Left: Flowerpot Friends from Settle. Right: A George Fox glove puppet from Germany. Photo: Left: Courtesy of Marie Lebacq. Right: Courtesy of Kerstin Mangels.
Eye - 02 August 2024
Q-Eye dips into the archive, with extracts from the 2nd August 1875 edition, and showcases Quakerly creativity – with George Fox flower-pot people, and a Foxy glove puppet from Germany!
Finding more Foxes!
‘Fox’s finery’ (5 July), featuring a doll dressed up as George Fox, prompted Kerstin Mangels, from Germany, to share a glove puppet likeness (above)! The dashing figure was made by Kirsten Stuhr, from Berlin, and Kerstin told Eye that ‘Friends are in the process of making a short film with him’.
Meanwhile Marie Lebacq, from Settle Meeting, told Eye about a garden-based depiction.
She writes: ‘Settle has a flowerpot festival every year, which brings in visitors far and wide. Each year the garden of Settle Friends Meeting House hosts an exhibit. This year has given us a lighthearted opportunity for outreach through portraying George Fox and Margaret Fell with lifesized flowerpot figures, holding four important Quaker testimonies, Truth, Simplicity, Peace and Equality.’
On this day
A change to our usual dive into the archive, Friends, as the 2 August edition of 1875 offered up plenty of windows into Friends’ lives, but not many giggles.
Firstly, Eye spied an unfamiliar section, appearing just ahead of the births, marriages and deaths. ‘Movements of ministering Friends’ charted, as the title suggests, the progress of over a dozen Friends who were travelling in the ministry across Britain.
A less familiar term to many contemporary Friends, ‘travelling in the ministry’ has its roots in the early days of Quakerism – when Friends would feel called to spread Quaker beliefs and visit other Friends beyond their own Meetings. This was the lifeblood of the Society, as it kept communities connected.
Then the letters page caught Eye’s eye – a rich seam to mine for vivid voices! One such letter addressed an issue that may be on contemporary Friends’ minds: ‘It is very much to be desired that attention should be drawn to the very defective ventilation of our meeting-houses. Now that the [mechanical ventilation] system of Mr. Tobin has been introduced with such success into the Leeds Court House and St. George’s Hospital, there is no reason why it should not be applied to our places of worship. Yesterday, at the London Quarterly Meeting, the atmosphere was most oppressive and exhausting, several had to leave the meeting, and many, probably, would feel the effects for days.’
Then an eloquent and impassioned plea for the rights of animals seemed to beg to be shared. ‘A wholesome indignation has been aroused by these disclosures [about vivisection], not unmixed with surprise that a practise so un-English in its cold-hearted cruelty to the defenceless, and so debasing to the moral nature of those habituated to it, should have taken root in our country. But I fear the cause lies near home… Are children taught that they are accountable for the happiness or misery of the creatures placed under their care? – that they are entrusted to us, not merely to minister to our comfort and amusement, but, as humble friends and dependents, to draw out the lovely qualities of gentleness, mercy, and thoughtful care?’
