Left: The children share their owl-themed artwork. Right: Libby Ferguson with owl, watched by Frances Hill as doorkeeper. Photo: Gary Kershaw.
Eye - 19 September 2014
From feathery Friends to Friendly connections
Feathered attenders
How do you get families to come to Meeting?
Andrew Backhouse got in touch with Eye to show Wilmslow Meeting’s unusual approach:
‘We have a few children who come fairly irregularly but one parent has already brought a baby owl to Meeting, and offered to bring six owls to show the children and adults.
‘So, the grandchildren and nephews were keen to be invited and it was intriguing to see how gripped the adults were too by, firstly, Libby [Ferguson], our owl handler, talking with the Children’s Meeting, and then presenting the owls to us all.’
Thirty-four Friends met that day, including nine children – ‘four of whom we had not seen before’.
Connections, coincidences and ironies
The bird bath donated to Friends by Bryant & May Ltd, now settled in the garden of Forest Hill Meeting (see Eye, 29 August), has prompted a number of letters in recent weeks.
The story also sparked ‘a succession of other Quaker connections’ in the mind of Hannah Kent. She writes:
‘By the time of the Match Girls’ strike in 1888 – prompted by poor working conditions which led to a variety of health problems including “phossy jaw” from exposure to phosphorous – the firm was run by Wilberforce Bryant, son of William.
‘The factory had previously moved to Bow and is now incorporated into a large housing complex known as The Match Quarter. In 1878, Wilberforce Bryant had built a large house, known as The Gables, in (then) six acres of ground by the railway in Surbiton (Kingston on Railway) and had his own gate on to the platform. After the strike, he and his wife decamped to grander premises at Stoke Park in Buckinghamshire, further from the seat of income and industrial unrest, and the Surbiton house passed into other hands.
‘By a stroke of Friendly coincidence, in 1926, through the gift of £1,000 from Quaker philanthropist Thomas Wall, who had funded other adult education projects (sausages and ice cream, rather than matches, being the source of his income), the house was bought by the expanding Residential College for Working Women, founded in 1920 in Beckenham. The college was renamed Hillcroft College, and so The Gables was no more.
‘By further Friendly coincidence, I, a member of Kingston Meeting, worked there for twenty years as the first professional librarian in the college’s history. Towards the end of my time there, some imaginative basic skills courses were developed which included a visit to the Match Quarter.
‘There was a neat irony about the way in which a house built on the proceeds of nineteenth-century women working in appalling conditions became an enabling environment for twenty-first century women in the process of change and empowerment.’
