John Porter Rodwell
Meg Hill looks at the life of an evangelical Friend in time of war
My grandfather, John Porter Rodwell (1885- 1949) came from a Quaker family with its roots in Leiston, Suffolk, where his father worked for an agricultural machinery company. The family later moved to Lancashire, from where his mother’s family originated, and then moved eventually to Vancouver.
John, however, did not go with them. He had left the Friends School at Penketh, Lancashire, in about 1901, aged sixteen or so, and became apprenticed to Thompson and Capper, homeopathic chemists in Manchester. He joined the Religious Society of Friends in 1904, becoming interested in the Friends Foreign Mission and in the Adult School Movement. Both were major aspects of Quaker life at the time and Friends were keen to convert ‘the heathen’, both at home and abroad, to the evangelical Quakerism of their day.
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