Windy Doctrines

Lately we were visited at our Sunday Meetings by a devout and recently born again "Christian" of a somewhat evangelical bent. During afterthoughts each week she attended, she felt commanded by God to read a passage of the bible "to bring us understanding and to remind us of the Christian roots of Quakerism", as she claimed in her ministry that followed. The passages were all from parts of the Old Testament and told of the wrath of God and certainty of his vengeance. She was very well versed, and claimed to have read Fox and "knew him to be among God's elect".

She has now moved on, God having commanded her to go elsewhere, his words having fallen on barren ground with us. We are clearly among those whose ears and hearts are closed up by our arrogance; yet, in her eyes, Quakers had once been among the truest of Christians. I gather from her homilies that the world is divided into the 'saved' – those that have heard the word – and the 'damned', who are deaf to their saving power.

On one occasion she said in a somewhat vexed way "I thought you were Christians!". Clearly, we are not what she understands by being "Christian". I did say to her that many, even in the early years of Quakerism, also thought we were not Christians.

The experience has left me pondering about the early Quakers. Was she right about the type of Christian she thought they were? I think it is possible to read Fox and the other early Quakers and to find among their words strands of evangelical thought; but then, there is also much that does not fit with that. 

This may be in part why North American Quakers split in two in the nineteenth century: those who followed an evangelical path, finding succour among the early Quaker's words, and those who did not, also finding succour among the early Quaker's words; both finding vindication where they chose. 

George Fox in his wanderings had plenty of opportunity to fall in with communities of an evangelical bent, such as the Baptists, or one or other of the many Anabaptist fellowships, amongst others. He did not. Instead he fell in with communities of Seekers. What he discovered amongst them was not so much evangelical as mystical: experience not to be captured by words.  

The Catholic mystics of the Middle Ages, spoke of 'syndereses' – the essence, ground, or centre of the soul that enters into communion with God; the spark or emanation of divinity in the soul – which seems to be as good a description of Christian mysticism as one is likely to get: the umbilicus within each person that connects us with the divine, which can be discovered during the deepest contemplative silence. 

Interestingly, Carl Jung suggested that there was such a point in the unconscious of all people, that he called the God archetype; a psychic umbilicus with the latent potential of awakening our spirituality. 

Fox told Friends to "walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in every one", pointing to the same nub, which he thought could be found in all: the Quaker omphalos.

In Don Cupitt's words, Fox "sought to bring spiritual power down from heaven and disperse it into human hearts"

Was it the discovery by Fox of mysticism amongst the Seekers that "answered to his condition"? An experience that takes you out of the clouds of words and beliefs – the "windy doctrines" which he had encountered "blowing people up and down" (or, as he wrote in his Journal about the doctrines of the preachers he encountered "by which they blew the people about, this way and the other way, from sect to sect.") Mysticism is about a relationship that is felt, experienced, known, but which is beyond words and beliefs. It is essentially inexpressible, but transformative. 

Now I came up in spirit, through the flaming sword, into the paradise of God. All things were new, and all the creation gave another smell unto me than before, beyond what words can utter. I knew nothing but pureness, innocence, and righteousness, being renewed up into the image of God by Christ Jesus; so that I came up to the state of Adam, which he was in before he fell. George Fox,1648 (see Qf&p 26.03)

Was this the "Christ Jesus" of the Evangelicals? A transcendent presence, to be magically connected with by fervent belief and devotion? An unseen but ever present and surrounding being who might "save" you? The risen Jesus Christ whose return to sit in judgement is to be anticipated? A magically embracing cloud? Or was this "Christ Jesus" as a template, and exemplar, sent by God to set the pattern for living? I think Fox is ambiguous, and can be read either way. However, mysticism bypasses belief and magical thinking, and suggests a template, a pattern, an example. A figure to be imitated, not worshipped. Was this ambivalence and avoidance of doctrine why the Quakers were so often accused of denying the trinity? Certainly, in The Sandy Foundations Shaken the trinity was explicitly denied by William Penn, whose preference it was to see Jesus Christ as a pattern sent as an exemplar.

The rejection of any form of formal worship, rites or rituals which, according to Fox, "stood in forms without power", so that Quaker "fellowship might be in the holy spirit" was done to enable direct and immediate communion with the divine, accessed from within (syndereses): a communal mystical pathway to be had in the practice of the shared stillness and silence of Meeting. A silence from which rose the words of spontaneous ministry, as well as the inspiration to live rightfully.

