Welcome sight: Geof Sewell on Thirsk’s refugee support

‘The father pretended to be part of an English golfing party.’

Thirsk Quakers have been offering support to refugee families for over 100 years. Once, individual Quaker families took responsibility, but for our latest project we have joined an ecumenical group. We need the skills and experience of the local Salvationists, Anglicans, Catholics and Methodists.

First, we had to complete the complex ‘Principal Sponsor Application’ process and raise over £9,000. One anonymous Anglican gave us £3,000, ‘because Quakers and the Salvation Army are working on this together.’

It was a different story after world war one. The German board of public health claimed, in December 1918, that 763,000 German civilians had already died from starvation and disease, caused by an Allied naval blockade. An additional 100,000 people may have died before the Treaty of Versailles. In February 1919, a Thirsk shopkeeper called Jed Hall got one of the first permits to ferry baby clothes and food to Vienna in his company van. He had to drive through areas where order had broken down, but repeated the trip regularly for three years, eventually winning a humanitarian medal from the League of Nations. Once, he brought back two sisters named Schindler for respite care; they spent a term at Thirsk School. Oscar famously went on to help seven hundred Jews escape the gas chambers.

In the 1920s, Jed’s sisters, Molly and Winifred, worked in a hostel for starving German children on the German/Dutch border. The Quakerspeisungen – Quaker Feeding Programme – seems to have paved the way for the kindertransport: Molly and Winfred met two German Jewish boys at Thirsk Station and took them in. They also hosted a family after the Anschluss. The father pretended to be part of an English golfing party to cross the German border. In Belgium, his wife and son were separated from him, but they met again in Thirsk. At the outbreak of world war two, the Home Office interned the father on the Isle of Man. When his granddaughter joined our Meeting for Worship in search of her family history, her only clue was his enemy alien card and the address of the two aunties.

On the day of her visit, we were raising funds for a small Afghan refugee family. Thirsk Together, a local ecumenical group led by the Salvation Army, found a cottage under the aegis of the UNHCR Pathway 2 scheme for vulnerable Afghan refugee families. The Home Office had previously found local authority housing for small groups of Syrians and Afghans, and Thirsk has also hosted Ukrainian women and children, but this is the first Pathway 2 project for a single family.

Representatives of all Thirsk churches met regularly for two years while we looked for rental property. All contributed to accommodation costs. Our first welcome party for the family was convened in the nearby Meeting house – an essential part of the community, soon to undergo renovation.

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