The BBC van outside Sutton Meeting in 1980. Photo: Courtesy of Gordon Steele.
Eye - 09 December 2016
From radio silence to trying
Radio Silence
A diligent diarist has delved into the past to remind Friends of an early radio broadcast.
Eye (11 November) related the reminiciences of ‘the first broadcast of Quaker worship… nearly forty years ago’ by David Winter, former head of religious broadcasting at the BBC.
However, Patricia Steel (née Holland), of Sutton Meeting, remembers another live radio broadcast of a Meeting for Worship; one that, as a twenty-four-year-old in Kingston Monthly Meeting, she detailed in her diary on 25 November 1956.
Patricia and her husband Gordon told Eye: ‘Rehearsals went on for several weeks, during which two studios were tried out and found not to be quiet enough! Early on the appointed Sunday the group of around fifteen Friends gathered with a degree of nervousness in the basement of Broadcasting House. Pat recorded in her diary “We had a very good Meeting, centred on the power of the Love of God and we all felt that it had been a very moving experience”.’
A recording and transcript of a more recent broadcast, from January 1980 at Sutton Meeting, has also been unearthed from the Meeting’s archive.
Patricia and Gordon recall: ‘The table in the centre of the room was wired up with four microphones and a red ON AIR sign on the wall and a BBC technician was behind a screen in one corner. George Gorman occupied the library and said in his introduction ‘You can’t broadcast silence’ – so gentle music, including Edward Elgar’s ‘Serenade for Strings’, could be heard by listeners (but not Friends) between pieces of ministry. In order to minister, Friends were asked to stand at a microphone, pause briefly, and then speak.’
Ministry included: ‘We meet here every Sunday in a well of silence and sometimes the rope that we tie to our buckets is too short and the bucket doesn’t reach the water. And sometimes we are too impatient and cannot wait for it to go down to the depths.
‘But when we do wait, then in the silence healing may come, and insight, and whatever we need to live out our daily lives.’
Stamping up a storm
Friends have more than doubled their annual fundraising total at the Quaker Peace & Social Witness (QPSW) Stamp Club this year.
The Club, which has sorted and sold donated stamps to raise funds for QPSW work for over fifty years, has raised nearly £9,500 – smashing its previous best of £4,500.
Allan Whitaker, the current Stamp Club organiser, told Eye that this unprecendented jump was ‘mainly from auctions of a very generous bequest which we sent to Stanley Gibbons Ltd as twenty-five lots’. He added: ‘We would like to thank all Meetings and individual people in the UK, the Channel Isles, the Isle of Man, Eire, Australia, New Zealand, Spain and the USA who have sent us stamps and albums.’
There has been a ‘considerable increase’ in the number of stamps being donated to the Club, which is now seeking extra volunteers.
Allan explained that help is needed for five or six days a year to ‘sort the stamps and albums into those which will be sent to a future auction and the remainder, which are sold to a stamp dealer’. Intrigued Eye readers can find out more from Allan by writing to 62 Uplands Avenue, Hitchin, Herts SG4 9NL or calling 01462 451708.
We can try
Creative Friend Kenneth Walch, from Chichester, shared a thought-provoking poetic penning with Eye:
Come pretty death and lead me hence away.
I’ll save that prayer until a later day.
I’ve things to do before I’m free to die,
We may not change the world but we can try.
