Vanessa Cook – Modern 20th Century History

Thu, Oct 15th 2020 at 8:00 pm - 9:00 pm

Vanessa Cook, a PhD student at Glasgow University, will speak on aspects of recent 20th Century history.
VoT: Willie Talbot


President Katrina welcomed everyone, including the guest speaker, Vanessa Cook, to tonight’s meeting of the Rotary Club of Motherwell and Wishaw.

Continuing with Katrina’s interesting Rotary information, this week she highlighted -  Paradise Lost. 

This concerned the environmental damage that has been done to Kamilo Beach in southern Hawaii.  Early Hawaiians used to comb the white sands of the beach for driftwood.  Now the same ocean currents bring a different kind of debris to the beach – plastic.  The beach is now one of the dirtiest on earth.

The North Pacific Ocean currents flow through a spot known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which contains a soup of micro-plastics that originated from North American and Asian waste plastic. The Hawaiian Islands act as a sieve, catching the debris carried by the vortex of water.  About 15–20 tons of rubbish washes up annually on the 9-mile stretch of coastline that includes Kamilo Beach and 90% of this is plastic.

The Rotarians of the Rotary Club of South Hilo are taking action.  During a clean-up in August they, along with other partners, collected 790lbs of marine litter, 37 bags of rubbish, 100lbs of plastic and 300lbs of nets and fishing lines.

Our speaker was then introduced by Katrina. Vanessa is a PhD student at Glasgow University, studying 20th Century History.

Vanessa’s subject was Willie Gall, a cartoonist for the Glasgow Evening Times from 1959 to 2004.  Cartoons were used as a way of conveying the social, economic and political climate of the time in a humorous way.  Gall produced over 9,000 cartoons, with a West of Scotland focus, illustrating the working class lifestyle, family and marriage, employment, politics, leisure and sport.  His cartoons drew on stereotypes of the Glasgow working class for humour. 

Vanessa displayed a number of Gall’s cartoons during her presentation and answered a number of questions put to her by the members.

Willie Talbot proposed the vote of thanks, on behalf of the members, praising Vanessa for a presentation which had been both entertaining and well illustrated.

Willie went on to report that the Bonus Ball had been won by the same Rotarian as last week, Ian St John.

There will be a Council meeting next Thursday at 7.00pm and joining instructions will be forwarded by Secretary Ian prior to the meeting.

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