Refuge, Relief, and Reconciliation

I was asked recently what defined Quaker responses to war. The assumption was that it would be conscientious objection, but actually Quakers are more proactive than that. Their responses, at least in the twentieth century, were overwhelmingly to tend the wounds of war. Only by looking at the history of male Quakers of military age does conscientious objection come to the fore.

I suspect that a feminist might comment that it is another example of His-story, which all too often comes to fill the pages of our his-story books, which predominantly chronicle his-stories to the exclusion of a broader and more inclusive vision of our past. A glance at the history section of any of our major booksellers, or the history section of our libraries, would tend to confirm the suspicion that the feminists have a point. 

Katherine Storr's book Excluded from the Record: Women, Refugees and Relief, 1914-29 (Perter Lang, 2010) was something of a welcome antidote to so much of the published history of the period I was researching. I needed to know so much more about the times in which Irene Pickard's archive was embedded, and the massive – yes I do mean massive – publishing bias in favour of male and militaristic histories of the period from a male and military perspective made hunting for those gems that would provide a more balanced picture something of a challenge. Especially any that included accounts of the Quaker experience!

This study reveals women's hitherto ignored lives as refugees and relief workers during the First World War and shortly after. The focus is on coping with and changing the devastating effects of war on civilians, rather than on the fighting of it. Wherever fighting took place, people fled from their homes or were trapped behind enemy lines. Most refugees were women and children. While some came to Britain, others remained in or near their country of origin. They were helped, sometimes under bombardment, by Quakers and suffragists.     (From the blurb about Katherine Storr's book)

It was women who spearheaded the Quaker response to war. Men were tied up with the social expectation that they should 'do their duty' and serve with the military; an imperative made so much more complex when conscription was imposed in 1916: the Flanders fields having eaten up the bodies of the willing leaving the war-machine short of fodder to feed to the machine guns. The imperative did not extend to women, who were thus free to see the war for what it was – the greatest of human tragedies which heaped suffering on suffering. Tending to that suffering was what they did. 

It became clear when mapping Quaker responses to war during my research that they fell under three headings: refuge, relief and reconciliation. Patterns that were to repeat themselves over and again through the twentieth century. 

Unlike the cornucopias of material available on the studies of the wars themselves, there is a dearth of works about relief work. Katherine Storr's work along with that of a paper written in Italian by Bruna Bianchi called Grande, Pericolosa Avventura: Anna Ruth Fry il 'relief work' e la riconciliazione internazionale (1914-26) [A Grand Dangerous Adventure: Anna Ruth Fry, relief work as international reconciliation (1914-26)] and Campbell Leggat's Friends in Deed stemming from outside the Quaker universe. The rest from within. 

Notable among the Quaker works are John Ormerod Greenwood's three volume Quaker Encounters; A Ruth Fry's A Quaker Adventure. The Story of the Friends' Relief Work in Europe during the War and After ; David McFadden & Claire Gorfinkel's Constructive Spirit; Quakers in Revolutionary Russia ; Joan Mary Fry's In Downcast Germany 1919-1933 [a very rear and almost unobtainable book that it is such a condemnation of the British role in inflicting starvation on the German population] ; Sheila Spielhofer's To Vienna with Love - Quaker Relief Work 1919-1922 ; William R Hughes's Indomitable Friend. The Life of Corder Catchpool, 1883-1952 ; Geoffrey Carnall's Gandhi's Interpreter. A Life of Horace Alexander ; A T Teglar Davies's Friends Ambulance Unit. The story of the F.A.U. in the second world war 1939-1945 ; Roger C Wilson's Quaker Relief; an account of the Relief Work of the Society of Friends 1940-1948 ; and C H Mike Yarrow's Quaker Experiences in International Conciliation.

Armed with these, and what other papers and references I could find, I was able to provide the context for why my subjects were in Geneva during the 1930s engaged on peace-work, and how they coped with the tidal wave of war which swept over them in 1940. 

What placed them there in the first instance, stemmed from another consequence of the outbreak of the First World War – the virtual collapse of support for peace movements. 

Carl Heath (1869- 1950) was appointed secretary of the National Peace Council in 1909, a body connecting the disparate anti-war organisations, ranging from trade unions through socialist societies and the suffragettes, to religious groups such as the Quakers. The declaration of war in August 1914 saw almost all but the Quakers desert the Council. Even the suffragettes mostly followed Emmeline Pankhurst in withdrawing and suspending their protests in support of the war. The desertion of the National Peace Council by so many organisations led in time to Heath throwing his lot in with the Quakers – the only remaining members – joining them in 1916. It was his suggestion for the need for 'Quaker Embassies" – as he call them – that led to Irene and Bertram being in Geneva as staff of one such, and their eventually encountering Carl Jung.  

