Quaker Social Action (150 years)

Ian Kirk-Smith explores photographs by Horace Warner, Quaker and self-taught photographer in 1871

by Ian Kirk-Smith 15th December 2017

Horace Warner was a Quaker and a self-taught photographer born in 1871. He became Sunday school superintendent of the Bedford Institute Association, one of nine Quaker missions in London’s East End fighting alcoholism and prostitution, and in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries began recording the lives and living conditions of poor children – the ‘Spitalfields Nippers’. His images are a unique historical record of part of London’s social history. The purpose of his photographs was to accompany the annual reports of the charitable Bedford Institute Association (the forerunner of Quaker Social Action), which was based in Quaker Street, Spitalfields, and his powerful images helped raise funds for the Institute.