Newbury Meeting house and garden. Photo: Courtesy of Carolyn Fletcher.
Eye - 10 July 2015
From quaking to glitches
Quaking Quakers
Friends in Newbury are under threat from redevelopment plans for the town.
In an article sent to their local paper, entitled ‘Quakers quaking over redevelopment plans’, Friends draw residents’ attention to the potential loss of the Meeting house if redevelopment plans go ahead.
Friends write: ‘Quakers have been worshipping in Newbury for some 350 years, and have been in their current location since 1955 when they bought the Highfield Avenue house and garden. The old Quaker burial ground lies just to the front of the building under an old Horse Chestnut tree.’
The Meeting house is also in use by around fifteen local community groups: ‘Where else will they find the privacy, tranquillity, convenience and reasonable hiring rates that Quakers offer? Several of these groups help people with addiction or mental health challenges, and the Quakers support some of them financially.’
Friends have invited local residents to the Meeting house for tea and cake on 11 July, whilst the Market Street Community Planning weekend is held at the council offices.
Pink purls and Pride
A piece of pink peace scarf appeared at the first Pride event held in Portsmouth in fourteen years.
Sarah Coote, of Portsmouth Meeting, told Eye that Friends took some of the anti-Trident pink knitting along to the parade. She said: ‘Groups from a wide section of the local community participated, including theatres, the Scouts and grammar school, and everything went calmly and happily. Portsmouth Friends set up a gazebo, well-secured against the onshore breeze, and enjoyed conversations with many visitors, distributing leaflets and copies of We are but witnesses, explaining the Quaker campaign for equal marriage’.
The scarf was originally created for the Wool Against Weapons direct action protest, where seven-miles worth of pink knitting was unrolled between the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) sites of Aldermaston and Burghfield (see ‘Friends join scarf protest’, 15 August 2014).
Glimpsing a glitch
An eagle-eyed Friend called River~~, from Central Manchester Meeting, spotted a slip-up: ‘On 12 June, under the headline “A glimpse of the past” you quoted from “the 12 January 2017 edition of the Friend”. Do you have access to a Tardis, or was this a delayed manifestation of the Y2k bug?’
Alas, the Friend office is Tardis-less and this was instead an erroneous clacking of the keyboard. The edition referred to was in fact dated 1917. Our apologies.
