From the archive: Should we form an ambulance unit?
The second in a series of excerpts from the Friend archive compiled by 1980 Swarthmore lecturer Janet Scott
Friends responded quickly, in August and September 1914, to the needs of wartime. One of the responses of which we are now proud was, at the time, contentious, as shown in these extracts from letters to the Friend.
Philip J Baker, who became the first commandant of the Friends Ambulance Unit, wrote:
Some members of the Society with whom I have been in correspondence feel strongly that in this crisis in public affairs they want to render some service more commensurate with their powers and opportunities than is involved in the administration of war relief at home. They feel perhaps in some cases that this relief work is not of the sort for which they are fitted, and that in any case there are so many well-qualified people anxious to undertake it that what remains for them will not be sufficiently exacting to satisfy their sense of duty.
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