The First Tuesday lectures
For years the hall's supporters ran a monthly lecture on the first Tuesday of the month, in the building itself. The programme below is one complete year of it, and it is a fair sample of the whole: local history and archaeology sitting beside wildlife photography and the solar system, because the audience was a town audience rather than a specialist one.
The mixture is the point. A society attached to a single building could easily have run a year of talks about that building; instead the calendar moved between medieval labour, Robin Hood, 617 Squadron and Katherine Swynford, and the hall functioned as a town lecture room.
| Month | Subject | Speaker |
|---|---|---|
| January | Crime and criminals in Lincolnshire Given with a dramatic reconstruction. | Adrian Gray |
| February | The Galápagos Islands A wildlife photographer's account. | Geoff Trinder |
| March | Gainsborough slide show Local views. | Thelma Childs |
| April | Robin Hood: man or myth University of Nottingham. | Dr David Marcombe |
| May | Labours of the month The medieval calendar of work. | Dr Maureen Ille |
| June | The Guild of Embroidery, Lincoln Cathedral On the cathedral's needlework. | Not recorded |
| July | 617 Squadron: the Dambusters | Jim Shortland |
| August | Katherine Swynford The Lincolnshire connections of John of Gaunt's third wife. | Linda Tilbury |
| September | Wonders of the solar system | Paul Money |
| October | Craft demonstration | Norma Newbolt |
| November | Disease, death and burial in the Middle Ages | Jean Townsend |
| December | An evening with the Gossiper Of the Lincolnshire Echo. | Peter Brown |
A separate and more formal series, the Sunderland Lectures, ran alongside these and brought in outside speakers; it is described on the events page. The papers that survive from both series are listed in the archive index.
The lecture society as an institution
Monthly lecture programmes of this kind were once a fixture of English town life, run by literary and philosophical societies, mechanics' institutes, natural history clubs and civic associations. They predate broadcasting and outlived it, and their survival into the twenty-first century in places like Gainsborough is one of the quieter continuities in English cultural life.
The format barely changes: a fixed evening of the month, a single speaker, an hour, questions, and tea afterwards. What holds it together is the honorary secretary who books twelve speakers a year, and the reason such programmes end is almost always that nobody takes that job on. The audience is rarely the problem.
Holding the series inside the building it was attached to mattered too. A lecture on medieval labour or on disease and burial in the Middle Ages lands differently in a fifteenth-century hall than in a community centre, and the association clearly understood that.
Questions about the lecture programme
Were the lectures only about local history?
No. A single year covered Lincolnshire crime, the Galápagos Islands, Robin Hood, the Dambusters and the solar system. Breadth was deliberate.
Who could attend?
The programme was advertised as open to everyone, with a small admission charge that included refreshments. It was a public series, open to anyone who turned up.
Are the original notices reproduced here?
The subjects and speakers are. Admission prices, booking arrangements and the contact details of individual volunteers are not, since they lapsed long ago.
Do any papers from the lectures survive?
A handful, in the archive index, along with material from the separate Sunderland series.