Letters - 12 July 2013
From Bryant and May to nanoparticles
Bryant and May: the complexities
Nick Matthews (5 July) encourages us to embrace cooperative values because Quaker businesses of earlier times ‘became the same as other businesses’. He highlights the matchgirls’ strike of 1888 to show that things could go wrong with Quaker enterprises even then. But I want to point out some things about this apparent blot on the Quaker record. Nick Matthews says: ‘Louise Raw, in Striking a Light, describes William Bryant as a true Victorian villain: greedy, hypocritical, callous and deceitful.’ It was, however, Wilberforce Bryant, his son, that Raw criticises, and by this time Wilberforce had long quit the Society of Friends. Indeed, the Society made no response to the scandal as far as I have been able to trace, suggesting that it no longer considered the firm a Quaker business. Additionally, Raw does not draw on a source that paints a very different picture of the events: Patrick Beaver’s The Match Makers: The Story of Bryant and May. Patrick Beaver points out, amongst other mitigations, that after the dispute was settled the London Trades Council (a labour organisation) investigated and issued a report in which ‘it was actually shown that most of the charges levelled against the company were without foundation’ and that wages at the factory were, in fact, fifteen to twenty per cent higher than in comparable firms.
As Raw shows, the matchgirls’ strike is iconic for the trades union movement. But the glamour of this should not let us make hasty conclusions about Quaker culpability.
Mike King
Quaker processes
Reference is made again to the nature of Friends’ recording of minutes at our Business Meetings (5 July). I am uncomfortable when terms such as ‘agreed’, ‘decided’, ‘unity’ are used when presenting a minute. In considering an agenda item we may be called upon, as we are in a standard Meeting for Worship, to offer some words. These are spoken into the stillness of our worship; the minister should release their ego from them as they are offered. These words may or may not be used in any subsequent minute.
This seems to be very similar to presenting a ‘Testimony to God in the life of…’. That life has passed and cannot be changed, although there may be various views of it, but it is not an obituary. A great improvement for discernment of a minute, is when we use Quaker processes as they are meant to be used.
Gordon Slaymaker
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