From the archive: Letters to the editor
Janet Scott continues her series on the Friend and the first world war and tells of Friends’ concerns in the summer of 1917
Some of the matters on the minds of Friends in the summer of 1917 were revealed through letters to the Friend. The following selection was published on 3 August. One Friend was particularly concerned about the Friends Provident Institution and the War Loan:
I was shocked and grieved to learn in the current issue of the Friend that the Directors of The Friends’ Provident Institution had invested £750,000 of its funds in the War Loan. This action I cannot but conceive is most unjust to the large majority of Friends who have insured in this well-known institution, and would, I am sure, have distressed its founders. It places pacifist Friends, who are largely in the majority, in a false position, as their capital is invested in a loan of which they strongly disapprove. How so well-known and respected an institution could have taken such a course of action I fail to understand.
Your friend sincerely, Joseph J. Green, Hastings.
Another Friend was keen to draw attention to the ‘White Ribbon Band’, a ‘social and educative’ initiative for young working women:
… Here we are getting in touch chiefly with ‘the old girls’ of elementary school, with the hearty cooperation of head teachers. During the winter we hold regular meetings with each band, the programme varying as to the first part which is social, but the last half-hour includes a short talk on some practical subject with the aim of helping the girls form a high ideal of womanhood. In the summer we have rambles with each Band and two united garden parties. The badge – a white ribbon row – is a valuable asset, and stands for ‘purity of life, and for modesty in dress and in behaviour, for total abstinence, for thrift, for wholesome literature, for strenuous opposition to any form of gambling, for friendship, for service, for gentleness, for the Christ ideal’. Our membership in Bristol is nearly 400 after eighteen months’ work, and we fill a gap no other organisation attempts to fill.
Yours truly, Ruth C. Shipway, Bristol.
There was also an appeal for temporary hospitality for air-raid sufferers:
Air raids and the great explosion have left behind them an aftermath of ill-effects of which those of us who live in more fortunate districts have not had any conception. Apart from actual illness, of which there is all too much, there are shattered nerves, sleeplessness, and a state of tension which must be felt to be realised. My object in writing is to ask Friends who live beyond the raided districts to offer or provide partial hospitality to some of the women, first and children of Poplar. We are apt to look upon a summer holiday as a natural right; not so the mothers in Poplar on whom the heaviest burdens of the war have fallen, and most of whom have had no respite of any kind. There is at the moment a unique opportunity for relieving the congestion of city life. The terror instilled by raids, combined with the comparative independence of soldiers’ and sailors’ families, have loosened the ties of neighbourhood very considerably, and there are signs that the tide is setting towards country life. I should be most grateful for any suggestions that would lead to the permanent removal of families to country towns and district.
Yours sincerely, Marion E. Wakefield, Poplar
The message which the Yearly Meeting sent to all followers of Christ was criticised by Juliet M Godlee because it did not make clear that it did not represent the views of all Friends. She went on to write:
There is something tragic in the attitude of the Society as it is represented at this moment: the straining after some divinely appointed ‘mission’ to lead the rest of mankind; the claim to be on a higher moral platform than other churches; to be specially ‘chosen’ for some great work apart, according to a ‘vision’ which others do not see: it is all terribly like the illusion of the German superman that we cannot wonder if it excites the pity or the anger of our fellow-men… Men are giving their lives for what Friends are only praying for; poor human flesh at grip with such a horror has almost more than it can bear; and if Friends go about their ill-timed mission of peace ‘like little glad children’ at such a time as this… they cannot wonder if thinking men and women are not willing to trust them with the destiny of the world.
This letter led to further correspondence including a letter from William Cadbury on 31 August. He questioned whether a meeting as large as the Yearly Meeting could actually take decisions:
After the war, all desire that Yearly Meeting shall meet as a truly representative body and record its deepest convictions after earnestly seeking divine guidance… But may one question if in practice this plan is suited to very large gatherings…
…are we satisfied that our present business methods are fair to all? The number of speeches that can be delivered on any one subject
cannot in practice increase according to the number of well-concerned Friends present, and the plan well adapted to a small assembly often proves a millstone about the neck of our very large annual gatherings…
I asked a Friend at home, why he did not go up to Yearly Meeting. He said that at a time when the country was threatened with a grave food famine, he felt he was doing truer service by working in his spare time on his allotment, rather than attending meetings in which he had no voice, unless by sheer insistence he crowded out some probably better speaker.
William Cadbury even suggested that there might be times when it was right to vote in the meeting and this too provoked further correspondence.
In August a book was published entitled I appeal unto Caesar. It was to receive considerable notice in the press and the public sphere. The author was Mrs Henry Hobhouse, wife of the Right Honourable Henry Hobhouse and mother of Stephen. The Friend in an editorial on 17 August described the book as presenting the ‘Case of the Conscientious Objector’:
As one of a family strongly in favour of prosecuting the war and as the mother of three sons in the army (one of them twice wounded), and of another son in prison, the author says she feels less distress at the fate of the former, ‘fighting as they are their country’s battles, with the approval of their fellows, that for that other son undergoing for his faith a disgraceful sentence in a felon’s cell, truly “rejected and despised” of men’.
What was happening to Stephen Hobhouse was described in a lecture by Gilbert Murray, reported in the Friend on 23 November:
…he was sent into the army. He was sentenced to 112 days’ hard labour. Upon coming out he was returned to the army, and sentenced to a further period of imprisonment. The effect of renewed sentences was to make conditions more severe than in the case of a single continuous sentence. Two of the worse features of our prison system of today were the eternal silence and the solitary confinement imposed on prisoners. It was not to be wondered at that prisoners manage to snatch a few words with each other, in spite of the prison rules. Stephen Hobhouse was so smitten with shame at the thought of concealment, that he confessed to the Governor that he had broken the rule as to silence, and that he did not feel that it would be right to promise to keep it. As a result it was understood that he was now to be kept continuously in solitary confinement.
Mrs Hobhouse appealed to her readers:
If you think that what is going on is barbarous and should be put a stop to… if you feel with me that what is happening will act like an ulcer on the public conscience and do our beloved country harm, then for the sake of the good fame of Great Britain and what she stands for in the world’s history, for the credit of brave army, for the sake of an even greater cause, the cause of our common humanity; do not hide your opinions, do not rest until… the men suffering for their faith are set free.
Stephen Hobhouse’s health was damaged and in January 1918 he was released from prison on health grounds.
‘From the archive’ is complied by Janet Scott.
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