Eye - 24 November 2023

From Beautiful bunting to Quirky Quaker monikers

Beautiful bunting

Spirituality and creative expression were highlighted in a recent display by Friends in Skipton Meeting.

A ‘festival of yarn and woolly creativity’ is held annually in Skipton and several Quakers in the Local Meeting joined with members of the Grassington Peace Group in staffing a stall there in September.

They told Eye: ‘In addition to sharing information about aids which enable people to continue their creativity as their dexterity and eyesight diminishes, it provided an opportunity to talk with those attending about the spiritual aspects of craft work. This prompted a number of enquiries regarding the location of the Meeting house and the time of Meeting for Worship.’

They added: ‘In the months leading up to the show, the organisers encourage participants to produce knitted or crochet bunting to decorate the sheds, circulating a different pattern each year. This year for the first time it was suggested that lettering could be added to create words such as “knit – wool – sheep – weave – spin – smile.” Skipton Friends decorated their stand with wording that illustrated the spiritual aspects of craft work: “peace – joy – cooperation – friendship – stillness – calm.”’

But this beautiful bunting has a life beyond Yarndale! Gil Skidmore, of Skipton Meeting, told Eye that it has been mounted for display in the Meeting house – and shared this photo of the colourful result!

Good for a laugh

There’s an elderly Friend in Penarth
Who will get up to tricks in his bath.
With the plugs and the soaps
He invents periscopes
It is naughty but good for a laugh.

Alec Davison

Quirky Quaker monikers

Once upon a time, could you tell a Quaker just by how they were introduced? Well, research into Quaker decorative arts has uncovered some extraordinary Quaker names from the seventeenth and eighteenth century.

Isabella Rosner’s thesis was titled: ‘“Women Professing Godliness with Good Works”: British and American Quaker Women’s Decorative Arts Before Ackworth and Westtown, 1650-1800.’

After three-and-a-half-years of original research, she shared the cream of the crop on Twitter and it went viral!

Extraordinary, weird, odd… many adjectives have been used to describe these names. But how ‘odd’ could these names really be? Well, here are just a handful that caught Eye’s eye:

Barb Bee
Charity Jolly
Discipline Matthews
Experience Cuppage
God Blessed
Humble Thatcher
Obedience Waring
Patience Fish
Revolution Sixsmith
Silence Williams.

Isabella Rosner spoke with Thee Quaker podcast in September about her research and about how this list proved exceptionally popular when she shared it in May.

By the time the podcast aired it had been seen by 6.4 million people!

Sourced from records of births, marriages and deaths, along with Meeting minutes, Isabella emphasises that many Quaker names she came across were ‘boring’. This list wasn’t representative, but ‘every so often I would come across a name that charmed me, either because it was a sentence in itself… or it was a name I’d never heard before’.

Isabella speaks about how she handled becoming a viral sensation, reflects on how Quakers and non-Quakers reacted to the list, and explores some of the surprising things that the needlework examples she studied can tell us about the women who crafted them and the society they lived in.

You can hear the whole episode at https://bit.ly/TheeQuakerNames and see all ninety names at https://bit.ly/RosnerQuakerNames.

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