Dorothy Benyei at Woodbrooke. Photo: Simon Best.
Eye - 1 July 2016
From retracing steps to a slow, stately dance
Friend retraces steps at Woodbrooke
Australians are known for their love of travelling – and age is no barrier when it comes to Quakers.
Last month Australian Friend Dorothy Benyei made a nostalgic visit to the Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre in Birmingham as part of her ninetieth birthday celebrations.
It was Dorothy’s third visit to Woodbrooke. The Melbourne Friend visited in 1991 and in 1994, when she spent three months there as a Woodbrooke student. On her latest visit, Dorothy spent time with Betty Hagglund, project development officer for the centre for postgraduate Quaker studies at Woodbrooke. They found and studied documents from 1994, which featured photos and articles that Dorothy had worked on during her stay.
Musical outreach?
Linda Murray Hale, from Southern Marches Area Meeting, did a double-take when she came across this sign (see below) outside The Vaults pub in Bishops Castle.
Alas, the Paul Parker starring in this ‘rootsy Americana, Folk and Blues’ five-piece band is not the recording clerk of Britain Yearly Meeting, though the group makes up for this lack with not one but two ukulele players.
Plain and voluptuous
The Guardian’s Lyn Gardner referenced Quakerism in her review of the Brighton staging of Neil Bartlett’s play Stella, which has since moved to Hoxton Hall in London.
Stella is about real-life nineteenth century cross-dresser Ernest Boulton, who reinvented himself as Stella. ‘A bright butterfly who lit up the West End’, Stella lived with a Tory MP until she was brought down by scandal.
Sixty-five-year-old Ernest and twenty-one-year-old Stella are the main characters of the play. The show, ‘like so much of [Neil] Bartlett’s work, succeeds in being as plain as a Quaker funeral and yet disconcertingly voluptuous…’
A long tradition
A visit to Gloucester Meeting left one Friend reflecting on historical connections. Antony Barlow, of Sutton Meeting, joined Friends in worship prior to talking about his recent book, He is our cousin, cousin.
He told Eye: ‘As I sat in Meeting… I realised that, with my presence on that day, members of my family had been worshipping in that very building for nearly 200 years.’
Antony also discovered the gravestones of a number of his ancestors at the Meeting, including Jane Bowly, ‘the wife of one of Gloucester’s most eminent citizens, Samuel Bowly, whose lifelong campaign against slavery was widely acknowledged, as was his staunch pacifism… His daughter Martha married Frederick Goodall Cash… [her] youngest daughter Mabel, my grandmother, was born in the city and worshipped there as a young lady and later with her husband John Henry Barlow, the future clerk of Yearly Meeting.
‘I felt humbled and honoured to be part of such a long tradition.’
A slow, stately dance
‘At the still point of the turning world… there the dance is.’
These words from T S Eliot’s ‘Burnt Norton’ have long put Alan Russell, of East Cheshire Area Meeting, in mind of a Quaker Meeting. He told Eye: ‘Thus I felt it quite appropriate when my wife Kathleen, who sometimes overlooks her typos, recently sent round to Friends a document headed “Minuets”.’
