Since mentioning Ruth Fry, the indefatigable Quaker peaceworker who made a brief fictional appearance in the play Fram, we are hearing more stories of Friends' encounters with her and her influence on them.
Tim Evens remembers a shy woman. Ruth and her sister Joan were well known in the Society when he was a young Friend in the 1940s. Tim spent two years with the Friends Relief Service in post-war Germany.
During a visit to his sister in 1948 they were both invited to tea by Ruth at her home near Aldeburgh and the conversation centred predictably on relief work. 'She was a quiet, reticent person,' Tim recalls. 'I had not read her book and so did not realise the scope of what she had done in and after the first world war.' But after reading our Fram story he concludes that Ruth played the same pivotal role that Roger Wilson did in the Friends Relief Service in the 1940s: 'They were both "movers and Quakers"', he says. Ingrid Penny's memories of Ruth go back even further. 'I remember hearing her speak at a peace meeting in Glasgow in 1935,' she says. 'She was one of my heroines, a lifelong worker for peace.' Ruth was a member of Leiston Meeting in Suffolk and Ingrid tells us that a member of the Meeting supplied her with vegetables; one of those intimate domestic details that we like to hear. Ingrid has sent Eye a yellowing pamphlet that Ruth and her friend Dorothea Gibb published all those years ago. It is addressed 'to governments and peoples everywhere'. One of the points made spoke to us particularly: 'the morality of the nations must be as the morality of the individual writ large'.

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