Eye - 20 May 2016

From making an entrance to bourgeois respectability

Making an entrance

Smiles were seen blossoming on the faces of those passing Northampton’s Quaker Meeting House recently.

‘A ninety-one-year-old Friend arrived at Meeting with a flat tyre on her mobility scooter,’ Liz Redfern, a local Friend, told Eye.

‘Luckily she has a recovery contact, and look what they sent as a vehicle! Even the operator said he hadn’t carried a scooter before, and took photos to show his children.’

The rest is silence

Judi Dench spoke about her faith in a recent two-page interview in the Church Times. In the article, entitled ‘The rest is silence: Judi Dench on being an actor and a Quaker’, she said: ‘My faith is everything, but I don’t generally talk about it.’

She also shed light on how she came to Quakerism after attending the Mount School in York, ‘because I liked the uniform. I used to see the girls with their white and blue uniforms and I thought “that’s where I want to go.” Luckily, I got in…

‘We had to go to Meeting on Sundays and, with our brother school, on Wednesday. One Sunday of the term we could go anywhere we liked, so I knew just about every place of worship in York. I found that, when it came to those Sundays, I knew I was much better, and felt in the right place, in the Meeting house…

‘The discipline you have to have to use the Meeting is very good for the restless soul… The Meeting is where I get the silence. I hope I get better at carrying it over.’

What if…?

An interesting conundrum was spied by a Friend in the novel Life after Life by Kate Atkinson:

‘Don’t you wonder sometimes,’ Ursula said, ‘if just one small thing had been changed in the past, I mean, if Hitler had died at birth, or if someone had kidnapped him as a baby and brought him up in – I don’t know, say, a Quaker household – surely things would be different.’

‘Do you think Quakers would kidnap a baby?’ Ralph asked mildly.

‘Well, if they knew what was going to happen they might.’

‘But nobody knows what’s going to happen. And anyway they might have turned out just the same, Quakers or no Quakers…’

Bourgeois respectability

The gleam of a further Friend-focused nugget caught the eye of Martin Hartog, of Thornbury Meeting, in George Macaulay Trevelyan’s English Social History of 1942.

Trevelyan wrote the following in passages relating to the middle of the eighteenth century: ‘Among other ways of dedicating life to God and man was the quiet work of the Quakers. They left to Wesley the task of popular revivalism, wherein they themselves had laboured so fervently in the days of their founder. They had now settled into bourgeois respectability, redeemed by the spirit of love that permeated with its pure influence the exclusive but philanthropic society of Friends.

‘Early in the reign of George II they were already famous for their knack of prospering in honestly conducted business; the poet Matthew Green, who died in 1737, had written of the Quakers and their unorthodox doctrines:

They, who have lands, and safe bank stock,
With faith so founded on a rock
May give a rich invention ease
And construe scripture as they please

‘The Friends had ceased to be a scandal to Mr Worldly Wiseman, and had become an accepted national institution.’

The historian had more than a passing familiarity with Friends as, in addition to his comments in English Social History, he published a biography of Quaker politician John Bright in 1913. The MP’s faith had shaped his politics and Trevelyan commented on ‘the advantage of his Quaker training, his restraint, his natural good taste that only hardened in the glowing furnace of his passion…’

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