Plainly and peacefully speaking

Christine Trevett reports on outreach at the National Eisteddfod

Cultural festivals are good places for Quaker outreach and engagement, though they involve a lot of work! The annual National Eisteddfod is one such opportunity, this being the primary Welsh language cultural event, which lasts a week. Quakers in Wales are always engaged with it, as also with the Royal Welsh Show, but this year Meeting of Friends in Wales ensured that Quakers provided a lecture at the Eisteddfod – the first of three planned until 2018.

he Eisteddfod venue alters annually. This year’s, in Abergavenny, lent itself geographically to the subject of an English Quaker who was an adopted son of the Gwent region. John Edward Southall (1855-1928) was an English printer-publisher based in Newport, Gwent, who embraced and promoted the Welsh language. Hopefully, he would play to local interest, to those historically inclined and/or with an interest in publishing, as well as playing to those who already knew of him in relation to education in Wales and the Welsh language. Yet not many people ‘out there’ knew much about his Quakerism.  The lecture-planning group knew a man who did!

The speaker was Gethin Evans of Aberystwyth Meeting. He had researched and written on Southall already, in Benign Neglect: The Quakers and Wales c.1860-1918, and gave a well-received lecture, with humour and candour, about a man who was not typical in many respects, not least among Friends. He determinedly remained a ‘plain Friend’ and one who engaged with the fact that Wales was not monolingual. We arranged simultaneous translation from Welsh to encourage attendance and in recognising that not every visitor to the Eisteddfod can speak Welsh. The lecture was well attended and will be published in full in both Welsh and English in due course.

A useful bit of serendipity was that a lecture on ‘The Brynmawr furniture factory: the Quakers’ social experiment, 1928-40’ followed immediately from ours on John Edward Southall. This made a neat ‘block’ of things Quakerly for historically or locally minded visitors to the Maes (the Eisteddfod site).  This, though, was just part of Friends’ engagement with the festival.

The village of Llanfoist is close by, in lovely country for walking. Llanfoist is home to Hedd Wen (blessed peace), which is part of Wales’s Small Pilgrim Places Network. This place of spiritual hospitality, learning, accommodation and a peace garden was created, and is managed, by Quakers.

So, starting from the Peace tent and Churches Together tent on the Maes, there were walks to Hedd Wen on several days of the week, including Hiroshima Day (6 August).  Hedd Wen tells the story of Sadako Sasaki and the 1000 Peace Cranes. Teaching the making of such paper cranes was a further activity Friends were involved in on the Maes.

There was a rota of Quaker volunteers all week in the busy Churches Together refreshment tent (as people spotted my Crynwyr badge I got ‘my daughter’s a Quaker, she got married in a Meeting house, they had the reception at Twycross Zoo …’; ‘I didn’t know there were still Quakers…’; ‘thanks for having a Quiet Corner, I could have gone to sleep…’; ‘there aren’t many of you but you do so much …’ ). Friends were also involved in other peace-related activities on the Maes: with discussions on drones in Wales; on conscientious objection in world war one; and with the exhibition panels from ‘Belief and Action: The Wales We Wanted – yesterday and today’ – facilitated by the Fellowship of Reconciliation (Cymdeithas y Cymod) and the Wales for Peace project. We were well engaged at this festival. It would be good to know how others elsewhere are linking up with cultural events of various kinds.

Further information: Quaker faith & practice 2.53

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