According to some, to be Jewish is to obey the laws of Moses; to be diligent and observant. It is about how you live, not so much about what you believe. It is of the here and now in its practices. Was that what the early Quakers were attempting to be like? Living in the truth, observing the new law as taught in the Gospels? 

A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.  John 13.34 & 35 (King James version)

Some of the early Quakers seemed to think they could live in the here and now in the same state as Adam before the fall:

So a man or woman may come to Adam's state that he was in before he fell, which was without sin. Against such the judgment of God does not go forth, but they have peace with God, and fellowship in what is pure, before sin and transgression were. (Stephen Crisp (1628–1692), The Missing Cross to Purity.)

In some ways, Quakerism is nearer to Judaism than it is to Evangelicalism: it is about obedient and observant living in the here and now, building the kingdom of God(liness) day by day in how you live, not being caught up in the "windy doctrines" about some second coming and day of judgement, or about being 'saved'. It is more about doing than believing. 

Early Quakers differ so much from so many other Christians by not being obviously lapsarian, that the professor of Theology, Donald Nesti, who researched Quakerism from a Catholic perspective, thinks they are an entirely separate branch of Christianity, neither belonging to the Catholic tradition, nor to the Protestant tradition, both of which rely on lapsarian theologies, or notions of original sin; an alienation from God and the possibility of redemption. Early Quakers did not seem to think they were alienated because there was "that of God" within which could guide their lives in the here and now, so that they might live in the state of Adam before the fall: their God was immanent and his kingdom forged by rightful living. 

Certainly, although a modern not an early Quaker, the Swiss Quaker Pierre Ceresole expressed the practical here and now nature of Quakerism better than many I have read, rejecting the worship of Jesus Christ, seeing that as idolatry: 

The name of Jesus Christ has come to mean more than his work, it has become your idol. You are simply worshipping a name. The best justification for atheism is: to be in rebellion against the worship of words. I suggest that the time has come to give up using his name, which has divided us, and to return to his work, which will untie us. (p.20, For Peace and Truth from the Note-Books of Pierre Ceresole, 1954)

Having cut themselves off from the anchoring provided by the teachings, creeds, beliefs and doctrines of, not only the established Church, but also the other numerous varieties of denominations that had sprouted like fresh grass during the Civil War and the Interregnum, the early Quakers were left beating their own path, often in a zigzag way as they evolved: sometimes lurching towards evangelicalism, sometimes away. They knew truth experimentally. They also knew it to be beyond words. They tried to make their lives a testimony in action by right living, by doing things in Gospel order.

A Reasonable Faith: Francis Frith, William Pollard & William Turner

 

 

When faced with the challenge of writing about Irene Pickard's archive – at first sight a seemingly disparate collection of Jungian and Quaker related items assembled over her lifetime – deciding where to start was always going to be a headache. If the papers in her collection were regarded like Christmas cards hung from a line, then the narrative would be the line, holding them together in some sort of order, giving them relationship one to another. The narrative would need to be fixed at both ends – an introduction and a conclusion. The introduction would be the context which the story grew out of, and the conclusion would be where it fixes itself into the reader's lives. That is the point of history, it provides sustenance for reader by relating to them – it is not simply entertainment – it is part of that function of history as dialogue between the past and the present.

The anchoring of the narrative in Quaker history means, given that the Society of Friends is not well known by non-Quakers, introducing it origins, but briefly enough for Quakers to skim over: a very short synopsis of its early history and its peculiarities would suffice, it is hoped; and, yes, Quakers are a very peculiar lot. 

Next comes setting the scene for the entry of the protagonists – the first length of line. That is where A Reasonable Faith (1884) comes in, or to give it its full title A Reasonable Faith, short religious essays for the times by three "Friends". It was a landmark book that altered the direction of Quakerism in Britain, but considered potentially so heretical and shocking to the Quaker community that the authors dared not give their names: they were speaking the unspeakable! Although there was also a strong element of Quaker modesty that forbade them from seeking fame: it was the message that mattered, not who told it. Being "Friends" with a capital "F" was enough to establish their credentials. Being Friends meant that the truth spoke through them rather than simply their telling the truth; just as in Meeting when a Friend is compelled to rise and give ministry, the compulsion and the message is not their volition, they are simply the vehicle, or so it is held.  

