Camel and horse team pull a supply cart, Buzuluk warehouse circa 1921-22. Photo: © 2014 The Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Britain.
Eye - 05 December 2014
From camels to comfort
Camels in the catalogues
Fascinating photographs from the archive of the Friends Emergency and War Victims Relief Committee have been given some tender loving care during a recent cataloguing project.
The images show aspects of relief work carried out across Europe and Russia during and after world war one. The relief work was undertaken by the Friends Emergency and War Victims Relief Committee and its predecessors, the Friends War Victims Relief Committee and the Friends Emergency Committee.
Lisa McQuillan, deputy archivist at Friends House library, shared ‘some intriguing highlights’ with Eye.
‘Among the photographs of conditions in famine-hit Russia in 1921-1922, some of them harrowing, are some marvellous shots of camels drawing carts full of food and medical supplies – horses were in very short supply.’
The fifteen-month project, led by project archivist Jane Kirby and funded by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, has seen over 100 volumes and 100 boxes, including a huge number of photographs, listed and described on the library’s online catalogue: (http://bit.ly/LibraryFEWVRC).
Visitors to Friends House can currently view some of the striking images, along with archive material and museum objects, in a display in the library and ground floor corridor. However, Friends from further afield can also explore this historical record, Lisa explained: ‘if you can’t make it to Friends House, “World War I centenary: responding with compassion” is an accompanying online exhibition featuring highlights from the collection (www.quaker.org.uk/WWI-Responding-with-compassion).’
The plot thickens
Well done eagle-eyed readers – you have risen to the occasion and Sibford Gower Friends’ mysterious Meeting house (‘Calling all sleuths’, Eye – 21 November) has been identified!
Several Friends swiftly spotted that the photo is none other than that of Pickering Meeting in Yorkshire. However, the picture’s Pickering connection has puzzled Sibford Gower Friends.
Zoë Connor explains: ‘I had a call from Elaine Rock and we had a chat about it because this has all come about because Judith Weeks is writing the testimony to the life of Margaret Le Mare and the picture was hers.
‘She died in March, aged 107, and now we ask, did Margaret have a link with Pickering Meeting? Elaine asked at Meeting on Sunday and no one can shed any light on this, but they did trawl through the visitors books for some forty years.
‘It could, of course, be that all those in the know are also no longer with us… However, does anyone now know why Margaret Le Mare had a picture of Pickering Meeting house in her possession?’
Comfort
Jenny and Laurie Andrews alerted Eye to a Quaker comment that appeared in the Guardian’s interview with actor Jim Broadbent on 27 November.
He talks about his parents, who were pacifists who ran a repertory theatre out of a converted Lincolnshire church, and mentions his time at the Quaker boarding school Leighton Park.
He adds: ‘Quakers are bright and clever people. I mean, of course, I’m not religious. But if I were, that is where I would go for my spiritual comfort.’
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