Beck & Ball’s The London Friends’ Meetings
Peter Daniels talks about reproducing a facsimile edition of this 1869 book
From my time on the staff of Friends House Library, I knew William Beck and T Frederick Ball’s 1869 The London Friends’ Meetings as ‘Beck & Ball’, the book to show historians the lie of the land before they explore volumes of minutes and other detailed evidence. Olive Yarrow from Bunhill Fields Meeting lent me her copy while I was working on an article about Stoke Newington Quakers. I realised that with Olive’s permission I could produce a facsimile reprint, with a new introduction, some illustrations, and a decent index. Simon Dixon had researched his PhD on London Quakers in the Library while I still worked there, and was the obvious person to help me with the introduction.
The book covers the Local Meeting histories of Greater London, but much else besides. London being large and complicated, everything tends to be atypical. Half a dozen Monthly Meetings divided up the city from the time they were invented. The London & Middlesex Quarterly Meeting corresponded to the same tier around the country, while other meetings held special functions – Two Weeks Meeting, which pre-dated Monthly Meetings and came to specialise in authorising marriages; the women’s Box Meeting, with pastoral funds; the Morning Meeting of ministers; Six Weeks Meeting and its executive committee the Meeting of Twelve (keeping up?). Six Weeks Meeting was set up by George Fox as ‘the prime meeting in the City’, described by Beck and Ball as ‘a sort of senate, or court of appeal’, but coexistence with Quarterly Meeting complicated matters. Eventually it became the property and finance committee for Quarterly Meeting. Six Weeks Meeting always did have a tricky relationship with the Monthly Meetings contributing to its pooled fund, and something of that continues today, but the book shows how valuable its work was for supporting Quaker Meetings in London.
William Beck especially would say that, as he was its surveyor. An architect, he must have known the Meeting houses better than anybody. But Frederick Ball probably knew Devonshire House even better: he grew up there from the age of seven, his parents being the ‘doorkeepers’ or caretakers, which shows some class difference from the Becks, who were one of the successful professional families that had been settling away from the City in Stoke Newington since the eighteenth century. Frederick, who later became a journalist, did most of the archival research for the book; also a teacher and an accountant, he was employed as secretary to the Bedford Institute (predecessor of Quaker Social Action), which had been William Beck’s brain-child.
Unfortunately, all was not well. In 1874, a few years after The London Friends’ Meetings was published, his Monthly Meeting was notified by an overseer that Frederick had misappropriated £86 of Bedford Institute funds and run up personal debts of £100 that he could not meet – and not for the first time: in 1871 he had been forgiven and the total amount of £150 repaid by friends. Devonshire House MM had no choice but to disown him, and the clerk who painfully had to sign the minute was William Beck. He never quite recovered.
Frederick Ball’s serious crime was evidently not pursued legally, and the disownment was handled sensitively: his family remained members, and he was eventually buried at Tottenham Meeting House. The following extract from the book illustrates some rather colourful ‘delinquents’ of the earlier period, researched in the Southwark MM minute books by Frederick himself; and very probably written up by him too, noting on the way, ‘we may mention that the subject of fraud was one of the delinquencies that needed care in early times’.
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