Ever since their almost accidental formation in the seventeenth century, Quakers have been a counter-culture because of their deriving their moral compass from inward revelation engendered by the practice of silent waiting, rather than from alignment with the prevailing zeitgeist – the ethos of an era. As a result they were for much of the time a people apart. A community that gave equal weight to the words of women as those of men – as seeing female revelation as just as valid and inspiring as male revelation. As being prepared to be led by women as men, if those women felt compelled to act under a concern; and many remarkable Quaker women were so compelled, providing much of the leadership in relief-work; addressing as much of the suffering caused by the unleashing of wars in the first half of the twentieth century as they could. Ruth and Joan Fry, Hilda Clerk, and Bertha Bracey are names that stand out as indomitable leaders of relief efforts.

Researching Irene archive and its context proved to be a study in counterpoint to the mainstream flow of history. Event making dominated by an almost exclusively male political and military patriarchy finding a reciprocal counter flow of outpouring of human compassion, often led by Quaker women. A story little told of providing refuge, of providing relief and of working to promote reconciliation, by a community set apart by a charismatic tradition that centred its ethics on inward revelation not on conformity to the prevailing ethos. What greater nonconformity than being pacifists and peacemakers in times of war; of tending to the wounds of war rather than adding to them. 

Hate had found respectable motives

Polarisation of opinion happens as soon as wars break out. Nuanced understandings of the issues disappear and taking sides becomes, not just normal, but a social requirement. Lining up with the mass opinion is not simply a matter of choice, but a defence reflex – no one enjoys being a pariah, or risking social censure or ostracism. We may not like the fact, but we are like iron filings in a magnetic field. We flatter ourselves that we are immune to such social pressures, but we are not.

Long before 1933, there was already a faint smell of burning in the air, and people were passionately interested in discovering the seat of the fire and the incendiary. And when denser clouds were seen to gather over Germany, and the burning of the Reichstag gave the signal, then at last there was no mistake as to where the incendiary, evil in person, dwelt. Terrifying as this discovery was, in the course of time it brought a certain sense of relief; now at least we knew for certain where all unrighteousness was to be found, whereas we ourselves were securely entrenched in the opposite camp, among the respectable people, whose moral indignation might well be expected to rise higher and higher with every fresh sign of guilt on the other side. Why even the call for mass executions no longer offends the ears of the righteous, and the burning of German towns was looked on as the judgement of God. Hate had found respectable motives, and had emerged from the state of more secret and personal idiosyncrasy. And all the time the highly respectable public had not the slightest inkling that they themselves were thus living in the immediate neighbourhood of evil.     [C G Jung: p.50, After the Catastrophe: in Essays on Contemporary Events: (trans - Welsh, Hannah & Briner) Kegan Paul, London, 1947]

The polarities in 1930s and '40s Europe were simple to observe. The more Germany under the Nazis was seen as the epicentre of evil, the more virtuous by contrast its opponents seemed; even Soviet Russia under Stalin was rehabilitated as a virtuous ally. 

The stark truth was that the British became blind to the horrors they were raining down on German civilians – women, children, infants, the infirm, the elderly. Being German, or even simply being in Germany was sufficient, regardless of whether that was by choice or whether it was as forced labour. The bombing of Coventry and other cities during the Blitz became a cause célèbre justifying the destruction of German towns and cities without compassion or remorse. 

I once met an Englishman from Jersey, who during the German occupation of the Channel Islands was deported to Germany as forced labour. Being skilled at horticulture, he was put to work as a field hand in the Eder Valley. He survived the catastrophic flood caused by the destruction of the Edersee Dam by the Dambusters' raid, but then was detailed to the rescue operation. 

He spoke of the horror of digging the bodies of children and babies out of the mud. Of the valley being clogged in places with bodies of people and animals, mangled in with uprooted trees and vegetation and the flotsam and jetsam from the destroyed houses. Even forty years after he still had nightmares. The work took months.

In Britain the raid is still commemorated. It has become legendary. It has been the subject of radio programmes, films, memorial flypasts, re-enactments, computer games, blog sites, and even been used in a Carling Black Label advert. 

As Jung pointed out:

And all the time the highly respectable public had not the slightest inkling that they themselves were thus living in the immediate neighbourhood of evil. 

Polarisation blinds. Societies have their own force fields that highlight what flatters their collective self-image and develops collective amnesia about uncomfortable truths: the ridges and troughs of belonging. Comforting and shared narrative lines about the past and present become communal folklore, heavily re-enforced by the media, and even built into school curricula, becoming a standard received version of history.

In researching about the Pickards and their circle I was of necessity dealing with a counter-culture: a community not in synch with the mainstream; pacifists when the dominant ethos was anything but pacifist, especially during the two World Wars and in their aftermath. Imperialism and militarism were closely allied to patriotism in the collective imagination. Questioning either was tantamount to being a traitor. The contempt felt for 'conchies' (conscientious objectors) was visceral.