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.

Universal Basic Income – a Quaker idea!

Sifting through Irene's archive revealed a number of pamphlets and other publications by her husband, Bertram Pickard. Whilst most concerned themselves with his dedication to peace-work, and a few with the spread of Quakerism across Europe, one stands apart. It was a radical foray into political economy: A Reasonable Revolution: being a discussion of the State Bonus Scheme – a proposal for a national minimum income. 

Bertram had been at Bootham School, one of the Quaker boarding schools, along with Denis Milner, whose brain child the 'state bonus' was. Denis and his wife, Mabel, wrote a small pamphlet about the idea in 1918. It seemed such an obvious and revolutionary step: pay every single adult a fixed sum of money sufficient to provide for their most basic needs. At a stroke, the demon of absolute poverty, whether caused by sickness, unemployment or incapacity, would be done away with. And it would be simply funded by each person in work, or earning money from investments, being taxed at 20%. 

It was an obvious solution for all to common destitution that followed in the wake of the First World War: the millions of permanently incapacitated x-servicemen; the legions of widows; the masses of unemployed discharged troops; these in addition to the usual burden of the sick, workless and unfortunate. 

Bertram expanded the pamphlet, with its limited circulation largely in Quaker circles, to a small book, published by George and Allan Unwin in 1919. The following year a fuller book by Milner explaining the scheme was also published by George and Allan Unwin under the title Higher Production by a Bonus on National Output. A proposal for a minimum income for all varying with National Productivity. 

Thus the idea of what we now call Universal Basic Income (UBI) was born. It was discussed at the Brighton Conference of the British Labour Party in 2021, and then seems to have been largely forgotten.  

However, elements of UBI have been introduced by different governments over time and applied to sections of their population as a universal benefit: old age pensions and child benefit being the most common; but to date nowhere has tried to apply it across the whole population, as was mooted by Milner and Pickard.

Applying it to the whole populations seems to have been reborn as an idea in the 1980s, often without people realising its earlier iteration. It was Walter Van Trier who in 1995 published his PhD thesis, entitled, Every one a King which put Milner and Pickard back on the map as its originators.

Now UBI is increasingly being discussed and even experimented with. It would seem worthy of consideration in an age of increasingly precarious employment and gross income disparity, with threats of automation, especially with the advent of AI, and globalisation, further disrupting lives.  Is it time for yet another great Quaker idea?

Why did Britain starve to death one million German civilians in 1919?

But the war ended at eleven o'clock on the eleventh of November 1918! We know this because we celebrate it every Remembrance Day. Not that celebrate is the right word, more like commemorate, with the added wash of mournfulness for those who 'gave their lives' – those recruited or conscripted victims of war who are increasingly portrayed as heroes. Why do I say a "wash of mournfulness"? – because those who actually remember the dead of the First World War, who had real memories about those who lost their lives, are themselves all gone. You cannot remember those you never knew, nor mourn their loss. What is carried out is little better than a collective pageant, a pantomime of mourning, an indulgence in nationalistic and militaristic sentiments.  

But the war did not end at 11.00 on 11/11/18. The fighting on the Western Front Ended. The fighting in Italy ended. The war against the Ottoman Empire had already ended. But Britain's navel campaign against Germany continued until to June 28 1919. 

This came as a surprise to me whist researching for the book. The history I had been taught, and, indeed, the history that is taught in our schools even now, focusses on the end of the war being on 11/11/18. It has become the standard version of our history, repeated in film, television and book after book. There is, however, a darker truth, one which we would prefer not to remember because what happened would now count as a war crime, as a crime against humanity: the deliberate starving to death of upwards to a million German civilians.

It pays to remember that not a single allied soldier's boot had landed on German soil. The German Army, for all the push back it had suffered in the autumn of 1918, still held its ground. It was still a cohesive and effective force. It still occupied much of France and Belgium. It was not defeated. A truth that Hitler was to capitalise on later during his rise to power.

The war on the Western Front was a stalemate. For all of the sacrifices made – there was hardly a street, town or village that had not lost someone in those killing fields – there was no clear victory. It fell to the politicians to deliver to a deeply wounded public the victory the fighting failed to provide. 

