Eye - 15 April 2016
From unkindness to April fools
Being unkind to Quakers
Could being nasty to Quakers be a way of improving the country’s prospects?
This unusual strategy caught the attention of Judith Mason, of Banbury Meeting, whilst she was reading Bill Bryson’s The Road to Little Dribbling.
During his travels in Shropshire Bill Bryson paid a visit to the Darby houses, built by a family of Quaker ironmasters in the eighteenth century.
Once there, he became unexpectedly absorbed in a book by Arthur Raistrick called Quakers in Science and Industry.
He reflected: ‘I hadn’t realised it, but Quakers in the Darbys’ day were a bullied and downtrodden minority in Britain. Excluded from conventional pursuits like politics and academia, they became big in industry and commerce, particularly, for some reason, in banking and the manufacture of chocolate.
‘The Barclays and Lloyds banking families and the Cadburys, Frys and Rowntrees of chocolate renown were all Quakers. They and many others made Britain a more dynamic and wealthy place entirely as a consequence of being treated shabbily by it. It had never occurred to me to be unkind to a Quaker, but if that’s what it takes to get the country back on its feet again, I am prepared to consider it.’
Rediscovering Bagpuss
Beloved stop-motion animators Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin are being celebrated in an exhibition, Clangers, Bagpuss & Co, at the V&A Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green, London, until October.
Their children’s classics - including Noggin the Nog, The Clangers and Bagpuss – were brought to life in the backyard of Firmin’s farmhouse home. Oliver, who was a Quaker, wrote and narrated the stories.
V&A curator Alica Sage told the Guardian: ‘There’s something about the characters: they’re so simple but there’s something so real and good about them. They have an eternal quality… At one point Major Clanger invents a plastic-making machine and they’re being overwhelmed by plastic objects filling their living space, which they can only get rid of by stuffing them into the Froglets’ magic bucket. This was in the 1960s, just as the plastic industry was really beginning, and it was really very prescient. And Bagpuss finds lost objects and repairs and recycles them: such a lovely message.’
Letters from the past
A Friend in Dorking shared two missives with Eye following the special edition of the Friend on conscientious objection (26 February).
The letters were penned by Bernard Ireland Macalpine, known as ‘Bim’, in 1916. Bim served with the Friends War Victims Relief Committee during the first world war and had long-standing connections with Quakerism as a result (see ‘Bim’s war’, 21 November 2014).
In the first of his letters, addressed to his aunt, Bim related the experience of observing one of the debates on compulsory service in the House of Commons from ‘the little place under the gallery, which is the best place of all’.
The second is addressed to the prime minister, Herbert Asquith. In it Bim writes of the exemption for conscientious objectors provided in the Military Service Bill. He said: ‘I would wish to acknowledge the effort made to meet those who, like myself, will feel compelled to claim that exemption; but at the same time, may I make it respectfully clear that my objection is not to combatant service but to service of any kind in the prosecution of war…
‘Will you allow me at the same time to ask you to believe that it is with sincere regret that I find myself compelled to separate myself from the nation at a time like this. Judged by the best moral standards to which the nation corporately has as yet attained, I believe this war to be a just and necessary one. But I find myself bound by what I feel to be a higher morality, applicable as much to national as to individual action, which forbids war as a means of settling differences.
‘That the quarrel is in this case a just one makes no difference to the binding nature of that Christian morality, though I fear it may increase the seeming disloyalty in the eyes of those whose leadership I would only too gladly follow.’
April fool
The Friend’s April fool announcement of a new grey-only office dress code (see page 2, 1 April) has prompted some giggle-worthy notes from readers.
John Russell, of Salisbury Meeting, made the office chuckle with: ‘The day I read of your new dress code I was delighted to find, in my local bookshop, a book on the very same subject. Sadly, its title had misled me somewhat and I found that I had wasted my money… mind you… that said…’
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