Our resigned but still Friendly Friend Ken Hartford, now eighty-one, amused us greatly by introducing a whole new angle to the slavery issue. 'It is perfectly possible,' he declared to us, 'to be a willing slave. Most of the members of the Meeting I attend are slaves to the Society as a whole and particularly to their PM, MM and YM and I admire them enormously. This applies to all the sixty-odd Meetings in various parts of the world that I’ve visited.'
Ken says he withdrew his membership eight years ago because 'I'd had enough of willing slavery in the years between 1934 and 1947 when I was in an orphanage and then in the Army with little or no choice of occupation.' Since then he has always selected his own employment. 'I don’t wish to return to slavery even on behalf of the Quakers, much as I profess to love them!'