One small Quaker meeting, four Nobel prizes!

When I began researching Irene's Pickard's archive in 2012, her daughter, Alison Bush, agreed that I could come each Wednesday at 10.00 in the morning and read and study the archive, making notes as I went, until five in the afternoon. Each time we shared a pleasant lunch together, and Alison would tell me snippets of her memories of their life in Geneva, the city that had been her home for the first fourteen years of her life.

She remembered Carl Jung visiting their home in Geneva, and her sitting on his knees. She would have been about eight years old at the time, far too young to realise the importance of the visitor, or to have any comprehension of her mother's fascination with Jung's theories. Beside, she was used to visitors to their home. It was a sort of open house for so many diplomats, academics, theologians, representatives of NGOs, delegates to conferences connected to the League of Nations, journalists, as well as for students attending the Post Graduate Institute of International Studies at the University, or the summer schools in international affairs run by Alfred Zimmern. It was a rare day in which there was just their family in their home. Her father, Bertram, was master at what we now call networking: anybody and everybody concerned with peace-work in Geneva was known to him. 

To cope with these incessant waves of visitors, Irene taught herself to always be ready to feed an unknown number of people, and to cook to cordon bleu standards for special occasions. Although started before the Pickards arrived in Geneva, Irene and Bertram perfected the informal meals used to bring diplomats together for off the record discussion about the issues of the day. A tradition still continued by the Quaker United Nations Office in Geneva. The seeds of mutual understanding sown at such events sometimes grow and bear fruit.

Geneva at the time of the League of Nations was a place of experiment in international relations. Nothing like it had existed anywhere before. Countries had to work out how to use the channels of communication opened up between them; how to relate to the newly created and emerging international institutions; how to train staff to work in such institutions – hence the Post Graduate Institute; how to relate to the emerging plethora of international non-governmental organisations; how to be part of the self-styled capital of peace. So much that we take for granted about how the world is integrated was first hammered out in Geneva between the wars, from communications to passports. 

Hawks in each country tell a story of peace being maintained by mutual fear. A narrative promoted, at considerable expense, by what has been termed the military-industrial complex: they have very deep pockets and the need for every increasing investment. The truth is that peace is much more effectively constructed by international co-operations and collaboration, and at much lower cost. It is that co-operation and collaborations that the Geneva experiment sought to encourage and expand. It was an attempt to build on the truth that human being collaborate at their core, but compete at their margins. Count the number of collaborative interactions between the peoples of countries compared to the number of military conflicts: peoples trade, communicate, exchange and intermarry – it is their governments and political leaders that tend to impose boarders and make wars. Much that was achieved by the League was about enabling peoples to interact; its efforts with governments was less successful – they were too invested in power and sovereignty. 

The small Geneva Meeting of the Quakers was at best about thirty people, including both residents and visitors, but among them many were engaged in the prevalent peace-work of the city. The result was a harvest of Nobel Prizes! This completely floored me when I began my researches into Irene's archive. Two Nobel Peace Prizes – Emily Green Balch and Philip  Noel-Baker – one Nobel Prize for Economic – James Edward Meade – which was for work on international trade, something he felt to be crucial in peace-building – and the 1947 Peace Prize for the peace-work and relief work undertaken more generally by the British and American Quakers, of which the peace-work in Geneva was a part. Strictly that is a ratio of one Nobel Prize to every ten Friends at the Meeting, if the 1947 prize is discounted (that was only very loosely connected). An extraordinarily high ratio. It would be hard to find a similar concentration anywhere else.

Militaristic interpretations of history often dismiss the League of Nations and other peace work in Geneva between the wars as being idealistic but misguided: time and energy that would have been far better spent making military preparation. The surprising but little told truth is that much of the post 1945 era draws on the work done by the League and others in Geneva, often the more prosaic and not so noticed stuff that enables interconnection between peoples, but which are essential parts of the framework of modern life.

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. 

Finding the narrative line

Irene Pickard (née Speller),  started her adult life as a personal secretary, one of the few occupations open to 'respectable' young women in 1911. The typewriter was a real instrument of female emancipation. Its mastery, along with the other secretarial skills, enabling a degree of income and independence, perhaps even entrée into homes and lives of the socially 'superior'. In the class ridden society of La Belle Époque it was one of the few opportunities for a girl to 'better' herself, to enter worlds which her birth might not have given her access to.

