Clockwise from top left: Southampton Meeting. Welwyn Garden City Meeting House. Metford Robson and Leo Prit. Malvern wreath. Stockport wreath. Dilys Cluer. Photo: Dorothy Searle. Philip and Margaret Baker. Graham Gosling and Jill Segger. Melanie Jameson. Phoebe Spence. Dilys Cluer.
Eye - 23 November 2018
Respect, remembrance and peace
Friends have been telling Eye how they marked the centenary of the end of the first world war.
On 7 November Friends from Manchester and Warrington Area Meeting sold white poppies outside Central Manchester Meeting House. Ursula Sharma said: ‘We distributed around 400 leaflets over the lunch hour and offered cups of tea or coffee to anyone who wanted to stop and talk with us.’
The Dublin Quaker Peace Committee organised a commemoration, including poetry from the first world war, on 11 November. Friends and passersby were invited to make poppies from white cloth, which were planted in the ground.
Dilys Cluer, a Friend and deputy mayor of the borough of Scarborough, carried a wreath of white poppies. When told she would be laying a wreath she requested that it should include white poppies and ‘was surprised and delighted that the Royal British Legion made the wreath entirely of white poppies, and heartened by the references to peace in the services which I attended’.
Melanie Jameson, of Malvern Meeting, described Friends’ role in the town’s ‘Festival of Remembrance’ and how it ‘enables us to respectfully convey our message to remember all victims of war and to promote peace’.
Graham Gosling and Jill Segger told Eye about laying a white poppy wreath at Bury St Edmunds’ war memorial: ‘A selection of quotations on the theme of peace and war were read out, before a wreath of white poppies was laid on the memorial by Metford Robson and nine-year-old Leo Pirt. This year, on his own initiative, Leo obtained permission to sell white poppies at his primary school.’
Dorothy Searle, of Southampton Meeting, described how white poppies made for the Collateral Damage project became an unusual centrepiece in the Meeting: ‘Some of the poppies had labels commemorating individuals who suffered as a result of war… A Syrian refugee family lives in what was once our warden’s cottage, and we invited them to write a label for their family and friends who are suffering from war now – and they filled the label with names.’
In Stockport poppies created for the project were part of a wreath Friends laid. Phoebe Spence says that the wreath will also be on display at Stockport War Memorial Art Gallery for most of the year.
Quakers in Welwyn Garden Meeting ‘planted’ poppies outside their Meeting house. Philip and Margaret Baker told Eye that a labyrinth was created to mark 100 years since the start of the first world war in 2014: ‘[This year] we embellished it with poppies, mostly white but with some red; some from the Peace Pledge Union, others handmade by local Friends.’
Roger Matthews, of Stratford-upon-Avon Meeting, writes that Quakers held a vigil ‘on Monday 12 November… as a reminder that people continued to suffer and die after the formal end of hostilities’.
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