The acceptance of A Reasonable Faith by the rising generation of Quakers changed the Society from one which, because of the Evangelical emphasis on salvation by faith, on devotion to Jesus, on loving Jesus, would have almost automatically rejected the likes of Jung and any suggestion of a psychological approach to understanding religion, into being a community that was receptive. Many Quakers, after the publication of A Reasonable Faith, might not have agreed with the contentions coming out of the new discipline of psychology, but at least they were becoming accepting of the need to accommodate their faith to the findings of the sciences – to reflect on the truths that the sciences might contain for them; especially those of evolution, of the vast age of the earth and of the extent of the universe. To use Bergson's terms, Quakerism had once more become a dynamic faith not a static one: it was open to transformation. 

Although in the book I did not write at length about A Reasonable Faith in that scene setting second chapter – Re-visioning Quakerism: Jones, Harris and Rowntree – and referred to it little thereafter, discovering it and its relevance to the narrative occupied research time far greater in extent than its use might suggest, and produced, as I prefer to do, a set of notes. My method has always been to read a source and make notes on it containing my own interpretation and reflections seeded with quotes, especially those which would seem to contain key points, and which would advance the narrative. Far better to let authors speak for themselves, than paraphrasing – a case of show not tell.

Here they are some of my reflections, quotes and notes from reading the book:

p.7: A Reasonable Faith

And finally, every article of Religious faith must be in harmony with sound reason and common sense; otherwise it becomes mere Superstition. The teaching of True Religion must never contradict the best exercise of the intellectual faculty, however much they may transcend, or supplement, its intuitions.

p.10

We hold, therefore, that no theory of Religion can possibly be satisfactory, which is not broad enough in its range, from the elementary simplicity to reasonable completeness, to comprehend all real God-seeking and truth – and goodness loving of all mankind – savage and civilised, learned and ignorant, child and man.

p.22: re a notion of God = loving father.

Such evidently is the Christian teaching as regards God. How, then, has it happened that one of the most influential schools of though in the Christian Church [the Evangelical] has, during the last three centuries, so far distorted and misrepresented a beautiful and tender religious faith like this, as to sanction and uphold all the horrors of predestination and the injustice of substitutional punishment? We thankfully believe, however, that these doctrines are now rapidly loosing their hold upon the minds of thoughtful Christian people, though not until they have wrought untold mischief and misery in the world.

The paradigm being suggested as the fundamental core of Christianity is that of the Loving Father, a paradigm that has evolved through a process of progressive revelation. The parable of the Prodigal Son is taken as exemplifying this: p.24:

. . . There is the long suffering love that rebellion and disobedience cannot destroy; the changeless love that cannot forget the absent; the deep hopeful love that does not despair of the reprobate; the active unslumbering love that is bent on winning back the beloved, though deluded, wanderer.

p.104: of the Bible as a source:

It is also of the utmost importance to bare in mind, that the Bible is an account of a progressive development, an adaptation of religious truth to the slowly growing capacity of the human race. The unfolding of wisdom and moral righteousness of God was given only as men were able to appreciate and apply it.

And thus of the hermeneutic understanding of what is written that results.*

The text of A Reasonable Faith is both humanistic, post-enlightenment, and focussed on an understanding of the paradigm of a Loving Father rather than on the Suffering Christ, or upon a Salvationist understanding. Christ is an aspect of the Loving Father, who has in Christ provided a paradigm of perfection. It is thus worldly [concerned with the ethics of living] and is about following in the footsteps as per the paradigm; not about alienation from the Divine Love – as so much of the Calvinistic tradition was – nor in over emphasis on the crucified Christ. It puts the God of love back at the top of the tree.

The text is a critique of the dominant Evangelical theology and practice of its times.

It seems to suggest that integrity is needed not to read into scripture what is not fully and clearly there. The honesty to know that the scriptures are the product of human hands, both in creation and in transmission, and so are not the infallible word of God.

It feels as if the writers are reaching back to the more God-centered, gradualist and circumspect vision of early Quakers – groping in the mist and slowly revealing rather than knowing. They appear to be recommending less certainty of doctrine, more openness to revelations cautiously explored.

They also seem to be recommending the primacy of God not Jesus in their faith. Jesus for them is seen as the manifestation of his will, not as the sacrificial atonement. God is not seen as a dark force fixated on punishment for sin, but as a loving father who came to earth to act as a guide. The Evangelical focus on salvation, resurrection, substitutionary punishment is set aside as not being as honest an interpretation of the bible as claimed. There is a refocussing on the life and teaching and not on the death and resurrection.

