Thought for the Week: An appealing Peel
Alec Davison reflects on a play depicting a Friend's life
Through snow and ice we came. Many a ‘yupidee’! We were the three enthusiastic audiences, over 500 of us, at Wells-next-the-Sea’s first community play, undeterred by its two week postponement when faced with blizzard and snowdrift.
A community venture always generates a special aura of expectancy and commitment, this one especially so for local Friends. Some rehearsals had been in the Meeting house, and the hero of the story was the much-celebrated Quaker Sam Peel. He had come to Wells as a Methodist in 1909 and encouraged song as a community bonding force throughout his ministry. But he soon became a Quaker when he found them in sympathy with his concern to address the grim poverty, drunkenness and appalling housing conditions he confronted. His was a great faith, shared throughout by the commitment of his wife, especially at the times of the death of two of their children.
To turn the tables on the inhuman acceptance of this communal distress entailed rebuilding a sense of community and energising the neighbourhood into fresh awareness and social action. Protest in confronting the powers that inhibited change became the order of the day. Training and preparation for this grew from Sam Peel’s initiation of an adult school established in the Meeting house, which regularly brought in more than 200 neighbours. Song was integral to the learning. He also faced conflict from those whose lot he was attempting to improve when the choices to hand did not always take the path they urged. He had to be a realist.
Many of the performers in the play, which vigorously told the story of his struggles, had never met Quakers. So, Sam Peel’s work had to be echoed today by the cast, led by director Ben Francis, to build a new kind of community. In this they triumphed. More than sixty performers of all ages, from children and teenagers to adults and senior citizens, shared their bursting energies and abundant talents in a kaleidoscope of scenes, some riotous and dramatic, others domestic and tender. The spontaneous improvisations in the crowd scenes and the housewives with their washing were especially telling. They performed, appropriately, in the Alderman Peel High School.
It was his granddaughter, Susan Wild, who had spent a year researching in the Norfolk Record Office and throughout the county to glean her grandfather’s story and publish its outcome. There were others who knew him personally in the cast. This all gave authenticity to the dramatist, Robin McLoughlin, who adapted the text with Susan Wild and the company.
A key contribution to the power of the play was the song of the Norfolk Labouring Men that eventually brought it all to climax, as pupils of today’s Alderman Peel High School joined the company. The text cried out for even more music and songs of the day to give their final lift to Sam Peel’s heroic struggle of fulfilling his vision of how to bring change and transformation to an impoverished people. He would not accept conditions as they were. As the play’s title proclaimed, here was A Man Who Did Different.
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