In the British Cabinet, the hawks, led by Winston Churchill, the Secretary of State for Munitions, argued for the absolute necessity of continuing the navel blockade: Germany needed to be forced to capitulate to every demand the allies might make at the Peace Conference. There was to be no negotiating with them. They were simply to be presented with the terms to agree to.  Churchill continued to hold this position when he became Secretary of State for War in Lloyd George's cabinet following the December 1918 election. The blockade was to ensure that no food supplies reached Germany until after they had signed the Versailles Treaty on 28th June 1919. He was of the opinion that Germany should be crushed to such an extent, if necessary by reducing its population numbers, that it would never again pose a threat. Starvation contributed to doing this. Georges Clemenceau, the French President at the time, even expressed the opinion that there were twenty million Germans to many (Patrick J Buchanan, 2008) 

There is another matter which calls for very prompt settlement. It is the last to which I shall refer before I sit down. I mean the speedy enforcing of the Peace Terms upon Germany. At the present moment we are bringing everything to a head with Germany. We are holding all our means of coercion in full operation, or in immediate readiness for use. We are enforcing the blockade with rigour. We have strong Armies ready to advance at the shortest notice. Germany is very near starvation. The evidence I have received from officers sent by the War Office all over Germany shows, first of all, the great privations which the German people are suffering, and secondly, the danger of collapse of the entire structure of German social and national life under the pressure of hunger and malnutrition.      (Winston Churchill addressing Parliament in March 1919)

This is part of British history that is usually omitted. Far better to end the account of the war with the armistice of 11/11/18 than to face the truth of how Britain reduced the population of Germany to mass starvation in order to ensure acceptance of the peace terms. 

Churchill's role in this as its main instigator does not sit comfortably with the usual laudations he receives as Britain's greatest Prime-Minister. It does not fit well with that narrative – but then a lot that he did and stood for sits less comfortably in modern eyes. He was an imperialist at the height of empire and did not shy away from using force in order to preserve or further British interests, whether by sending the Black and Tans into Ireland, or equipping the air-force with mustard gas bombs to use on Kurdish rebels in Iraq.

The Quaker imperative to 'answer that of God in everyone' led to their perceiving the people of Germany in a very different way. They were not an enemy to be defeated, but men, women and children suffering the consequences of continued hostility. The Friends War Victim Relief Committee in London had been revived in 1914, and, under the secretaryship of Ruth Fry concerned itself with all who were harmed by the war, regardless of the lines of division imposed by Governments. Someone in urgent need of relief is someone in urgent need of relief no matter what their nationality. As soon as it was possible to bring relief to the suffering peoples of Germany, the committee did so. Ruth Fry wrote in her memoir of the period:

Figures given at a meeting of German scientists show 763,000 deaths of civilians during the war due to underfeeding, and in 1918 the deaths from this cause rose to 37 per cent of the total. They estimated further, that one million children died as a result of hunger and its attendant illnesses through the blockade. Deaths were so frequent in Frankfurt-am-Main (March 1920) that there were funerals all day long, and a lady told our workers that she had to wait a whole week for the chance of burying her brother-in-law. On the other hand, the birth-rate fell to about 50 per cent of the normal, so that the deaths exceeded the births, and Dr. Meyer, of the Berlin City Health Department, stated in 1920 that the average size of babies at birth was only one-half of the normal, and that there were no children who were not undernourished. Of the children in the elementary schools 80 per cent were estimated to be unable to follow the lessons because of their enfeebled condition.  (Ruth Fry: A Quaker Adventure. The story of nine years' relief and reconstruction: Nisbet, London, 1926)

Exluded from the Record: Katherine Storr

 Women, Refugees and Relief, 1914–1929

Go into any main stream bookshop, or library for that matter, and look at the amount of shelf space given to detailed accounts of the doings of men during World War I. Then look to see if you can find a book about the other half of the population. You would be hard pressed to find any. Bless them, women were clearly either not involved or not effected by the war, just staying at home knitting socks for their war hero menfolk, or bravely stepping up to take on men's work whilst they were away. 

It comes as a shock to discover that the number of women, children, the elderly, and other civilians who died as a result of the war was greater than the number of men. It runs counter to the dominant narrative.

Each year at eleven o'clock on the eleventh of the eleventh month, we stop to share a minutes silence to remember the dead from that terrible conflict, and wreaths are laid – most symbolically on the tomb of the unknown soldier – but also at thousands of war memorials up and down the length and breadth of the county, where the names of the 'fallen' men are inscribed.

Where is the memorial for the women who died? Or for the children? Or for the other civilians: they were more numerous than the battle field heroes. Hardly a whisper is said about them. 

There is a problem with history: it can all to easily become his-story. In microscopic detail, the doings of men on the battle fields are recorded, in book after book. But of what women may have done, there is next to nothing. Yet women did make a incredible and lasting contribution, not by adding to the death and destruction, but by ameliorating war's ills. 

Classically, stress is explained as the 'fear, flight, fight' reaction. True, but not the whole truth. They are the typical responses in men. Responses that the armed forces galvanise to their advantage. Some researchers claim, with good evidence, that the female reaction to stress is better described as 'fear, tend and befriend'. 

The lasting reaction of women to the horrors, stresses and destructions of the 'Great War' fits well with the 'tend and befriend' model; but their work with refugees, with relief work and with reconciliation is Excluded from the Record – hence Katherine Storr's title for her book.

