Hemel Hempstead tercentenary
Audrey Pitchforth writes about a major anniversary
Hemel Hempstead Local Quaker Meeting is celebrating its tercentenary this year. So far, it has proved to be an invigorating and exciting year with, inevitably, a great deal of looking back. In this celebratory year, we have thirty members and five attenders listed in our Meeting.
There was a Quaker Meeting House at Wood End in Hemsted, Hertfordshire, in 1682. It was a rudimentary building, with a burial ground nearby. In 1689 it was reported that twenty-three men held a Meeting for Worship and, on the same day, there was another Meeting of eighteen women.
Friends have identified many of the thirty-three Friends buried in that burial ground.
In 1718, following the Act of Toleration, a plan was made to buy land in the centre of the town and establish a new burial ground. This was followed by the erection of the present Meeting house. This is now a Grade II listed building. We remain part of the ‘old town’. Hemel Hempstead was developed as a ‘new town’ in the late 1940s.
Our first celebration of the tercentenary took place at Easter and took the form of a pilgrimage to Wood End to remember the Friends who worshipped and were buried there. There will be a large-scale housing project there in the near future and we have asked that the burial ground is left untouched and that it should be marked.
A special Meeting for Worship was arranged for 20 May, when local churches sent representatives, as did the local Interfaith Group (which meets monthly in our Meeting house). This was followed by lunch (with many apologies to our Muslim guests, as it was Ramadan).
About two years ago our librarian suggested that we should prepare an anthology as a permanent memento of the tercentenary. This has proved to be a splendid venture, with a book that tells the story of the Meeting over 300 years. The opening paragraphs of this article are taken from the ‘Time Line’ in the book, which gives a valuable and interesting insight into the history of Quakers in Hemsted. We have viewed the original deeds of purchasing the land from the Bell Inn in 1718 and wondered at the number of Friends from different places who gave money to buy the land and build.
There were some weighty Friends amongst those first members and fortunes varied as the years progressed. In Victorian times a local Q=uaker, Joseph Cranstone, was mayor and bailiff of the town, and an important employer in his iron foundry. One son, Lefevre, was a royal academician and we have been allowed to borrow prints of his work from a Cranstone descendant in Bournemouth Meeting.
Hemel Hempstead is now quite a small Meeting, but our wish to mark 300 years of our building has given us great pleasure. We have worked closely together and enjoyed our self-appointed task. We shall continue to celebrate and commemorate with music, an Apple Day (when we shall make apple juice from our garden trees), a specially written play about long dead members and a Christmas concert by a choir, which has used our main hall as a rehearsal room for many years, and we shall try to sell our anthology! So much is known of the past – we are determined that Hemel Hempstead Meeting will have a future.
Audrey is clerk of the Quaker Terecentenary Committee.
Further information:
hemelhempsteadquakers@gmail.com
