Volunteers during a break at the Pardshaw workcamp. Photo: Photo: Dawn Beck.
Eye - 25 October 2013
From elbow grease to celebrating fifty years
Uniting in elbow grease
What can you do when walls need repainting, drains unblocking, windows repairing and a safer kitchen… but funds are scarce?
Form a Quaker workcamp!
Chris and Catherine Thomas and Dawn Beck called some Friends for help when the Pardshaw Young Friends Centre in Cumbria was in need of some tender loving care.
In September the ‘rarely used but much loved’ centre greeted a team of volunteers with their sleeves rolled up and paint brushes at the ready. Andrew Backhouse, of Wilmslow Meeting, got in touch after taking part.
He, and other members of the workcamp, had stayed at the centre before: ‘I first visited in 1979, meeting a wonderful lot of other young Friends and doing some lovely walks too. It is a wonderful place, with fantastic views of the fells, great daffodils and a feeling of peace.
‘A workcamp at a time when I was free, with some I knew, and others I did not seemed a lovely idea. And slapping on Snowcem [exterior waterproof paint] to the walls to bring the place alive was going to be fun when the sun shone – and it did.
‘We got the walls done in very quick time, and a major drain dug out and replaced. Others cleared the kitchen to replace the flooring and put a fireproof barrier to the sleeping area. The doors got their first coat of paint in years… What a pleasure it is, though, to make do and mend as best you can, leaving something looking that bit better for the next few years.’
Work will continue in 2014.
Andrew reflected: ‘It reminds me of the real importance of Quaker workcamps to get a range of ages working together in a spiritual community.’
Half a century at St Andrews
St Andrews Meeting recently marked fifty years of Meeting for Worship.
Jill Marshall got in touch to tell us more about the ‘joyful coming together of Friends who returned to share the occasion’.
A number of Friends reflected on their time with the Meeting, which began in 1963: ‘The nearest Meeting previously had been across the Tay in Dundee, in the days when there were no trains on Sunday, no road bridge and no bus to the ferry… Christine Davis, who was a student at St Andrews, was asked, “Why hadn’t she started a Meeting in St Andrews?” After advertising in the local paper on 17 November 1963, the Meeting was born.
‘Jonathan Dale arrived the following year and he recalled the sense of a close-knit community, discussion groups and students who made a wonderful contribution to the life of the Meeting and how St Andrews played its part in a personal transformation, before moving on after twenty years.
‘Having taken responsibility for the youth group Ellen Colingsworth remembered the experiences of teenagers that opened up through the group in the nineties, she quoted their direct recollections, reminded us of their activities and of the lasting values developed in Meeting.
‘And, finally, Buša Cochrane-Muir, whose story began five years ago, related her journey into the life of the Meeting today.’
There were also displays featuring activities such as the peace initiatives by PASTA (Peace Action St Andrews), which became QASTA (Quaker Action St Andrews); photographs of Quakers opposing the Iraq war and the use of armed drones; correspondence with prisoners of conscience; as well as social occasions such as shared picnics and marriages.
