Letters - 02 January 2026
From ringing true to reading in Meeting
Ring true
I wonder if Friends would like this seasonal extract from Alfred Tennyson. I came across it in my Christmas inbox, and I thought that it might speak to us in our difficult national and international times.
In 1850, the year Tennyson became the poet laureate, he published this poem, part of an elegy for his sister’s fiancée who died at twenty-two. It is called ‘Ring out, wild bells’. At the end of the poem, the bells ring in, like Christmas bells, what Tennyson calls the ‘fuller minstrel’.
Ring out the false, ring in the true
Ring out the grief that saps the mind
For those that here we see no more.
Ring out the feud of rich and poor.
Ring in redress to all mankind.
Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife,
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.
Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out thy mournful rhymes
But ring the fuller minstrel in.
Rosemary Hartill
Medomsley
I joined the Prison Service in 1978 as an assistant governor, the same year Tim Newell was appointed governor of Medomsley Detention Centre (see News 5 December, and Letters 12 December) I can support Tim’s assertion that, ‘there was a wide cultural and communication gap between prison officer and governor grade staff’. At that time a governor’s power over their prison officer grades was largely theoretical, while the prison officer grades, as represented by the Prison Officers Association (POA), exerted the real power. The POA tended to manage their governors rather than the other way round.
In 1990 I was appointed staff officer to Raymond Lygo when he undertook the Prison Service Management Review at the behest of the then home secretary, Kenneth Baker. In his report Lygo alluded to governors’ instructions being regarded as optional by the uniform grades represented by the POA. He went on the say that ‘a prison governor’s job is the most difficult management task I have ever encountered’.
From my current experience as a Quaker chaplain to a large London prison I can say that is as true today as it was in 1978 and 1990.
Neil Johnson