The whirlpool of war sucked in so many able bodied men – serving in the armed force or retained in a reserved occupation – but women were free from such demands. Some chose voluntarily to serve, many in medical or in arms manufacturing roles. There was a general feeling that by stepping up to the plate and showing their worth they would be rewarded by winning the right to vote: service was seen by as a way of advancing female suffrage. But there were others who used the female freedom not to participate in wars in a more compassionate way. Katherine Storr's book focuses on them and what they achieved. 

With the men's hands tied by conscription, reserve occupation, or, for the brave few, conscientious objection – with its risks of being sentenced to terms of imprisonment with hard labour – it was the Quaker women, in particular, who led the way in providing relief work, services for refugees, and, where possible, reconciliation work. 

More has been written about the humanitarian service rendered by the men of the Friends Ambulance Unit (an allowed military style service for conscientious objectors) than about the work carried on by those women, yet the work they did touched the lives of millions. 

The counter cultural nature of Quakerism to some extent insulated its members from the pressures to conform to the prevailing zeitgeist: an overwhelming sense of patriotism and anxiety to 'do your duty' and serve as part of the war machine. It was the age of the white feather. A fact discovered by Carl Heath, the then Secretary of the National Peace Council, when in 1914 support for the council vanished almost over night when war was declared, leaving few but the Quakers among its members. 

Looking back on his life, Carl Heath saw that a main event was the discovery he had made early on in the First World War that the international peace movement, was built on sand. When the flood of an actual big war at home swept over Europe, it fell. Carl was increasingly drawn to the Society of Fiends, feeling a kinship with its fundamental teachings, to which he had very largely come through his own independent thinking. But this was a group, a fellowship of like minded people, seeking together to follow the Light, not a collection of individuals.     (Fredrick J Tritton: Carl Heath Apostle of Peace: Friends Home Service Committee, London, 1951)

Katherine Storr's Excluded from the Record was an important source book for me, helping address the imbalance in history publishing. It is one of the few modern book on the subject of women's peace work during and in the aftermath of the First World War. As Storr says in her introduction:

Military history feeds nostalgia by claiming that war is exclusively a male matter, that war time deaths and suffering are gender-specific and quantifiable according to the wearing of uniform, and that courage is an exclusively male attribute called on in combat. Most importantly, the history of civilians appears to detract from the bravery of soldiers. 

There has been very little chronicling of the extraordinary efforts spearheaded by Quaker women to ameliorate to the suffering of the civilian populations caused by the war; a willingness to reach out over national boundaries to all who suffered. Quaker pacifism expressed itself internationally, extensively and actively: they lived out the peace testimony. 

In order to set the scene for the arrival of the Pickards in Geneva in 1926 as peace-workers at the Quaker Centre, a brain child of Carl Heath – it was one of his proposed Quaker 'embassies' – I wrote a chapter on the Quaker Reactions to the 'Great War' and its Aftermath which touched on some of the extraordinary relief work spearheaded by such Quaker women as Ruth Fry, Hilda Clark and others. The opening paragraph says:

From the moment war was declared in 1914 the predominate response amongst Quakers was humanitarian. They knew this to be above all else a crisis of need on the part of so many innocent victims. It was to tending those needs that they geared themselves up, both individually and collectively.

Such is the dearth of modern material in English about those efforts that I was grateful to find anything on the subject, no matter what the language. I did find one academic work, which happened to be in Italian: Bianchi, Bruna : “grande, pericolosa avventura” Anna Ruth Fry, il relief work e la riconciliazione internazionale (1914-1926). ("A grand and dangerous adventure" Anna Ruth Fry, relief work and international reconciliation, 1914-26 )

It would seem there really is an bias against publishing works on the doings of women – her-story, if you will, as opposed to his-story. 

Personal or Civil use of force v military use of force

The classic "what if" thrown at pacifists, anti-militarist, and other assorted peaceniks, is to ask what they would do if someone broke into their home and violently assaulted their family. Would they stand by passively offering no resistance? If they concede that they would feel compelled to use force to resist such invasion and threat, then that is taken that they really accept the use of force and therefore accept the existence of a military establishment, and, in the event of conscription, the requirement for them to take part in military activities.

That is a massive conflation that equates military force with the personal or civil use of force. It is perfectly possible to approve of and support the use of personal or civil force whilst being thoroughly against the use of military force. The three are vastly and distinctly different – but not to the military mind. 

There appears to be a militarist presumption that for a pacifist to be consistent they must never use force in any situation whatsoever, that they must be completely passive at all times. This is an extreme delimitation of what counts as pacifism. A delimitation that favours acceptance of the military use of force as a consequence of the acceptance of the use of force in any situation whatsoever. 

Pacifism is against the use of military force: a very specific and highly organised form of collective and premeditated force. It is not against the personal use of force in extreme circumstances, nor against the use of civil force as required to maintain a well ordered and secure society.

