Sutton Meeting House Photo: John Hall for Britain Quaker Meeting Houses/flickr CC.
Portrait of a Meeting
Gordon Steel looks back over the life of a new-ish Quaker Meeting
Sutton Meeting is a newcomer within the life-span of Britain Yearly Meeting. Founded in 1932 with the help of Friends from long-established meetings in Croydon, Purley and Mitcham, it has no deep-rooted tradition but it has displayed a certain liveliness. Perhaps surprisingly, its archives have been well-kept and they paint a picture of a Meeting that flourished during its first two generations but which is now showing the strains of modern times.
Finding a home
For the first eight years, Sutton Friends met in rented accommodation. Then in 1940, in the heat of war, they purchased a large detached dwelling, which served them well for the next three decades. In 1959 they added a beautiful new Meeting room to the rear of the property, only to be told two years later that the borough council intended to carry out a compulsory purchase in order to build a multi-storey car park. It took nine years before the Meeting was able to move into a brand-new building, provided as ‘comparable reinstatement’, premises that are now well bedded-in.
Those at the heart
The character of the first fifty vibrant years was moulded by a succession of remarkable individuals who devoted a substantial part of their lives to Sutton Meeting. Jessie Ritch was a charismatic and very spiritual Friend at the centre of the early Meeting, although we have been reminded in a lovely phrase reproduced as an extract from her Testimony (Quaker faith & practice 18.16) that ‘our Friend was not without her human foibles…’
Jack and Ann-Mari Finch were the wardens of the first Meeting house but both did far more than look after the premises. Ann-Mari was a grassroots worker who shunned official Meeting appointments: ‘she worked on her own like a whole team of overseers’. Jack had no intellectual misgivings about theological niceties: ‘God was Love, Jesus showed the way to live and Jack was a willing disciple’.
Arthur White was widely known as recording clerk of London Yearly Meeting and was a pillar of the Meeting for many years: ‘he ministered frequently and his insights were drawn from personal experiences in his daily life. His ministry often had the feel of modern parables delivered with a lightness of touch and a gentle humour but which, nevertheless, carried powerfully affirming and positive messages’. The right conduct of our Business Meetings was a particular concern of Arthur.
Dennis Scott was dearly loved: ‘unforgettable, that rotund, bluff, waistcoated figure rising to minister, the strong, deep, vibrant voice reaching all his hearers’.
Isabel and Jack Boag were a more recent couple at the centre of Sutton Meeting, They combined a loving care for individuals with a concern that the Meeting as a whole should be effective in addressing some of the major problems of the world around us.
These are just a few examples from a wide range of quiet and weighty Friends who have served and inspired the Meeting.
Modern times
Since the 1980s Sutton Friends have been aware of a gradual decline in membership and attendance. This is illustrated in the accompanying graph, which also charts the children’s contribution to the Meeting – an attendance that peaked at around thirty-five to forty in the early 1960s and now has fallen almost to zero. In spite of this sad state of affairs, Sutton is still a very lively Meeting with a good age range of adults and a steady stream of new members.
History recorded
The history of this relatively young Meeting has been documented in a compilation of fifty pages of text extracted from the minutes (1932 – 2010), extracts from the minutes of record of the lives of sixty-seven Friends and attenders, a large number of ancillary documents about events in the life of the Meeting, and around 600 images of Friends and their activities. Copies are available on a single CD disc from ggsteel@onetel.com.
