A close-up of a Quaker Tapestry panel. Photo: © Quaker Tapestry.
Eye - 06 April 2018
From a new marriage tapestry panel to finding Friends in film
A new marriage panel
Yealand Meeting is creating a new Quaker Tapestry panel on marriage, local Friend Thelma Holt has told Eye.
Keith Triplett, an organiser for the project, was interviewed for the local Area Meeting newsletter and talked about the background to the idea: ‘I went into the Meeting house cafe at Kendal after a visit to the dentist. Bridget Guest, who is the Quaker Tapestry manager, approached me with this idea.
‘She told me that the Tapestry trustees would like to support a panel representing Quaker decisions leading to the revised chapter sixteen on marriage procedure of Quaker faith & practice published in 2016. She wondered if I would be interested in getting a group together at Yealand.’
The project, Keith explains, has drawn in other Friends: ‘I approached Ray Green, who is a member attending Yealand Meeting, (an artist and poet), to ask him if he would do the design work. He visited the Tapestry and spoke with Bridget. Ray has agreed to be executive designer. Bridget will be our technical advisor and Michael Booth our Friends House contact for reference information.’
The panel, Keith points out, will not be a ‘gay’ one: ‘It will be about inclusivity.’ He hopes the new panel will ‘include as many Area Meeting Friends as would like to help and support us, especially young people, and particularly to sew when the design process is complete. Inclusion of relatives and friends of Friends would make this an outreach experience’.
A design group is meeting each month. Lancashire Central and North Area Meeting children are to work on the lower portion of the panel and there will be regular workshops.
Wordplay at Woodbrooke
At the Nontheist Friends Network conference on 10 March the evening entertainment included a limerick-writing exercise.
David Boulton, author of The Trouble with God, was present wearing a surgical boot following a bad ankle break he had suffered while hill walking after Christmas.
Michael Wright, of Middlesbrough Meeting, contacted Eye with a witty ditty prompted by the plight of poor David and his boot:
There was an old Quaker of Dent,
Whose ankle got horribly bent.
He’d tripped on a clod
And said “oh my God!”
But that wasn’t quite what he meant.
Finding films featuring Friends
The portrayal of Quakers in films (9 March) has prompted John Lampen to contact Eye.
He points out that High Noon and Angel and the Badman are not alone in featuring Quakers as characters on the silver screen.
John writes: ‘Accounts of Quaker portraits in film usually overlook The Deep Six (1958), in which Alan Ladd’s character is called up to be a naval gunnery officer during the second world war.’
In one scene an aircraft approaches the ship he is on and he is unable to escape the influence of his Quaker upbringing.
John explains: ‘He finds himself unable to give the order to fire (but the target turns out to be an American plane, so that was okay, wasn’t it?), but it means he’s “sent to Coventry” by the crew until he proves his courage by throwing an unexploded bomb overboard.
‘In the end, like Grace Kelly in High Noon, he does kill a group of enemy soldiers to protect a wounded friend.’
John gives the film a mixed review: ‘The film is clichéd and never quite decides where it stands on the question of using violence in a good cause.
‘But it does challenge the notion that pacifism is a form of cowardice. There’s a good plot summary and comment on it at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The Deep_Six.’