There is a vast leap from accepting that the use of personal or civil force may be necessary on some occasions to accepting the necessity for the maintenance of a permanent military establishment with its vast cost, insatiable demands for ever more sophisticated weaponry, and the resultant political temptation to deploy them for what might be deemed worthy ends by those in power.  

Max Webber distinguished between the ethics of conviction and the ethics of responsibility. Responsibility provides the context in which deviation from conviction may be necessary. 

For a Christian pacifist, no matter how ardently they feel compelled by the New Commandment (John 13:34) or Great Commandment (Mark 13:30-31) or by the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:38-47)(Luke 6:27-36), the duty to protect others, especially the defenceless, the vulnerable – those unable to resist violence or coercion – may compel the use of force in their protection. It may even lead to legal jeopardy due to not intervening with reasonable force when your could have done. 

Those whose conviction may arise from non-Christian grounds would face the same dilemma: no matter how fervently held the pacifist conviction will be trumped on occasions by the need to protect those for whom they may be held to be responsible.

In a world where no-one threatened or used coercive force there would be no need to respond with any form of force. It would be possible to be blissfully but pointlessly pacifist. But the benefit of threatening to use violence because of the coercive fear it induces, gives power to those willing us it for their own ends. The hold that street gangs or para-military organisations have over communities makes only too clear the effectiveness of intimidation. Violence only need to be employed occasionally for it to be affective. Knee cappings by the IRA, or occasional stabbings by street gangs, re-enforce the hold such groups have, establishing and policing boundaries over the coerced communities and ensuring compliance out of fear. 

Life is messy. Thugs, bullies and men of violence (it is usually men) have always existed and will always exist. Self defence, the use of counter force if attacked, is usually not only understandable but necessary for survival, or to avoid submitting to coercion.

Historically slaves or sailors who resisted being whipped, or children and teenagers who resisted being caned, were deemed to be rebellious and out of control if they used counter-force: submission to violence was required. Before it was made illegal, caning, especially in boys boarding schools in the UK, was even semi-ritualised, often public, and almost a right of passage.

Submission to the threat of violence is still required in the face of lawful authority. Policing is only benign to a point, then it becomes coercive. In extreme circumstances, lethally so. 

Attempts are made to provide frameworks for the civil use of force because countering intimidation and violence is part of policing society. The United Nations conventions outline the basic principles framing the use of force and firearms in law enforcement.

However, pacifism is not about the use of force in self-defence or about the civil use of force. It is about the collective, military use of force. Force which is used predominantly for political ends. 

Quakers have understood that distinction between the personal use of force or civil use of force on the one hand, and military force on the other; an understanding shaped by having lived through the awfulness of the Civil Wars of the seventeenth century:

I speak not against any magistrates or peoples defending themselves against foreign invasions; or making use of the sword to suppress the violent and evil-doers within their borders – for this the present estate of things may and doth require, and a great blessing will attend the sword where it is borne uprightly to that end and its use will be honourable … but yet there is a better state, which the Lord hath already brought some into, and which nations are to expect and to travel towards. … (Isaac Penington, 1661: Quaker faith & practice 24.21)

But the underlying principle that distinguished such personal or civil use of force from the military use of force was that, as Quakers, we do not take part in wars, but seek to be peace-makers. This was clearly stated in 1660:

Our principle is, and our practices have always been, to seek peace, and ensue it, and to follow after righteousness and the knowledge of God, seeking the good and welfare, and doing that which tends to the peace of all. All bloody principles and practices we do utterly deny, with all outward wars, and strife, and fightings with outward weapons, for any end, or under any pretence whatsoever, and this is our testimony to the whole world. … (Declaration to Charles II, 1660: Quaker faith & practice 24.04)

Quakers are not so much pacifists but peace-makers. Their vision is of a world that becomes more peaceful as more people come to live out the Peace Testimony: they are a vanguard creating an expanding space of peaceful living, leading by example, being an influence on the world by living in that "better state" which others, even nations, are expected to "travel towards". Pacifism tends to be a negative response of non-participation. Peace-making is more positively orientated. That is why Quakers engage across the spectrum of violence through such projects as the Alternatives to Violence Project and the Friends Peace Teams, not simply by non-participation in military activity.

The typology of violence helps distinguish between self-inflicted, interpersonal and collective violence and their sub-divisions. Of these, war is the one which pacifists refuse to take part in or to support. It is where individual conscience conflicts most acutely with collective action. 

War, and the roots of wars are complex. They are almost a uniquely human creation, although they may be an enlargement of a potentials found across nature. The Quaker understanding has always been that we should engage in addressing the roots of war – as various and as specific as they may be – whilst steadfastly refusing to take part. Since the early twentieth century they have also felt compelled to attend to the harms that wars inflict.

