Dorking Friends hold Bertha Bracey exhibition
Quakers in Dorking have held an exhibition about a Friends' role in Kindertransport
More than sixty visitors came to an exhibition exploring the Kindertransport at Dorking Meeting House.
The event, on 15 September, was part of the Heritage Open Weekend ‘Extraordinary Women’ theme and centred on Quaker Bertha Bracey’s role in the second world war rescue of Jewish children.
Tara Craig, an attender of Dorking Meeting, told the Friend: ‘The exhibition told the story of Birmingham-born Bertha’s many years of work on behalf of refugees, from the 1920s at the Quaker International Centre in Vienna, where she focused on post-first world war relief and reconstruction, to the years after the second world war, when she was part of the Allied Control Commission, working with refugees in Germany.’
She added: ‘Visitors also learnt how she helped run Dovercourt Camp, a former holiday camp near Harwich that provided accommodation for refugee children, and of how, as the war drew to a close, Bertha arranged for the RAF to fly 300 orphans – in a bomber – from Theresienstadt concentration camp in German-occupied Czechoslovakia to a reception centre near Windermere.’
Comments
Bracey was one of the greatest Quakers of the last century. The dedication of the sculpture to her in Friends House reads as follows:
To honour Bertha Bracey (1893–1989)
who gave practical leadership to Quakers in quietly rescuing and re-settling thousands of Nazi victims and lone children between 1933 and 1948
But this wording is sexist. Would the same terms been used about a man? Bracey’s leadership wasn’t just ‘practical’; it was administrative and intellectual. I don’t understand what is meant by ‘quietly’. She was busy communicating by all possible means. She didn’t advertise her work widely but that would have been to put it at risk. Let’s not patronise our great figures.
By frankem51 on 6th October 2018 - 18:47
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