Coming full circle

Andrew Bolton writes about a journey from Pendle Hill to Kansas City

I grew up among the beautiful fells in the English Pennines that form the ‘backbone’ of hills and mountains that stretch south from the Scottish border to Derbyshire. The distance between the two areas is perhaps 260 miles. It is not difficult to sense ‘the Beyond’ from the tops of these windswept hills that I climbed with joy as a boy. For seven years I went to schools in the shadow of Pendle Hill, which George Fox climbed in 1652 shortly after the devastating English civil war. On top of the hill, looking north to the distant Lune Valley where my mother was born, Fox had a mystical vision that led to the founding of the Quaker movement. I have been up Pendle Hill three times in his footsteps to think
and ponder.

Stories of Quakers

Although I grew up a Roman Catholic, I heard stories about the Quakers from my agnostic mother, my uncle (a Church of England priest), and a head teacher, who was a Methodist. All spoke with respect and admiration of the Quakers. My mother, who was suspicious of religion, was unreserved in her admiration of the Quakers. My uncle, her brother, wrote a three-volume work on the northern English Quakers. I remember his explanation of how women and disinherited sons (the first son inherited the farm) were attracted to the message of radical human equality of early Quaker preachers.

Our head teacher, Mr Nicholson, took us one day to Sawley Meeting House, which was a mile from the school and the only Friends Meeting house with a view of Pendle Hill. As an adult on holiday I have been back to Sawley Meeting with my family to listen, in the silence, with the small gathering of Friends.

Further north, in the nearby village of Newton, two-and-a-half miles away from our home, John Bright, the Victorian Quaker and parliamentary reformer, had attended school. There is still a Quaker graveyard up the back lane from Newton, although the old Meeting house is now a private home. But in the silence of hedgerow and fields, interrupted by curlew and lapwing bird song, you can hear, if you listen, that Spirit that spoke earlier to women and men who joined the Quakers with hope and expectation of a better world.

Experiences of war

My Catholic Dad had been a soldier for seven years in the second world war and experienced unspeakable things. His troubled mind and heart created crises, struggle and pain for my mother, my three brothers and me growing up. It was not until I was sixteen that I began to understand that it was Dad’s experiences of war that were the cause our family’s pain. Then I, too, began to have suspicions about war, the military, nationalism and empire.

So, I grew up in original Quaker country and grew to admire the Friends’ stance on war and peacemaking, their work against slavery, for human rights and for prison reform. There is ‘that of God’ in everyone and Quakers are very practical about that. My family moved to Slaidburn village, one-and-a-quarter miles further up the valley from Newton, when I was eighteen. It was a bigger village and had a war memorial. There are lots of names on the war memorial from the first world war. Some of the family names I knew. I went to school with them, or knew them as neighbours: Bleazard, Carr and so on. Every time I pass the war memorial I feel the pain, the suffering, the waste of lives and the stupidity of war. In total, over a hundred countries in Africa, America, Asia, Australasia and Europe were involved in the first world war.

Seventeen million died and twenty million were wounded. It was one of the deadliest conflicts of all time. Among the dead were 117,000 Americans. An estimated fifty million died from Spanish flu at the end of the war, an epidemic that was exacerbated by wartime conditions. The first world war led to the second, and then I am into my own family’s pain…

Leaving the Pennines

I left the valley I grew up in, said ‘goodbye’ to Pendle Hill and went to university. I worked in the US and Germany in the summers, and then again in Germany after I graduated. I became a school teacher, married an American – Jewell – and together we worked as teachers in Japan for two years. It is significant to have worked in two countries that were at war with my country in the second world war.

In 1998 I began working for the Community of Christ at their international headquarters in Independence, Missouri, near Kansas City. My wife is from Independence, president Harry S Truman’s hometown. My job was to help coordinate peace and justice ministries for the whole church worldwide. Community of Christ is not a historic peace church, but now repents of earlier violence and embraces a peace mission. Quakers and Mennonites continuously informed my work. In 2013, as the centenary of the first world war approached, my friend Matt Naylor became the president and CEO of the National World War I Museum and Memorial in Kansas City. Matt is a humanitarian and a very able administrator. We had a church relationship and since he is from Australia we also had a British Commonwealth connection. He was open to a conference at the museum on resistance, dissent and conscientious objectors in the first world war.

Conscience and conflict

I knew the story of two Anabaptist Hutterites who died as conscientious objectors at Fort Leavenworth in 1918, just fifty minutes from the museum. So, in early January 2014, Hutterite educators, Mennonite scholars, an editor from Plough Publishing, and Quaker activists and historians met by conference call and in person to form a coalition and to start planning a conference/symposium that will be held at the National World War I Museum on 19-22 October 2017. This year is the one hundredth anniversary of the entrance of the US into the first world war.

Scholars and activists will tell stories that include the Quaker founding of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the American Friends Service Committee and the work of British Quakers in the first world war. We will end the international conference with a memorial service outside the old Fort Leavenworth hospital, where the two Hutterites died. We will remember them and all the conscientious objectors who suffered in Fort Leavenworth and elsewhere. And we will listen in a time of silence for what we need to do in our day about war, violence, and violations of human dignity. At least two British Quakers will be joining us in Kansas City. Jane Dawson and Simon Colbeck will be sharing stories about British Quaker experiences in the first world war. We welcome others from the United Kingdom.

Life has come full circle. The Voice still speaks on the wind and people still hear – whether it is on Pendle Hill in the English Pennines or across the prairies of the American Midwest in Kansas City.

Andrew, recently retired, continues to serve voluntarily through Community of Christ in both the USA and Europe.

Further information: www.theworldwar.org/mutedvoices

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