The pacifist mindset presumes a default state of peace. By contrast, the militarist mindset presumes a default mindset of potential warfare. For the militarist peace is seen as an interlude between wars which must be used to rebuild capacity, to re-arm, to re-stock. The resultant military-industrial complex drains economies. It is no accident that the economies that grew most post World War Two were the two peace orientated economies of Germany and Japan, or that even now they rate as the world's third and fourth economies. 

Bertram Pickard – one of the core subjects of my studies – was the Secretary to the Quaker Centre in Geneva and effectively the Quaker representative to the League of Nations between 1926 and 1940. He went on to become part of the United Nations secretariat in Geneva (1946–55) after working as part of UNRRA. He struggled with the reality of maintaining a pacifist stance amidst the complexity of international affairs. He wrote about this specifically in his booklet The Peacemaker's Dilemma, which was one of several items by him in Irene's archive. He had been involved in the conscientious objector's movement during the First World War.

History is written into the stuff we are made of

For my birthday my partner bought me a 23andme genetic ancestry testing kit. This is where family oral history and legends meet science. Puzzles, enigmas, and hidden secrets might perhaps be revealed and explained. 

First – it was a factor in my parent's divorce – whose son am I? The man named on my birth certificate whose family name I carry, was my mother's husband, but he had his doubts about being my father, especially when blind drunk. My mother divorced him to protect us from him, and the courts agreed, denying him any access or even communication with either myself or my brother. When my brother reached twenty-one and I thirteen, he stopped paying maintenance. He was prepared to provide support for what he believed to be his child, my brother, until they reached adulthood, but not for the cuckoo.

One May, nine months before my birth, my mother was called away from our family home in Herefordshire, to the island of Jersey to look after her mother, who was recovering from a stroke. She remained on the island for the next three months. There she met and became close friends with a Scotsman, who became my god-father. Hence my nominal father's deep suspicion. How could I be his if I was born in February?

So, am I part Scottish with cousins, distant or otherwise, to be found in and around Aberdeen where my god-father and his ancestors came from, or anywhere else in Scotland for that matter?

The answer was unambiguous. Not a trace of Scottish ancestry, but a pool of paternal third and fourth cousins in the North West England where my nominal father's family came from. And more, confirmation of his family story that his grandmother was German. I have almost exactly 1/8  broadly Franco-German genes inherited from just one individual, according to the results. There is a pool of 3rd and 4th cousins in North West Germany, which does point strongly to the truth of the oral history that my father's grandmother came from Hamburg, although my cousins are mostly to be found in North Rhine-Westphalia. And it confirms absolutely that I am his son. 

It turns out the cuckoo was not a cuckoo.

But there are also a few paternal Irish ancestors, not a hint of which was in the family oral history. Are they related via my paternal grandmother, of whom I know very little beyond her being born about 1876 in Oxfordshire? There are, according to the results, paternal 3rd and 4th Irish cousins with whom I share either a common great-great-grandparent, or a great-great-great-grandparent. (Grandparent x3 or x4)

Now comes the most curious family legend. It is on my mother's side. We are supposed – it was said darkly and secretly and as an explanation for the diminutive appearance of my mother and so many of her mother's relatives – that we are part Japanese. 

This made little historical sense. My grandmother was born in 1880, and Japan was a closed country until 1854. Hardly time for the genes to travel from the islands of the Far East in time to make my great-grandmother part Japanese, especially given that she was an itinerant fieldworker, who gave birth to my grandmother in a workhouse in the Severn Valley in Worcestershire in the English West Midlands. Family appearance apart, it seemed impossible.

Sometimes we should trust oral traditions. The genetic test results show there are distant Japanese cousins! What's more, there are also almost twice as many Filipino cousins. The Filipinos were a complete surprise. 

Most strangely of all, there is a clear genetic marker for Arabian Peninsula heritage! Distant, but unmistakable.

What? How? Where on earth would Japanese, Filipino and Arab genes get mixed up? And how would they end up in my grandmother, my mother and me? What history is buried in this?

And then there is the other surprise. I have a lot – and I do mean a lot – of 3rd and 4th cousins on my mother's side in South West Ireland, in Munster, and especially around Cork. Not a hint of that in our family's oral history. How and when did that come about?

The clue to the Irish side lies in my maternal great-grandmother's occupation: field worker. The second clue lies in the degree of relationship. My Irish relatives share either a great-great-grandparent, or a great-great-great-grandparent (grandparent x3 or x4) with me. That puts the common ancestor as having lived in Ireland in the first half of the nineteen-century. About one-million Irish, especially peasants and farm works, fled the Great Famine between 1845-52, particularly from the South West where the famine was at its worst. The work they would have known, and found most easy to get in Britain, was field work: casual labour picking the crops. The same work as my great-grandmother. 