The writers seem to be challenging the almost unquestioning acceptance of a superstructure of doctrine, and also questioning the felicity of such acceptance; of whether it would deliver the deepening of faith and understanding that the stance of “what canst thou say” would seem to require? Should Quakers be simply climbing aboard the “ready-made” version of Christianity promulgated by the Evangelicals, and accept the “knowing” implied, or should they have greater humility of faith? Acknowledging that the seed needs careful cultivation and a slow growth into individual fullness, where perhaps that fullness may take different forms in different lives and in different times.

I have a feeling that they were growing wary of the 'we are saved' aspect of Evangelicalism as focussing on the individual salvation in an afterlife and thus focusing on the self, rather than taking on board the teaching of the scriptures as a guide to living more selflessly and discarding thought of afterlife rewards.

Did they feel Evangelism was dishonest? 

* Hermeneutics: the critical dialogue between the reader and the text resulting in evolving interpretations. An informed reader reads the text differently to a naive reader, filtering it with and relating it to their experience. There is not a single, therefore correct, interpretation; it will speak differently to different people's condition. The authors are also concerned with the changes over time in understanding consistent with human progress. There is concern with some readers projecting onto the text the interpretation they want to see, but which the text may not bear.

William Penn

History is always a dialogue between the past and the present. The down grading of William Penn in the esteem of Quakers by removing his name from one of the rooms at Friends House is very much part of such dialogue. 

How the mighty are fallen! Penn name must be removed from public display because he owned slaves. An unforgivable sin to our modern twenty-first century eyes, illuminated by Black Lives Matter. How could he! Surly one of the founding fathers of Quakerism, one of those who came to accept, propound and live by the testimony of equality, must have realised the crime against humanity he was committing, the massive hypocrisy he was indulging in? Did equality for Penn only extend to people with white skins?

Or should we be looking more carefully at this, and at our relationship with the past? 

There is always a danger of decontextualising when we project into the past our current values, resulting in misrepresentation. Historic figures always need to be appreciated in their context, not judged as if they were our contemporaries; although their significance to us is always part of the current public discourse. The dunking of Coulson into Bristol Docks speaks volumes about were we are in re-assessing our relationship with parts of British history.

William Penn was born in 1644, some 263 years after the Peasants Revolt of 1381, when the peasants of south-east England tried and failed to free themselves from forced labour, and 231 years before the 1875 Employer and Workman Act decriminalised the failure to perform labour. Penn lived near the midway point between the two; between the medieval, when almost everyone was bound into a web of enforced service, and the modern world of freedom of labour and individual liberty.

Prior to 1875 employees could suffer criminal sanctions, including fines and imprisonment, for withholding their labour. The Master and Servant Act of 1823 required "the obedience and loyalty" from servants to their contracted employer, with infringements of the contract punishable before a court of law, often with a jail sentence of hard labour. That act itself was a codification of earlier laws and practices that enforced work and bound servants to their masters. Servants were still legally bound to their masters even two centuries after Penn's birth.

It was not until 1574 that serfdom was finally abolished in England and Wales, although it had begun slowly disintegrating after the Peasants Revolt of 1381. However, the impression that people were anything like free thereafter was far from the truth. Being bound as an apprentice, indentured servitude, bonded labour, debt bondage, being bound in service, impressment into the military, convict labour and forced day labour, on road repair and such like, were all normal. It has been calculated that 80% of the world's people were in forced labour of one kind or another in Penn's time, and for much of the following century (see Adam Hochschild Burry the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery).

Wives and children fared little better being, in the eyes of the law, dependents of the man. Injury to a man's wife, child or servant was injury to him, and he would deserve compensation for such harm. As master of his household he was entitled and expected to administer 'just punishment' to all – wife, children and servants –  including the use of the rod.

The concentration on the Afro-American experience of slavery can lead to the impression that seventeenth century slavery was simply an issue of white people enslaving black. True, as long as the extensive enslavement of Europeans in North Africa by the Barbary Pirates, the enslavement of up to 80,000 Ukrainians, Russians, or other Slavic peoples a year by the Crimean Tartars for shipment into the Ottoman Empire, or the widespread trading in slaves along the Silk Road and elsewhere in Asia is ignored. Fear among Europeans of falling into Barbary or Ottoman slavery was very real. Upwards of two million Europeans were taken into slavery between 1500 and 1700, with the Barbary pirates raiding as far north and the English Channel and Iceland. It was only in the eighteenth century that numbers of African slaves in the Americas overtook that of European slaves in the Islamic world. There were also other very healthy and vigorous slave trades around the world in Penn's time. Slavery was globally endemic and horribly normal.

