PUBLIC SPEAKING.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19904, 25 September 1926, Page 19

PUBLIC SPEAKING.

ELOCUTION TRAINING NECESSARY. MR T. P. O’CONNOR’S VIEWS. (Fbom Odb Own Coebespondent.) LONDON, August 1L Hints on the art of public speaking, and especially on the value of elocution in oratory, were the themes on which the Tit. Hon. T. P. O’Connor, M.P., dwelt when he addressed the teachers attending the City of London Vacation Course in Education at luncheon at the Holborn Restaurant. Mr O'Connor gave examples from personal experience of speeches being

ruined by bad delivery, and strongly urged a system of voice culture. Sir Robert Blair presided. Mr O'Connor began by remarking that ho had some experience in making speeches, listening to speeches, and chronicling speeches, and he thought he might talk to teachers on the part they could play in preparing their pupils for public seating. It was a subject, he said, that had not been sufficiently considered, and he had seen a thousand examples of the good part or the bad part which knowledge or ignorance of elocution had played in making or marring the success of speeches. The first necessity of an effective public speaker was a good voice, and nature had not always given that gift to men who were, dowered with magnificent

other qualities. “People succeed in the House of Commons,” Mr O’Connor went on, “who go there with some startling disadvantages. People go there who have a very perfect education, and I have heard most powerful and effective speeches delivered by men who had a considerable amount of difficulty in knowing where ‘H’s’ should be put in or left out.— (Laughter.) But that was because the subject matter of the speeches was good and we s-re all charitable to our own faults. The House of Commons does learn to ignore a great many physical defects. Mr Winston Churchill, when he began was almost impossible. # Now he has become, by sheer practice, courage, and tenacity, almost the greatest parliamentary orator of to-day. John Bright was a derful orator, 'with a perfectly wonderful voice. Sir Charles Dilke, who was not a very good speaker, though an able man, used to say that Bright’s success as an orator was entirely due_ to his voice. That is ridiculous, because in the speeches of John Bright you will find passages of simple but glorious eloquence equal to the finest passages in the writings of our greatest speakers and writers. The voice, Mr O’Connor continued, was largely a matter of' cultivation as well as of natural endowment, and it could be largely taught and largely improved. A man with a comparative? small but trained voice, might be able to produce better effects than a man with a great but untrained voice. Was it necessary that men in public life, whether barristers, politicians, oi clergymen, should be trained in elocution? Emphatically, yes. ORATORS IN THE HOUSE OP COMMONS. “I have,” said Mr O'Connor, “heajtd perfectly wonderful speeches destroyed by

want of elocutionary skill. I remember listening to a speechi by Lord Rosebery, which was absolutely destroyed for that reason. He was working himself up to a great peroration, and in working himself up ho shouted and shouted, with the result that when ho came to the peroration he had shouted at his audience to such an extant that the end of the speech was received in terrible silence. That was had elocution. I may surprise a good many people by stating that in my opinion Mr Bradlaugh was not nearly so effective in the House of Commons as he was on the platform. My fault with Mr Bradlaugh was fhat lie shouted so much in the Home of Commons that he always suggested to mo the idea of a man playing a pair of cymbals in a small drawing room at an afternoon tea party.—(Laughter.) What, then, makes the success of the great speakers in the House of Commons apart from other gifts? I say elocution. Take Mr Gladstone. Everything about him was artistic; not that he wae artificial. If you watched his legs you saw that they gesticulated and added force and grace to what he was saying. But, above all. if yon studied the use of his voice you would see that it was like a great gamut of music, where the low note and the soft note came just at the right moment. He would speak for an hour. During that hour there was scarcely ever the same lone. 11 he was light and airy the voice was light and airy. If he was reallv earnest the voice was earnest, so that' to listen to him was reallv like listening to a wonrh .-ful piece of very varied music bv a great, prima donna,” The first thing a man had to do while speaking to an audience. Mr O'Connor concluded, was never to shout. The records of the orators of the House of Commons showed that the most successful wero those who spoke in Quite, essv