Speakers at the Society of Genealogists’ Conference

Breaking the Barriers – Innovative Genealogy in the 20th and 21st  Centuries

Royal Overseas League , London . 7 May 2011

Juliet Nicolson will be our key note speaker. She will be speaking at the final session of the day when the conference will come to together to hear her talk about - 

The Perfect Summer. Dancing into the Shadow in 1911

Session 6 (final), 17.45-18.30

The summer of 1911– the year the SoG was founded – is seen through the eyes of a series of exceptional individuals including a debutante, a choir boy, a politician, a trade unionist, a butler and the Queen. A new king was crowned and audiences swarmed to Covent Garden to see the Ballet Russes and Nijinsky’s gravity-defying leaps. The aristocracy was at play, bounding from house party to the next; the socialite Lady Michelham travelled with her nineteen yards of pearls while Rupert Brooke a 23-year-old poet spent the summer swimming in the river at Grantchester. But perfection was over-reaching itself. The rumble of thunder from the summer’s storms presaged not only the bloody war years ahead: the country was brought to near standstill by industrial strikes, and unrest, exposing the chasm between privileged and poor as if the heat was torturing those imprisoned in society’s straitjacket and stifled by the city smog. Children, seeking relief from the scorching sun, drowned in village ponds. What the protagonists could not have known is that they were playing out the backdrop to WWI; in a few years time the world, let alone Britain, would never be the same again. Juliet Nicolson illuminates a turning point in history.

Juliet Nicolson is the granddaughter of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West and the daughter of Nigel Nicolson. A journalist and writer, her books include The Perfect Summer: Dancing into Shadow in 1911 and The Great Silence: 1918-1920 Living in the Shadow of the Great War. She read English at Oxford University and has worked in publishing in the UK and the States. She has two daughters and lives in Kent and Sussex.

The Society of Genealogists thanks the Halsted Trust for sponsoring this speaker

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