Fortunately for posterity, Irene never lost the secretarial habit of making copies and filing. That is how her archive came about. It was composed of a mass of documents created between 1911 and 1982, a library of over 100 volumes on Jungian related themes, a box of personal letters between Rendel Harris and herself, articles in two periodicals, one published on each side of the Atlantic, along with a number of pamphlets written by her husband, Bertram, and others. 

When I first encountered what Irene had referred to as her 'compost heap' it was obvious that hidden within was a remarkable story. The problem was finding a narrative line which would give it order.

First there was the biographic frame of lives lived in Britain, Switzerland and the USA, and identifying who the main persona were, their relationships, the nature of the work they were engaged with, and how Quakerism related to their lives. Then there was the task of identifying the chronology –  which document belong to when. But what was central was the story of Irene's infatuation with Jung as a complement and argumentation to her Quakerism. And not just Irene, but the other members of the Quaker-Jungian group in Geneva too. An infatuation that would prove to have traceable consequences on both sides of the Atlantic up until the present.

As I familiarised myself with the archive, what became apparent was that Irene and the others had gone through a learning process with identifiable stages.

First came a preparatory stage, which put them in Geneva in between the wars and explained why they were there. A stage dominated by the theme of peace-work, but also by how Irene and Bertram came together as a couple.

Then came their introduction to Jung, which led to an intense phase of exploration and assimilation of his ideas. A period which according to Irene produced "the most intensive and far reaching study group I have ever known".

What followed in the later 1930s was a period of accommodation as the impact of Jung's ideas on their lives and faith were worked through, set against the the deteriorating international situation.

That led to a stage of dissemination starting during the Second World War, as the now scattered group shared what they had learned with the wider Quaker community and beyond. Dissemination that continued for years in the aftermath of the war as Irene and Bertram once more returned to Geneva to pick up the threads of their peace-work.

Finally there was a stage of consequences as the wider Quaker world absorbed what was being shared and undertook their own explorations and discoveries, and evaluated the the significance of Jung to their lives and faith.

Following that pattern of development allowed chapters to emerge and take their place. 

All that was needed was to add a few chapters to provide context and to trace the development of the peace work Bertram was engaged with. No small matter for someone who became something of a hub for the efforts of so many of the NGOs in Geneva, and who played a part in the founding the the United Nations, and became one of the first members of its secretariat, mirroring the role he had created for himself before the war as the spokes person for the NGOs to the League of Nations. 

The interweave of the twin themes of living out the peace-testimony – the Bertram theme – whilst comprehending and deepening spirituality due to Jung – the Irene theme – formed the two voices of a fugue that was their shared life, and the two themes that run through the book.

Preliminary: (What is) Quakerism; Re-visioning Quakerism – Harris, Jones and Rowntree; 1914 – a World Ripped Asunder; Well met at Woodbrooke; The Peace Testimony; Quaker responses to the 'Great War' and its Aftermath; Peace-work in Geneva. 

Exploration and assimilation: Encountering Jung's Ideas; Tina Keller-Jenny's Exposition; Meeting with Jung in Zürich ; The Letters; Many papers were written and read; Reactions – H G Wood and Howard Collier.

Accommodation: The Rising Tide of Fascism; Reconciliation, Relief and Refugees; The Calm before the Storm; The Looming Storm; Belief in an Age of Analysis; The Last Gasps of the League; Escape. 

Dissemination: Peace-makers in a time of war: The Aftermath of War: The Road back to Geneva: The Women's International Forum and the Friday Club; After Aion – Irene's Dark Night of the Soul: Answer to Job: P W Martin and the Experiment in Depth: Elined, Irene and the Inward Light: Martin Buber, Marjorie Martin & Piet Englesman; The Various Light; Pierre Lacout – God is Silence: Peace as a Process; The Godmothers – Elined: The Godmothers – Irene.

Consequences:  Jungian Ripples in America: Jungian Ripples in Britain: The Living Myth.

Those are the working titles and the pattern of chapters.

The War in its Effects upon Women by H M Swanwick, August 1916

Three themes emerged from researching Irene Pickard's archive: Quakerism, Jung and peace-work. If it was not for the peace-work the Pickards would not have been in Geneva, and the Irene may never have been exposed to Jung's ideas with such intensity, and certainly would never have met the man himself, nor, one expects, ever been in correspondence with him nor been on friendly terms with his wife, Emma Jung, herself a significant analyst. 

