Letters - 21 November 2025
From the Tapestry Museum to historic Meeting houses
Tapestry Museum
Your recent reports about the proposal to close the award-winning Quaker Tapestry Museum in Kendal (7 November) are deeply concerning. It may be helpful for Friends to know that Quaker Tapestry Limited (QTL), which manages the museum, is separate from Quaker Tapestry Collections Trust (QTCT), which owns the artefacts. This trust was established to ensure that, in the event of the closure of the museum, the collection could not be broken up and sold to defray costs.
Both trusts, along with Kendal & Sedbergh Area Meeting, face a dilemma. If the museum closes, it will be necessary to fund the collection’s storage. If the museum stays open, it may have to operate at a deficit. All museums of a comparable size require funding beyond what can be raised from paying visitors and merchandise sales.
I hope that Friends and Meetings can reflect generously on the prospect of losing this unique treasure, with its hugely significant function for outreach. Can we share the challenge of bridging the funding gap?
Arthur Pritchard, QTCT trustee
Fleecing schoolchildren
I really liked Chris Rose’s Thought for the Week (14 November), about the little girl who was taught to knit by a German man (I am the child of German refugees made so welcome in 1939 that my father was not even interned). But the hands in the picture are doing crochet, not knitting!
My second point is less trivial: I was horrified by a detail on the picture accompanying Jane Harries’ piece on the peer mediation conference. It shows a group of children training to be peer mediators. On the fleece of one of them, you can clearly read the words ‘Year 9’. That means that such fleeces need to be replaced every academic year, whether they are outgrown or outworn or not. The parents of the children of that school – and any other schools with similar uniforms –should be screaming, for financial, environmental and educational reasons.
Irene Auerbach