In the seventeenth century Quakerism was new and was finding its way, following those openings that George Fox spoke of, being led by the light. All of the first generation of Quakers came to it from outside, bringing with them the mores, beliefs, attitudes and values which they had grown up with and which they had lived by. Bending themselves to the emerging ethic as it grew was at times a painful struggle. There was no template for being Quaker. It all had to be worked anew. The rejection of all authority except that of the inward light meant being open to transformation. Nothing was a given. The seed had to be allowed to grow. Continuing revelation is never comfortable. It requires moving from what is, to what now seems required. The testimonies were not givens, they emerged through painful living and long hours of contemplative sitting in that collective and germinating silence, attending to the ministry that arose. 

It took many years for the testimony of equality to emerge and to see how it applied to all manner of people. Accepting the spiritual equality of women was not automatic – Margaret Fell's Woman's Speaking Justified dating from 1666 – and for many years men held Meeting for Business separately, not involving women in the proceedings; women's' Meetings were confined principally to matters of social wealfare. Likewise, how equality applied to children, servant, employees, non-Quakers, non-Christians, non-Europeans, or any other degree or kind of person, had to be worked through, including what aspects of life it applied to. A process that is still unfolding: the twenty-first century seeing Quakers addressing the issue of equal marriage amongst other issues.

For seventeenth century Quakers your lot in life, your estate, was simply a given. You might be a free man or bound. You might be a pauper, or the owner of great wealth. Equality in the spirit was separate to your earthly estate. William Penn counted amongst the wealthiest men of the age, especially after receiving the grant of lands in North America from Charles II, making Penn the greatest private landowner in the world: but his word arising from the gathered silence of meeting for worship was worth no more than that of the least of his servants, indentured, bound, or enslaved.

Equality did not mean material or economic equality for early Quakers, it applied to spiritual equality: being open to revelation, to speaking the word as it came from within. This perception was applied to slaves as well as to the 'free'. It appears that the first encounter between Quakers and slavery was in Barbados in the 1660s, where slaves were welcomed into Quaker meetings, even becoming elders. Nelson McKeeby has described this as a weird version of slavery.

By acknowledging that slaves had spiritual equality Quakers had laid the foundations for their coming to realise that slavery itself was wrong. A revelation first expressed in 1688 in the Germantown Petition against Slavery, only seven years after the grant of Pennsylvania to Penn, and six since the first colonisation of Philadelphia. Penn seems to have had 12 slaves, initially employed on the construction of his house and outbuildings. However, slaves were already part of the workforce of the Delaware valley, having been imported as early as 1639 by Dutch and Swedish settlers, and added to by later landings. It seems that Penn's slaves were purchased from that pool by Penn's agent as that was all the manpower to be had. Penn, like the Barbadon Quakers, was concerned with how slaves, other indentured people, including personal servants, were treated, and laid down regulations concerning them all after his return to Pennsylvania in 1699. Jack H Schick's account of Slavery in Pennsylvania includes a more detailed account of this. 

In an era when slavery was normal the interesting story is how the Quakers came to reject the practice and became leading campaigners for abolition. It almost conforms to George Foxe's revelation that in order to come to realisation of what was right, it was necessary to have a sense, and perhaps experience, of what was wrong. By giving spiritual dignity, respect and equality to everyone regardless of their estate, the Quakers lit a fuse that ended slavery. 

So should we feel shame about William Penn because of his slave owning? Should he have leaped in one bound from the normality of his times, to applying equality in every respect to everyone, or was this a work in progress? It may be that the removal of Penn's name from a room says more about our current discomfort about race than it says anything about Penn and his times. Is it a way of  avoiding the dissonance that its continued presence may invoke, rather than our engaging with the transformations we need to make?

[This item has been re-worked by removing the more polemical and confrontational tone of the original due to the criticisms it received, for which I am most grateful.]

 

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. 