The Severn Valley, Gloucestershire, Worcestershire and up the Avon into Warwickshire, had masses of seasonal field work, as did the neighbouring Wye Valley in Herefordshire. Day work was to be had from the first of the asparagus in April until the last of the potatoes in October, and even a little cabbage, sprouts, leeks, cauliflower, parsnips and broccoli picking through the winter. This in addition to masses of employment fruit and hop picking to be had during the peak season in the summer and autumn. It was a tough and hard life, often sleeping in barns, or sheds, under hedges, or even in the fields, and being paid a pittance for the weight of crops picked. Winters often drove people into the workhouse.

The disparaging term used for such itinerant field workers was diddikai. Not proper gypsies, but living like them. It was a term used of my grandmother's family, usually with the addition of the word "dirty". Being a 'dirty-did' was a school yard insult when I was young, used for the most despised children among us. "They are no more than a bunch of dirty-dids" was an insult thrown at families who lived on the margins of society: untrustworthy, skiving, thieving, drunken, brawling and disreputable. A heritage to be lived down.

But how did a woman, my great-grandmother, whose life was doing such work have Japanese, Filipino and Arab genes?

There is one place in the world where such mixing of genes is not that uncommon: Manila in the Philippines. It is estimated that around 2% of Filipinos have Arabian genes as a result of the 2,000 year old seaborne trade between Arabia and the islands. The Arab dhow was a great trading ship and linked together Arabia, especially Oman, with India, South East Asia, and the islands of the East Indies.

Anyway, Sinbad, let's call him, appears to have left his genetic footprint in Manila sometime in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, to give the degree of genetic presence he has in my genes.That would explain the blend of Arab and Filipino, but what of the Japanese? Now that is a real problem.

During the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) the Chinese were not allowed to trade directly with Japan. That could only be done through Manila. As a result, Chinese and Japanese trading communities grew up there. However, in 1639 Japan became a closed country, and the Japanese community in Manila began to shrink as a result. There was only one way any connection with Japan could be maintained. It was via the Dutch East India Company, who were given the right to have a trading post in Nagasaki harbour. That was for the next two hundred years Japan's only connection with the outside world. 

The Dutch were not allowed into Japan, but had to stay in their trading colony on a small artificial island in the harbour. Japanese were allowed to visit for trade, and the local governors made sure that Japanese women were made available for the 'comfort' of the Dutchmen. Some of the women married Dutchmen. As a result they and their children were not allowed off the island. Their only option was to leave with their husbands when his time as a trader ended, making their way to Manila, often via Macau, a Portuguese trading city on the mouth of the Pearl River in China, where a small community of Japanese exiles grew up. The Dutch dominated much of the East Indies trade after 1647 when they won the right to trade directly with Spanish colonies, making direct trade between Nagasaki and Manila possible.

A very few Japanese took passage on Dutch East India Company ships from Nagasaki, knowing it would be extremely unlikely that they would be allowed to re-enter Japan if they returned. There were three types of people who took those risks. The very adventurous, those fleeing Japan, and Japanese hidden or secret Christians. The latter maintained a tenuous and very secret connection with the Catholic Church and community in Manila. Christianity in Japan was banned in 1614 and all known Christians had been exiled or executed by 1650. Thereafter Kakure Kirishitan (“Hidden Christians”) survived very secretly, some even travelling to Manila to train in Catholic seminaries, risking certain death if they returned and were discovered.

My genetic results suggest that someone Japanese left Japan for Manila sometime in the eighteenth century. Were they the wife of a Dutch trader? Someone looking for adventure? Someone fleeing? Or a Hidden Christian? We shall never know. It is very likely they became part of the Japanese community in Manila. They, or their close descendent, must have had a child with a Filipino-Arab.

Alternatively my ancestor may have come from the residual (pre-1639), and mostly Christian, Japanese community in Manila. However, the presence of distant relatives whose grandparents x3 or x4 were born in Japan suggests a post 1639 and not a pre-1639 Japanese origin of the genes.

That's got the mix of Japanese, Filipino and Arab prepared in Manila. But how did it get from there into Britain? And then on to mix with my great-grandmother's family? 

The Philippines were held by Spain, who governed the country from Mexico City. Their trade routes from Manila led eastwards across the Pacific to Mexico, and then onwards across the Atlantic to Spain. The Spanish did not allow their colonies to trade directly with the British. The Dutch, who could trade with the Spanish colonies, controlled the trade westwards through Malacca or Batavia (Jakarta) and on via Cape Town at the tip of South Africa, however, their ships were not allowed to dock in Britain. The British Navigation Acts reserved trade from producer countries into British ports to the producers own or British ships, effectively shutting the Dutch out of their highly profitable trade as a middleman shipping exotic goods to Britain or its colonies from the both West and East Indies. 

It looks very difficult for someone from Manila in the eighteenth century to have reached Britain. Spain or Portugal, yes. Holland, possibly, but Britain no. However, things were changing. A window of opportunity for such a journey was opening up.

