured Mary’s life. Mary was highly intelligent and she used to sit in when friends of her father’s such as Percy Shelley, a poet, and Erasmus Darwin, a physician, would visit the house.