The sound of doors being bolted shut

When you are researching an archive, the historical events that form its background can unexpectedly connect with your own family's history and with current events. It stops being remote and become so much more real. Last week the papers were full of this story:

Washington Post

By Amy Cheng

November 19, 2021 at 4:03 a.m. EST

Britain’s Conservative government could be allowed to strip people of citizenship without giving them notice to appeal if legislation being debated in Parliament becomes law.

The Nationality and Border Bill would permit the home secretary, Britain’s top domestic security official, to cancel citizenship without warning on national security grounds if it is not “reasonably practicable” to do.

The stripping of citizenship – well, that's familiar! History repeating itself, but in a minor key. It was a problem that the subjects of my researches had grappled with in the late 1930s. Bertram Pickard, in his role as a reporter for a number of newspapers, including the Washington Post, but also as an observer on behalf of the international Quaker community, attended the conference at Evian-les-Bains held between the 6th and 15th of July 1938; a conference called by President Roosevelt precisely because of the stripping of citizenship from so many people in central Europe was causing a refugee crisis. 

The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 had stripped German citizenship away from 'non-Aryans'. The Anschluss and the annexation of Czechoslovakia now extended that to the Jewish, Roma and other 'non-Aryans' of Austria and the freshly dismembered Czechoslovakia. 

Évian was the sound of the world bolting their door tight against any potential influx of refugees. Only previously allowed quotas would be accepted. In many cases, much as a result of the often hysterical reporting of the press, there was pressure to reduce even those. The Daily Mail ran headlines such as:

 German Jews Pouring into the Country

and wrote reports such as:

Never before has it been more difficult for an alien to land unlawfully and remain out of police hands for more than a few hours. The favourite method is to come ashore in a rowing boat with the appearance of having been out for a short sea-trip. Despite coastal watch it is possible for an alien to escape notice in this way, but his inevitable struggle for existence is almost certain to lead him before long into police hands.  Daily Mail, 2nd August, 1938

What! Aliens landing on British shores in small boats! 

Migrant crisis ‘out control’ as Channel crossings treble last year’s total

THE growing number of illegal migrants crossing the channel is now a "national emergency", a senior Tory MP has warned.

By Macer Hall

23:03, Mon, Nov 22, 2021 | UPDATED: 23:04, Mon, Nov 22, 2021

 

Sir Edward Leigh told Home Secretary Priti Patel that the Government had “lost control” in the crisis. Anger erupted at Westminster yesterday after figures showed more than 25,600 people have made the journey across the Channel this year. Small boat arrivals in 2021 now stand at more than triple the figure for the whole of last year, when 8,417 people crossed.     Daily Express, 22nd November, 2021

Clearly history is repeating itself, replete with press outrage and calls for the government to act, as Becky Taylor (Reader in Modern History, University of East Anglia) reminds us in her recent blog post on Refugee History.

Just as now there are those who see refugees not as a threat but as people in distress who need help, so there were in the late 1930s. The subjects of my research were very much involved in such action, and were part of the Quaker effort to provide relief and assistance. Efforts that were co-ordinated from Friends House, London, the central offices of the Quakers in Britain:

Up to 1937 the staff and volunteers in the London office were never more than nine people. The work escalated after the invasion of Austria, so that by the end of 1938 the number of case workers employed had risen to 59. The stream of refugees needing help at Friends House swelled so much that the two great staircases became more or less permanently blocked by queues of people waiting to be attended to. Interviews had to be conducted in corridors when the offices were overflowing. A few months later, in February 1939, the work moved to Bloomsbury House. At this time a staff of 80 case workers moved out of Friends House along with 14,000 case records. The expansion of the work for Jewish refugees from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia led to the formation of a co-ordinating body known as the Inter-Church Council for German Refugees. Bertha Bracey was the Secretary of this body, whilst still employed by Friends Service Council as Secretary to the Friends Committee on Refugees and Aliens.    Lawrence Darton, Friends Committee on Refugees and Aliens, Appendix IV and pp. 58-9

My own family became involved when my mother received into her home a Jewish couple from Czechoslovakia, having paid the necessary surety money to the UK government to ensure that the couple would not become 'a charge upon the public purse' – the equivalent of about £5,000 in modern values. Technically the couple came as 'domestic servants' – due to the so called 'servant shortage' that was one of the very few categories of immigrant allowed into the UK – quite a claim for a couple who had owned a major store in Prague trading in fur coats – but a necessary fiction.

In the light of subsequent events, it seems the Quakers, and, in this case, my parents, were on the right side of history.