In 1762 the British East India Company ceased control of Manila, and held it until 1764. Thereafter they carried on what became known as the "English Country Trade". The East India Company hired Indian ships to trade between India and Manila, thus getting around the Spanish ban on their colonies trading directly with the British.

Now we have a bridge. Did someone of Japanese-Filipino-Arabian decent work their passage from Manila to India, and then, being a seaman and "knowing the ropes" (quite literally in those days), was taken on as a seaman on an East-Indiaman? The Filipinos are famous as seafarers, and even today crew many of the world's super-tankers and giant cargo carriers. The Navigation Acts allowed up to 25% of the crew of British ships not to be British. Such employment would land our intrepid gene-carrier in England, but in London where the East India Company ships docked.

We now need to get them, or their descendants, to being field workers in Worcestershire. The degree of separation suggests there are at two or three generations between our supposed seaman and his descendants arriving in Worcestershire. 

Looking at the genetic report, we must once more turn to Cork in Ireland. This may seem odd, as the British East India company was a London company with exclusive rights to trade east of Cape Town, South Africa, rights it protected zealously. It ships sailed from London, and returned there, once laden with the exotic goods gathered into its stores in Calcutta, Madras and Bombay. So how come Cork? The answer lies in Britain's war time regulations intended to protect its shipping from the predation by privateers, pirates, and enemy fleets. 

The Royal Navy operated a convoy system during the time of the American War of Independence (1775–83) and during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1794-1815). Homeward bound ships gathered at St Helena in the South Atlantic and were escorted to Cork, from where they continued their homeward journey in safer waters. Outward bound ships gathered at Cork, waiting until their numbers were large enough to form a convoy, and the required Royal Navy ships were ready to escort them. Being laid up in Cork harbour provided the ships with opportunity to be provisioned with supplies of fresh water, beers, salt meat and butter, a provisioning trade on which the city thrived. 

It also provided opportunity for crews to enjoy some shore leave, which they did, particularly in an area strangely called the Holy Ground, considering its reputation for dispensing to sailors the entertainments they desired. Many a child resulted. Was this where our Arabian–Filipino–Japanese sailor left his genes? If so, it is easy to understand how such a child born in poverty would be swept by the Great Famine into England and into taking what work they could to survive. That work more often than not was as field hands picking the crops. It is thought that many Irish became travellers at this time, moving as work gangs from farm to farm. Exactly the life to which my grandmother was born.

How much reliability can be given to any of this? A little. 23andme claim that up to six generations of ancestors can be traced with a reasonable degree of reliability. After that it becomes increasingly less so. However, I think Sinbad's genetic footprint, of which they are pretty sure because of its identifiability as trace ancestry, is key, and points to Manila. 

So my genetics seem to have the imprint of the Arabian sea-trade, the Dutch East India Company monopoly of trade with Japan, the genetic melting pot of Manila, the seafaring traditions of the Filipinos, the "English Country Trade" between Manila and India, the ships of British East India Company, the convoy system between St Helena and Cork, and the Great Irish Famine. 

There is one other imprint, and a very ancient one at that. My maternal haplotype carried by my mother's mitochondrial DNA: H1u. A variation that probably evolved in the Iberian peninsula in what are called Ice Age refuges, and then moved north filling the Atlantic seaboard lands as the ice retreated, being found among the first post Ice Age settlers in the Hibero-British Isles. My mother's lineage is extremely ancient in these islands and may indicate a south west Irish heritage, taking us back once more to Cork and Kerry.  

This in addition to my having a German grandmother on my father's side who sought work in England as a governess. She accounts for about 12.5% of my genes, with the remaining 1% of broadly Franco-German genes coming from elsewhere; otherwise, I am, according to the report, horribly British and Irish, some 86.4%, squeezing the Japanese-Filipio-Arabian genes into what is left: just a trace level, but a trace with an interesting history.  

Do monotheists have a monopoly over religion?

I feel the Religious Society of Friends would be misrepresented if the marriage declaration was altered along the lines suggested in the Friend of 10 February in order to accommodate non-theism, unless we wish to abandon our traditional view that marriage is a ‘religious commitment’ as set out in Quaker faith & practice (1.02, 23).

The declaration not only reflects the couple’s view of marriage but also the view of the Religious Society of Friends as a corporate body.

In my opinion the way in which we define commitments such as marriage and membership reflects how we see ourselves as a faith community. If we wish to remain a religious society, why would it be right for us to define either in non-religious terms? Richard Pashley, The Friend, March 2, 2023

Equating being “non-theist” with being “non-religious” is something of an error. Many non-theist have a deeply spiritual and reverential attitudes towards life and towards relationships. That is not lessened for them by the absence of a purported intangible. 

Many modern Pagans regard the earth itself as sacred and the life springing from it as its sacred out-flowing. They reverence the natural world. The sky god, the celestial god, the abstracted omnipresent but intangible god of judgement, trapped in the texts of ancient books, is not their god. Their focus of reverence is tangible: it is the woods and trees, the rivers and streams, and the abundant fecundity of life.

