Happy birthday

Christine Trevett reports on a celebration of Friends

It doesn’t rain cats and dogs in Welsh. It rains old wives and walking sticks (‘bwrw hen wragedd a ffyn’). It was doing just that on 21 October as everything was being cleared away. Meeting of Friends in Wales (MFW) had met in Newtown/Y Drenewydd and there marked twenty-five years of its existence.

Storm Brian was to sweep across Wales from the west, and some west coast Friends had decided against the journey. Still, the attendance was good and it felt like a gathering in good heart.

It was bound to be different, of course. We don’t normally meet in a church rather than its hall, but then we needed the hall as well, for a shared lunch, and space to be together and take photographs.

A congratulatory minute from Meeting for Sufferings isn’t an everyday event, nor is a greetings card from the recording clerk, with both of these in Welsh as well as English. What a nice touch it was that the card featured the Money for Madagascar charity, one of many projects that owe their origins to Quakers based in Wales.

The Meeting heard words about its past from assistant clerk Catherine James. She is also a past clerk of Meeting of Friends in Wales and was among those pioneers who envisioned such a thing for Wales and worked towards its creation. This has not happened without opposition, including from within Wales itself. Some Friends feared a kind of nationalist agenda and thought it an unnecessary concession to have Welsh as a language Friends might use in worship and business, and in outreach.

A lot has changed since those days. There was no time for nostalgia, though – there was a good deal of business to be covered.

Future generations

There is a belief that: ‘Some things are done better in Wales under devolution.’ There was the matter of housing provision and the Welsh Assembly’s ending of ‘right to buy’, for example, which came to the fore after Mary Hammond of the Quaker Housing Trust spoke to us in the afternoon. Mary has moved into Wales recently after some years in Cornwall. In both places, she said, rising prices and inadequate pay, second homes and holiday homes skew the market and create difficulty for locals. (The translator for the day, of whom more later, nodded approvingly).

Then there was the Assembly’s Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015 – a ‘first’ for any government. Friends in Wales, it was suggested, should be giving full attention to the this.

Bilingual resources

Outreach and the provision of bilingual resources for outreach took centre stage as Gill Sewell of Quaker Life reminded us of the opening which the Hay Festival of Literature and the Arts offered. Around 250,000 visitors is some opportunity for staging a Quaker presence! Hay on Wye/Y Gelli is in Wales, of course – even if only by a whisker. So, following on from this year’s presence there, Hay must be added to our annual outreach and resources concerns, added to The National Eisteddfod and The Royal Welsh Show.

Among other initiatives, MFW is producing a new and updated map in various formats, so that all might see where Meetings in Wales and contact addresses are. This is ‘work in progress’ and some tweaking is still needed. Having the map of Wales imposed over a blue surround made it look as though Wales was an island and that Ludlow, Hereford and much of the rest of England were under water! From the clerk’s table, I could see the translator smiling.

Meetings of MFW have professional simultaneous translation so that Friends may speak in Welsh or English, as they feel led. For much of the Meeting’s life it has been fortunate in having a Friend, Bryn Jones, now retired, who was such a translator and gave his service to the Meeting. Today’s man was new to us and seemed very engaged throughout, afterwards asking questions about Quakers and about George Fox. Translation does make us conscious of ‘Quaker Speak’. It must be startling in any language to encounter ‘Sufferings’ for the first time and the ‘annual meeting’ / AGM is not quite the same to Quaker ears as Yearly Meeting. Translators very soon cotton on, though, and speaking of maps, another one came up in a different agenda item.

Why is Wales not shown as Wales, with its proper borders, within the Tabular statement documents? Indeed, why isn’t there Tabular statement data for Wales as a separate entity? ‘We send this Minute to the recording clerk…’

The loss of some of MFW’s archive had been reported at a previous meeting (was it related to the fire at the National Library of Wales, perhaps?). Now, though, the more upbeat news was that there has been good progress in reconstituting a record of our history and work back to the 1980s, before there existed Meeting for Friends in Wales in 1992, which after just a few years became Meeting of Friends in Wales.

Pans of soup for our shared lunch had been lovingly transported from farther west and next to the tables of contributions was a substantial celebration cake – fearfully transported from South Wales. It was decorated with a map of Wales and a superimposed MFW logo, among other things. Frank Brown, MFW’s clerk of trustees, led us in a toast in sparkling elderflower. Dafydd Jones, another pioneer of the Meeting and a former clerk, should have cut the cake, but was unable to attend. Fortunately, he still got some of it.

As they left, some Friends carved pieces of cake to take to such pioneers, and, with the strong sense of place that seems typical of people in Wales, they were cutting into the map by geography: ‘That bit’s somewhere near Wrecsam, we’ll have that’ and ‘Looks like all of the South and West has been eaten already.’

‘Penblwydd hapus/Happy birthday’, the recording clerk had written. Beyond the Racial Justice Network, the terms of reference for committees, the picturesque Hedd Wen peace garden and the related Teaching Peace pack for schools, and so much else that concerns us, we had considered thankfully where we had come from and what might come next.

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