Winter 11 Featuring: The Buckingham Palace Awards Ceremony ...

I would not have met my wife!’
The English-Speaking Union (of course) gave me a year in the USA as a boy of 17.
But the English-Speaking Union gave me much else besides. For example, it was at the English-Speaking Union
that I became involved with Ronald Fredenburgh, whose Current Affairs Unit gave regular
Commonwealth Students’ Supper Parties, over which I sometimes presided if Ronald was away. At one of
these Supper Parties (in late 1971), I met a chap from Poland called Emil Kowalski whom I visited in Krakow a
couple of months later. There, amidst the snow of the Tatra Mountains,
I met a girl called Aleksandra Wacwakik.
My wife, in other words.
Brian Marsh – SSE (formerly BASS) 1958 – 9 and President of the Alumni Association
Emma Pinder and her fiancé Nash at the Buckingham Palace
Commemorative Dinner 2011
James Probert, as part of the England Schools
Debating Team, 1999
‘I wouldn’t have got the job!’
In 2009, I went for a job interview for a temporary position
with the Treasury Solicitors. At the start of the interview,
one of the interviewers looked over my CV and commented
that he had also done the SSE with the ESU. I was
immediately able to talk about how I had enjoyed my year
at the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, what I had
gained from the experience and how that would help me in
the role I was interviewing for. It was a great starting point
for the interview as I instantly had something I could talk
about that I knew the interviewer could relate to. A few
days later, I was offered the job. Little did I know that this
was a practice run for an interview I had three months later
for a training position with the law firm Spring Law.
Imagine my surprise (and delight) when this second
interview started with the Managing Director informing me
that he too had done the SSE with the ESU! I have been
with Spring Law for two years now and have just been
invited to stay on once I qualify as a solicitor in November
2011.
Emma Pinder – SSE (formerly BASS) 2001
‘I wouldn’t have made friendships spanning
fifteen years and half a dozen continents!’
If it were not for the ESU picking me for the England
Schools Debating Team when I was 15, I wouldn’t have
taken my first ever trip on an aeroplane; wouldn’t have left
Europe for the first time to spend two weeks in Israel and
Palestine arguing (in a very constructive way) with a group
of some of the most extraordinary young people in the
world; wouldn’t have made friendships with them spanning
fifteen years and half a dozen continents. The experience
left me with a store of self-confidence that has served me
well ever since, and a passion for the people, ideas and
organisations that I encountered that has led me to devote
my working life and much of my free time to international
and educational charities. These include the ESU itself, of
which I’m a former employee and a proud member, and the
World Schools Debating Championships, the destination of
that first ever ESU-funded plane journey, of whose board
of trustees I am now chair. I can say, without hesitation, that
the ESU’s support for England’s national Schools Debating
Team has changed almost every single aspect of my life for
the better, and I like to think it was some of the best money
they ever spent.
James Probert – England Schools Debating Team 1999,
Capitol Hill 2001 and ex-member of ESU staff
DIALOGUE 36