The Taoist reverence the flow of energy through everything. It is not the river that is sacred, but the flowing of the river. It is not the tree that is sacred, but its growing. It is not the leaf that is sacred but the falling of the leaf. It is not the bird that is sacred, but the flying and singing of the bird. It is not the person that is sacred, but the life that flows through them. When we are in accord with the flow, when we are in harmony with it, when we bend ourselves to it, then we are in spiritual alignment. There is no god, no operator behind the scenes pulling the strings, no eternal all seeing judge, just the flow that gives and keeps on giving, without judgement.

The great Tao flows everywhere. All things are born from it, yet it doesn't create them. It pours itself into its work, yet it makes no claim. It nourishes infinite worlds, yet it does not hold on to them. Since it is merged with all things and hidden in their hearts, it can be called humble. Since all things vanish into it and it alone endures, it can be called great. It isn't aware of its greatness; thus it is truly great.  Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching: translated by Stephen Mitchell.

Are we to say that the Pagan or the Taoist are not religious because they have no god? Equally, can we say that the non-theist is not religious, because, likewise, they have no god?

Late Roman Empire Christianity – the illegitimate child of Judaism grown into maturity, conformity and authority – inherited from its parent a conception of a celestial god – ineffable, omnipotent, omnipresent, a law giving mega-god – and passed that conception on to its breakaway children, reformed Protestant and non-conformist alike. That was the dominant conception of the god of Christianity in seventeenth century England. We should not be surprised to find that conception embedded in the words of seventeenth century Quakers. 

Their radical re-centring onto unmeditated experience and away from ritual may have returned those first Quakers to what they thought was a form of primitive Christianity, more akin the lived experience of Jesus and his disciples, but it also took them away from reliance on creed or doctrine. They conceived of Jesus as standing in the presence but with the word in his heart. They too wished to stand in such a presence harkening to the word in their heart; and they found that it was in stillness and silence that the seed of that word grew and gave forth. 

But the presence of what? To say that is to leave a vacuum that linguistically begs to be filled. Does it need to be filled? That sense of wonder, awe, reverence, sacredness and transcendence is a vehicle for spirituality, but does it necessarily have to carry you to the response "god"? Is that a convenient word that serves to fill a linguistic vacuum? An obedience to the subject <–> object structure of our language? Is such a response void filling in order to be rid of cognitive and linguistic discomfort? Should we not be examining that discomfort and learning from it? To avoid doing this is, if anything, lazy. 

Our language, it seems, requires an object, but, as the theologian Paul Tillich* points out, if "god' is an object, then he is only one more thing among a universe of things, and, as he is not immediately apparent or tangible, he can cease to have importance or relevance. Rather, Tillich felt that 'god' should stand for the very ground of being itself, or, as he sometimes put it, as being itself: god as sacredness, as reverence, as wonder, as awe, as the totality of being, as our greatest concern, not as one more object among a universe of objects.

In Tibetan Buddhism sometimes pupils are advised to practice 'god' devotion. Only when they have fully realised the practice and come to be devoted to the god, experiencing them as real, does the meditation master burst the bubble so that the pupils are shocked into realising that they have created an idol that is a projection of their own yearnings. Thus deconstructed, 'god' function as a doorway into deeper realisation. This is similar to the Zen advice, that "If you meet Buddha on the road, kill him". The devotion and reverence engendered by the practice of god-worship is thus transferred to all life, to being itself. 

Are we to say that such Buddhists are not religious because they have burst the bubble of god? Equally, can we say that the non-theist is not religious, because, likewise, they have no god? Because they are not prepared to worship an idol that is a projection of their own yearnings? That is to deny them devotional and reverential agency. That is to deny them profoundly religious experiences simply because they are not prepared to focus those feelings onto the inherited god of Christianity, a culturally manufactured idol.

I have no doubt that many non-theists are deeply religious, which is exactly why they are non-theist. To worship an mind-made idol – a projection – which they know to be mind-made, would be sacrilegious, blasphemous, and a manifest gross lack of integrity.

Carl Jung in his work as an explorer of the human mind – the psyche – identified what he called the 'god-archetype. A latent cluster of feeling, images, desires, yearnings, in his patients which troubled them unless attended to. It often found form by projection, taking the shape suggested by the patient's culture and history, becoming an object of devotion, of worship, of ritual and of veneration. Alternatively they might suppress it, becoming notably iconoclastic and atheistic; or inflate their experience, becoming identified with the archetype, either embodying it or by becoming its servant. He advised that only integration would aid what he called individuation – which we might think of as maturation – conditioning the psyche (spirit) into wisdom rather than knowledge, thus letting those complex feelings find expression in ways that helped build and enrich life.