Eye - 15 January 2016

A tale of ships, poetry and smooth-sailing

The banker and the two-masted schooner

Prompted by a painting of a ship, Woodbridge Friends set sail to find out more about an eighteenth-century Quaker poet from their town.

Local Friend Jeremy Greenwood wrote to Eye to tell the tale: ‘After an interval of nearly seventy-five years, Quakers started a regular Meeting for Worship in Woodbridge, Suffolk, in 2009. From April 2011 Meetings have been held weekly in Shire Hall on Market Hill, Woodbridge.’

A visitor at one of the first Meetings there noticed a painting hanging above the gathered Friends. It featured a two-masted ship named Bernard Barton.

‘Bernard Barton spent most of his life in Woodbridge, was a member of Woodbridge Meeting and a poet. He worked for forty years in Alexander’s Bank, a Quaker bank, in Woodbridge. He was a close friend of Edward Fitzgerald and corresponded widely with other poets, among them Robert Southey and Charles Lamb. He was perhaps a finer correspondent than a poet.’

In a fascinating booklet Friends published in September 2015, they quote letters penned by Bernard Barton, including one, following the launch of the boat in 1840, that makes mention of this maritime dedication: ‘I was sailing about Portsmouth harbour, looking at great castles of ships, to which the B.B. was but like a child’s toy, made out of half a walnut-shell…

‘I was asking myself if my vanity would not have been more tickled to have had one of these first-rates bear my name…

‘Of a truth, could the choice have been given me, I should have given my vote, most cordially, for the schooner B.B. at Woodbridge. I have so decided a preference for humbler fame of home growth, awarded by folks that I have lived among for thirty-five years, and am linked to by numberless and nameless ties of neighbourly, social and friendly sympathy. With these feelings thou wilt readily feel and understand that the B.B. is a bit of a pet with me.’

It appears that his relationship with Quakerism wasn’t always smooth-sailing. Ernest Bentham, in his introduction to A House of Letters, wrote: ‘A disciplinary section of the Quakers regarded him with suspicion bred of his rhymes, that reached even to the “Mr” on his brass door-plate, and to an embroidered waistcoat he took to wearing, both of which carnal indulgences he vigorously and triumphantly defended.’

In a letter Bernard wrote to Matilda Betham in 1845 he describes the temptation to attend the ‘unQuakerish locality’ of the theatre and how he ‘could not with decency be the only Quaker there’.

He goes on: ‘But I had a vast curiosity to go; for it is not an ordinary concert, but performed on certain pieces of rock, hewn out of Skiddaw, which struck with some metal instrument, emit sounds of most exquisite sweetness.

‘We have heard sermons from stones, but I never dreamt of going there for music; but we live in a wondrous age for inventions of all sorts; so I, for one, by no means despair of seeing a silken purse made out of a sow’s ear, in defiance of the proverbial wisdom of our ancestors.’

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