Emma Jung's visits to Geneva to talk to the Geneva Quakers was one of the key events deepening Irene's appreciation of Jung's psychology and its importance to her Quakerism. For Irene, it opened up the inner workings of the mind and gave life and validity to her faith. It placed it on a 'scientific' footing as an essential part of being a complete and psychologically healthy individual. Contrary to the Marxists or to the Positivists – both prevalent philosophies at the time – religion was neither the 'opium of the people' nor vacuous nonsense: it was, according to Jung, essential to the process of successful individuation (to becoming an increasingly mature and balanced individual).

However, it was not analytical psychology that had brought Irene to Geneva but peace-work. It was where the League of Nations was which put it at the heart of the efforts to build a new way of working internationally that might prevent another catastrophe like the First World War. It was why the Quakers had decided to open a centre near John Calvin's cathedral in the old town, and why they decided to appoint Bertram Pickard as its first full time secretary, with Irene as the warden of a proposed student hostel for young Quakers studying International Relations at the University – the first university courses of this kind in the world.

What made the Quakers adamant that they needed to have a voice in Geneva was their experience of the war. Many had been so much at odds with mainstream sentiment, so much in conflict with the authorities over such issues as conscription, and had reacted to the war so much at variance with the dominant patriotism – working to alleviate the suffering caused rather than compounding the suffering by participation – that they felt impelled to aid, in any way they could, steps taken to construct a permanent peace. 

Living out the Peace Testimony under the duress of a world war had not been a comfortable experience. It had tested many Friends to breaking point and had led some to abandon the Society. Helping to construct a peaceful future would need considerable investment in the opportunities for collaborative working with those outside the Society. That was the model that had allowed the Quakers to have such an impact in the abolitionist movement: it amplified their concern by finding and working with allies.

Once such ally was Helena Swanwick (1864 – 1939). She had been active in the women's suffrage movement, but resigned over the Suffragette's active support for the war effort, and particularly their decision not to take part in the Women's Peace Congress at the Hague in 1915. 

In 1916 she published her inflammatory condemnation of men, as makers of the war, for their blindness towards its effects on women, who suffered inordinately but had no voice. War was pre-eminently the doing of men. She also condemned her erstwhile companions in the British suffrage movement for their lack of compassion for the impact of war on women in the conflict zones: 

… although [British women] suffer like all the other women by the death and maiming of their men, they are curiously removed from the stunning effects of war on their own soil. Their grown men die, it is true, too young and very dear. But they do not see their babies killed by the thousands; they do not see their daughters outraged; they do not have their homesteads and fields defiled and burned and blown to atoms; they do not have to take part in those hideous retreats of women and children and sick and old, starving and dying on the cruel roads: they do not bear their babies to the sound of cannon … [The War in its Effect upon Women, August 1916]

She shared with the Quaker an understanding of war as tragedy and as a massive failure of human governance. She even suggest that women should ask themselves –

… whether men are so made that periodical wars are necessary for their bodily and spiritual health. Many people tell them so, and sometimes, in bewildered amaze at all the suffering brought about for what seem trumpery reasons, women will feel inclined to think that, after all, men fight because they like fighting; they always will like fighting; they always will do what they like. 

However, she thinks it is only a half truth, as:

… the mind of man should be equal to the task of directing and transforming this instinct (to fight) to the common good. By the prodigious development of mechanical and chemical resources, men have perhaps forged the weapons that will teach them that they must kill war. For it seems that unless man will kill war, industrial and military machinery will kill man.

Helena went on in 1919 to be a founding member of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom [WILPF]. The league had grown out of Jane Addams's peace movement via the International Congress of Women. It appointed Emily Greene Balch as its first International Secretary-Treasurer, with its headquarters in Geneva.

Emily soon came into contact with the small Quaker community in Geneva, and became a member in 1921, saying: 

Religion seems to me one of the most interesting things in life, one of the most puzzling, richest and thrilling fields of human thought and speculation... religious experience and thought need also a light a day and sunshine and a companionable sharing with others of which it seems to me there is generally too little ... The Quaker worship at its best seems to me give opportunities for this sort of sharing without profanation.     [Randall, Improper Bostonian, p. 60]

Emily Greene Balch was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1946 for her work with the WILPF. One of three Nobel prize winners associated between the wars with that small Quaker Meeting in Geneva.

