Eye - 29 May 2015

From 'Trident' in Ilkley to anonymous authors

‘Trident’ in Ilkley

An unusual Quaker craft project was unveiled on 10 May. A Trident submarine, made by Friends from Leeds and Ilkley Meetings, ‘set sail’ on Ilkley Moor boating lake as part of an ongoing peace protest against the renewal of Trident nuclear weapons.

As it was too big for the Meeting house garden in Ilkley, Friends young and young-at-heart took the submarine up a steep hill to the local boating lake.

Brian Sayer, the oldest member of the ‘crew’, said: ‘It was good to have the children – they made a good crew. I felt happy to be on the tail and was very glad that we stopped half way up the hill for a rest. It looked very good on the boating lake.

‘It reminded me of a sculpture of a [Polaris] submarine made from 6,000 tyres by David Mach in 1983 – it was outside the South Bank Centre in London and was unbelievably huge as it was full size.

‘Our Trident was much smaller but the message has not changed.’

The cost of replacing Trident and maintaining the new submarines is estimated at £100 billion.

According to a CND report published in March 2014, People Not Trident: The Economic Case Against Trident Replacement, this is enough money to fund: all A&E departments for forty years, or 30,000 new primary schools, or insulate fifteen million homes.

Meeting for Worship for Rock Pooling

Friends came to a recent Meeting for Worship in Falmouth with nets and buckets prepared, as well as hearts and minds.

The Meeting for Worship for Rock Pooling took place on a sunny Sunday morning in late April.

Jan Webb writes: ‘We welcome a small number of young people to our Meeting here in Falmouth and the age range is large. Maurice Matthews, an elder of our Meeting involved with the young people, came up with the idea, which caught everyone’s imagination.’

But what would such a Meeting be like?

Jan explains: ‘After a brief period of silence on the sand, rocks were negotiated with everyone giving each other a helping hand. Rosie was a real crab whisperer and located five.

‘Various seaweeds and shells were gently collected and put into buckets of sea water for a “show and tell” sharing back at Meeting for Worship (all living things were returned to their original habitat immediately afterwards).

‘It seemed right to sit and chat over ice cream about our time together and what we had thought about and we just made it back in time to share with Friends at Meeting.

‘Not everyone lives by the sea but a similar Meeting for Worship could happen in a park, woodland, by a canal or even in a big garden.’

Anonymous authors

‘The love of letters’ (see Eye, 1 May) raised many an appreciative chuckle, but it also prompted a pertinent question.

John Hall, of Colchester Meeting, wrote to Eye: ‘Thank you for the enjoyable and perceptive verse but… who wrote it?’

The ultimate author or authors are, alas, nameless Friends from The Midlands. All that is known is that the lyrics were sent to the Friend by a C G Naish with the note: ‘The accompanying verses were part of an entertainment provided at the annual meeting of the Birmingham Friends Reading Society this month. They were sung to a well-known tune. It seems only fair that a copy should be sent to you.’

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