Music at the bank Photo: Photo courtesy Peter Budge.
Eye - 29 April 2011
From Barclays to the university
A pretty protest
Following a rendition of Steve Tilston’s Pretty Penny at a regular music session in Le Bon Croissant café in Crouch End, London, one afternoon, the musicians had not had their fill. They decided to take the truth-telling ditty to serenade the staff at the local Barclays Bank also in Crouch End. With the lyrics referring to the banking system it seemed appropriate to use in a peaceful protest highlighting Barclays questionable practices.
They planned their protest in the style of UK-Uncut sit-ins that are happening all over the country, ‘targeting companies that are using tax evasion methods to ensure they do not pay a full amount of tax at a time of cuts to many vital services’, Eye’s Friend, Peter Budge explained (see also the Friend, ‘Protest at Barclays’ 24 February.)
Peter and friends set off to break the bank (or at least provoke them mildly.) Five of the seven-strong party happened to have Quaker connections.
While one member joined the queue, the others ‘settled into chairs’, took up their instruments and began to play. Before long they were confronted by the manager who asked them to cut the noise. They continued. She reappeared threatening to call the police. They continued. She came back a third time – only to ask them to play more quietly.
Having taxed the bank for forty minutes the group did a transfer to the pavement, where they rounded up their concert with an encore of Pretty Penny.
‘Behind their hedge they don’t plant wheat
They don’t cut corn, they don’t pick tea
They don’t dig coal, they don’t forge steel.
They just push numbers all about
They push too hard, we bail them out
Just to keep their hands on Fortunes’ wheel.’
Chorus to Pretty Penny by Steve Tilston
In brief(s)
Following last week’s story suggesting that ‘weird’ Quaker values might prevent Friends from sporting raunchy underwear, Eye had a letter from Kevin Redpath of Street Meeting in Somerset. Beginning ‘Dear Johnnie’, he points out that the Society of Friends has never tried to ‘lobby underwear manufacturers to adhere to its values of simplicity, equality, truth and peace.’
He continues: ‘Whilst our founder George Fox designed and wore his own pair of leather breeches, this was a purely practical solution to walking the length and breadth of seventeenth century England, at a time when dry cleaners were hard to come by. He offers no advice in his journal about what should be worn underneath and I don’t think his fellow Quakers would have had the temerity to ask him. Indeed, his wife, Margaret Fell, thought the early Quaker adherence to plain clothing was a “silly poor gospel” so perhaps Quakers aren’t quite so weird after all!’
Addio remembered
As the oldest man in the world passed away at the age of 114 years claiming that it was his two-meal- a-day diet that kept him in good health for so long, Eye was given cause to wonder over the longevity of professor E I Addio of University College London.
A postscript to a letter to the Friend remarked on the long life and energy of professor Addio. R J Claxton, author of said note and graduate of the university engineering department, wrote: ‘I was pleased to learn from the 1 April edition that “‘prof” Addio is still going – he seemed very old to me back in the 1950s!’