In 1924 Helena Swanwick severed as substitute delegate to the League of Nations on behalf of Britain, and between 1928 and 1931, during the build up to the disarmament conference, as part of the Labour British Empire delegation.

During both those periods Helena would have connected with Emily Greene Balch and others on the network of peace activists in the city, including many from the Quaker Meeting. During her second spell that network was joined by Bertram and Irene Pickard. Bertram in particular played a very prominent part in the network. In 1929 he was appointed as Honorary Secretary to the newly formed Fédération Internationale des Institutions Internationales Etablies à Genèva [FIIG] an umbrella organisation bringing together all the non-governmental organisations [NGOs] in the city. He also became Chairman of the Disarmament Committee of the Christian International Organisations in Geneva. He made himself very much the hub of the peace activist network. 

There was a fascination in researches springing from Irene's archive, to see how apparently diverse people interwove their lives because of the networks they became part of. How they gravitated towards each other because of their commitment to one or other ideal. The network of committed peace activists in Geneva was no exception. 

I first came across Helena Swanwick in Katherine Storr's book Exuded from the Record: Women, Refugees and Relief 1914-15 whilst researching outwards from Irene's archive into its historical context. References in Katherine Storr's book led me to finding a copy of Helena's 1916 booklet, which I then used as an example of divergent attitudes to the war. It was only later that I discovered that she was connected to Emily Greene Balch via the WILPF, and had been involved in peace work in Geneva. Writing based on an archive is very much like fitting pieces into a jigsaw, but where so many pieces are hopelessly lost for ever, or others do not turn up until late.

Am I fullfilling Godwin's law?

 Jung, the Quakers and Hitler – why the Hitler? He certainly was not there when I started. 

It began with my being invited to look at an archive left to an elderly Friend (yes, the capital is intended, she was a Quaker, born and bred, and an active Member – yes that capital too – of the Society of Friends – yep, and those) who was deeply concerned that her mother's archive might be lost or destroyed when she died. That was exactly what had happened to her mother's friend's archive when she died: it was mistakenly sold along with the household furniture. She had been the first Jungian analyst in Washington D.C., a founder of the Friends Conference on Religion and Psychology, and for many years the editor of Inward Light. Among her papers would have been many fascinating letters exchanged between her, the Jungs (yes, both Carl and Emma) and her own analyst for many years – Tina Keller-Jenny. Posterity lost out there: they're gone – the letters and all – no doubt consigned to some rubbish dump or incinerator.

Needless to say, Irene Pickard's surviving daughter was concerned that the same fate should not happen to her mothers archive. She had inherited them from her sister – herself a psychiatrist – who had inherited them from their mother. They had both understood that the archive was worth preserving, that its contents were certainly unique and irreplaceable, and might well be of value to future researchers. Some of it had already been used as a resource for one post-graduate submission for a higher degree, and another academic had written a paper about their father – Bertram Pickard. His papers, and some of his wife's, had been preserved. They had been gifted to the Swarthmore College Peace Collection. 

And that was where Hitler got in.

It is simply not possible to write about what was in Irene's archive without him. He had dominated their lives for far too many years because Bertram was actively involved in peace work for most of his life, spending a large part of it in the shadow of the rise of Hitler – an experience that almost cost all of his family their lives –and then in the aftermath of the Third Reich, helping to repair the damage. 

I was asked a simple question when I was invited to look at Irene's Jungian archive. Was the archive of value? As it contained heaps of Jungian related material, including correspondence with him, and was a record of how a group of Quakers struggled with and absorbed his ideas, coming in time to disseminate them on both sides of the Atlantic. There was no doubt in my mind it was of value. It contained a remarkable story waiting to be told, especially as it was interwoven with the story of the Pickard's peace work as a background.

I was allowed to have privileged access to the papers before a home was found for them among the Quaker archives at the University of Essex.  

Godwin's law? The longer the discussion, the more likely a Nazi comparison becomes, and with long enough discussions, it is a certainty. So in discussing my researches, it was utterly and completely unavoidable that I would fulfil the law. 

I understand that in some groups this would automatically signal the end of a discussion. Well, that's me stymied then, given what I am writing about.