Stratus and cumulus clouds over Fiji. Photo: Photo: VMFoliaki / flickr CC.
Eye - 4 July 2014
From the clouds to conscientious objection
The namer of clouds
The man who named the clouds will be celebrated this month.
Tottenham Ploughman, ‘a group of local like- minded people who want to celebrate the best of Tottenham’, will be marking the 150th anniversary of Luke Howard’s death at CloudFest on 6 July.
Luke Howard was a Quaker who attended Tottenham Meeting and is buried in Winchmore Hill Meeting’s burial ground.
In his 1802 paper, On the modification [classification] of clouds, he proposed some of the cloud names still in use today. He became a fellow of the Royal Society in 1821 and joined the British (now Royal) Meterological Society in 1850. He has been called ‘the father of meterology’.
CloudFest will see the Tottenham Civic Society, Bruce Castle Museum and the Cloud Appreciation Society exhibiting the history of Luke Howard and creating cloud themed pieces of art. Blue cheese pizzas and cloud candy floss will be on offer, as will the chance to sign an open letter to English Heritage, asking them to save the house where he lived in Tottenham.
In 2010 an issue of Journeys in the Spirit, published by the Children & Young People’s team at Friends House, focused on Luke Howard. Friends can still find this in the archive at: http://bit.ly/LukeHowardJourneys
Portrayal of a tribunal
Quakers trod the boards at the Merseyside Maritime Museum in a recent production.
Liverpool Quakers and friends performed a play re-enacting the tribunal appearances of Ernest Everett, the first man to be jailed as a conscientious objector when conscription was introduced in the first world war. The performance took place at a lecture, Constructing Conchies, by Lois Bibbings.
Lisa Hoyle, Liverpool Meeting’s outreach worker, writes: ‘Transcripts of tribunals were destroyed by order in the 1940s but this case was reported in the Liverpool Echo and Post so survives.
‘Everett was not a Quaker, he was a nonconformist school teacher from St Helens. He was, sentenced to two years hard labour which was condemned by many, including Bertrand Russell.
‘Jon Marrow, education director of the Maritime Museum, said, “Thank you for such a wonderful performance! The audience was clearly captivated and it gave a fascinating insight into a local tribunal and what was going on in Walton prison. The lecture and reconstruction complemented each other brilliantly and the audience was the biggest yet in the three years I’ve been involved in these adult lecture programmes.”’
Lisa added: ‘The transcript of the tribunal can be downloaded from the home page of the Liverpool Quaker website as a pdf. We hope that it might be used by schools to provide insight into the experiences of conscientious objectors during world war one.’
The play and ensuing discussion can be seen at: http://bit.ly/ErnestEverettPlay
