Eye - 12 October 2018
From silences to spaces
Silences
What happens during ‘silent’ worship? Jane Short shared a flavour of her experiences with Eye after being inspired by her time in Meetings at Canterbury to pen six haikus:
Silence streams and flows
Settles, drifts, and soft enfolds
Covers and completes.
Slowly it arrives
A cool grey mist of peace
I step in with joy.
From the cathedral
Bells peal, tumble, leap and chime
Here, we are silent.
Today a dove called
Children sang on the river
Silence was alive.
A stormy morning
Heavy hearted, waiting here
Silence lifts me up.
Electric silence
Shimmering and glowing blue
Draws us into light.
Found in the footnotes
Efforts to ‘rescue notable women from the footnotes of history’ have unearthed a Quaker connection. A story in the Guardian on 22 September drew the attention of Alison Tyas, of Craven and Keighley Area Meeting.
Alison told Eye: ‘The RHS (Royal Horticultural Society) has been looking for a “Miss Harrison”, who came top in their 1898 exams but was not awarded the prize because she was a woman.’ The discovery was made whilst the RHS sifted its archives and information about the fate of the green-fingered ‘Miss Harrison’ is being sought.
Happily, Alison can shed light on the mystery: ‘This person was our grandmother, Olive Mary Harrisson – a lifelong Friend who lived in Essex and went to Saffron Waldon before going on to Swanley to study horticulture. She was at Swanley (Kent) because the Essex horticultural college did not take women. This much the family did know but I don’t think she even told her children about the missed award. Perhaps she never knew. She received a medal which she was very proud of and is still in the family.
‘She then worked at Northfield Manor as gardener to “Young Mr Cadbury” as she called him. After she married in 1904 she never did any more professional gardening but did instil in her children and grandchildren a love of all things horticultural.’
A die-hard ‘prommer’
As the Last Night of the Proms got off to a rousing start on 8 September, eagle-eyed Friends may have clocked a clerk making an appearance at a key moment. Clare Scott Booth, who will be clerk of Yearly Meeting 2019, was one of two ‘die-hard prommers’ chosen to place a chaplet on the bust of Proms founder Henry Wood.
Restricted views and versatile spaces
Just because a building is well-endowed with years doesn’t mean it can’t be surprisingly versatile, as Friends at Garstang Meeting discovered this summer.
Local Friend Daphne Sanders shared a story with Eye that shows how creative thinking and centuries-old architecture can be combined, when, 200 years after their construction, the hatches between the women’s and men’s rooms in Garstang Meeting House were in use again.
She writes: ‘The occasion… was a public performance of Three Acres and a Cow, which had an unexpectedly large audience.
‘First overspill was two rows on the balcony, then Robin Grey, one of the performers, said spectators could sit on the raised elders bench and the performance would take place in front of it, along with its “washing line”…
‘As more people arrived the hatches were opened and ten Friends watched through them from the Fellowship Room, albeit one or two with “restricted view” as they say in the theatre.’
Three Acres and a Cow is a history of land rights and protest in folk song and story, performed by Robin Grey, Rachel Rose Reid, Tim Ralphs and Roo Bramley, along with local guest performers.
Daphne told Eye that it was ‘hugely appreciated’ by the people in the audience.
‘The story was relevant to our time and place with local issues of fracking, flooding partly consequent of land management on the high fells, and the ringing of Garstang by housing developments on the green belt.
‘Our struggles today for the right use of our land are the most recent episode of a very long story. The account struck a chord with some of Preston’s asylum seekers who were in the audience and carefully recorded, with photos on their phones, the historical episodes described on notes hung out along the “washing line”.’
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