“The Human Eye” Friends Temperance Union lantern slide, circa 1900-1910. Photo: Reproduced courtesy of the Library of the Religious Society of Friends.
Eye - 13 June 2014
From archive delving to historical sights
Peering into the past Bibliophiles and bookworms have a new way of unearthing Friendly treasures. A new online catalogue of Archive and Library collections has been launched by the Library at Friends House. It is the first time that descriptions of manuscript and archive material will be available online.
Tabitha Driver, printed books librarian, told the Friend: ‘Adding archive and manuscript collections means that users anywhere in the world can now find out about the Library’s unique holdings of official archives and unpublished papers of Friends, dating from the seventeenth-century onwards.
‘The catalogue includes archives of most Yearly Meeting committees and their predecessors (such as the Slave Trade Committee), associated organisations (such as the Friends Ambulance Unit), and records of London Meetings, as well as manuscripts (such as Abiah Darby’s journal, or the papers of the Lloyd family).’
Tabitha has found some interesting searching possibilities: ‘We did a search on Eye and came up with this record for a lantern slide catalogued as part of our recent “Temperance Project”…
‘Find out more about what is included here: www.quaker.org.uk/search-catalogue’.
Historical Quaker spotting in the City
Some surprising Quaker connections cropped up during a recent outing in the City. London Friend Richard Pickvance got in touch to tell Eye all about it.
He writes: ‘Peter Smith, a qualified City of London guide married to a member of Blackheath Meeting, took a party from Blackheath on a tour of some City churches.
‘After we crossed Gracechurch Street, where one of the earliest London Meeting houses was located, we entered St Olave, Hart Street – “St Ghastly Grim” to Dickens, because of the skulls carved above its entrance gate. A stained glass window in its Lady Chapel commemorates Elizabeth Fry and other women social reformers. This was the church that Samuel Pepys and his wife attended along with his neighbour and colleague, admiral sir William Penn.
‘We ended the tour at All Hallows-by-the-Tower. In the undercroft museum a register records the baptism of the admiral’s son, William Penn the Quaker. The church’s font is recent, because the vicar sent the previous font to a church in Philadelphia – a reminder that Penn was originally baptised an Anglican.’
The turn about the City also turned Richard’s mind to a tale of the tenacity of Friends.
‘The City churches (re)built after the Great Fire were the work of Christopher Wren and others from his office, such as Nicholas Hawksmoor and Robert Hooke. I cannot resist recounting one of Wren’s less celebrated achievements. As surveyor of the king’s works, in 1670 he carried out Charles II’s order to pull down Horsleydown Meeting House in Southwark, the home of an intolerably thriving Meeting. Undaunted, the Meeting gathered in the ruins on the following First Days. Next year they rebuilt the Meeting house, bigger and better.
‘Quakers 1, Establishment 0.’
