We have learned, sadly, of the damage caused to the West China Union University in Chengdu by the recent earthquake. The campus and buildings were designed by Frederick Rowntree, son of a Jarrow grocer. He was successful when the design was put to tender in the 1900s. British Friends had worked with Canadian and US missions to found the university. Now it seems that all the buildings have been damaged in the earthquake and some have taken structural hits. Our Friend in China, Patrick Wood, told us the story.

'The two buildings mostly affected are the administration building, which housed the Meeting room used by the Quakers before 1949, and Building Four, which will be fondly remembered by all British Quaker teachers, supported by QPS (Quaker Peace & Service) and the Quaker China Group who worked there as it was used by the foreign language department.'
The university is now the West China Medical Centre, attached to Sichuan University. Patrick believes the university is seeking financial help from central and provincial government sources for full repairs.

Surveyors are measuring the buildings and Patrick wondered if the original blueprints could be traced to help them. Eye got on the case and tracked down Pearce, Bottomley, Rowntree in Leeds, now called Pearce, Bottomley Architects. An apologetic woman told us that since the company had been founded in 1880, they would need a warehouse if they had kept all their drawings. The drawings of course, could be anywhere, languishing in a loft, or kept as cherished mementoes in a drawer with a Rowntree connection. Does anyone have a clue?

We have an entreaty from John Roycroft.

'Kindertransport reminiscences encourage me to ask readers for factual or anecdotal memories of the late Paul Dukes (1889-1967)', whose life he is researching. John takes up the story: 'The chief obstacles to this are two: apart from his own two autobiographical books The Unending Quest and Secret Agent ST 25, no one seems to have written about him independently (at any length) and as regards the second world war the Official Secrets Act is still in force. However, Scarlet Pimpernel rescues from Austria (into Czechoslovakia) in 1938 may have been Paul's doing. Hence my appeal for access to family records, although rumours too will be welcome.'

Eye made a cursory search but all we could find out was that he was once a pupil in St Petersburg of the mystic teacher GI Gurdjieff. Obviously not your average secret agent.
(You can contact John on roycroft[at]btinternet.com)

This column is always learning new literary tricks. We hadn't heard before of a 'mondegreen', which is something like a 'malapropism'. A phrase such as 'laid him on the green' (referring to a murdered clansmen in ancient legend, we believe) ends up as Lady Mondegreen.

A reader who went to this year's BYM is keeping track of the best ones she hears at Friends House. 'I am filled with admiration for the person who transcribes, in real time, speech to print at Yearly Meeting', she says, 'though I often find that if I fail to hear, so does the operator of the wonder machine, sometimes amusingly'. In recent years these have informed the Meeting of Young Friends being shipped together (though we were not told their destination); a referral to 'Gee sus' (Jesus?) and a 'bee ne dick tin monk' (Benedictine monk?) Thank goodness for mondegreens at BYM.

We have a reader who is not at all sure about the way Friends parcel up 'children' with 'young people'. 'We know all about them', he says, 'there is someone at Friends House who has special responsibility for them. I assume that numerous Area and Local Meetings have committees devoted to children and young people'. But who are the children, he wants to know. 'I'm happy just with young people. I see them as being aged from nought up to whenever they stop being treated as young.'
The way that children grow up so quickly these days, Eye imagines they would also agree with this.

Eye occasionally delves into the Quaker archives to find an explanation for current woes. We were not disappointed, therefore, when we followed a hunch about the first recorded British bank to suffer a run. Yes, it was indeed a Quaker company, Overend & Gurney, the ‘bankers’ bank’, and it collapsed spectacularly in 1866. But what really astonished us was the similarity between the cause of that crisis and our present ‘credit crunch’. Apparently the financial situation in the 1860s mirrored our own. Because of changes in liability law, credit began to be more easily available from a new type of finance company, accepting securities from farmers, traders and domestic servants. The bank provided the money. Defaults piled up and the bank lost millions (£11 million – equivalent to around £6 billion today). Sound familiar?

We checked out our regular source on these matters, Ted Milligan’s Biographical Dictionary of British Quakers in Commerce. The Gurney who took the brunt of anger from his Quaker contemporaries was Henry Edmund, a broker who followed his father into the family firm. He lived in a splendid house in Reigate. A committee of Dorking, Horsham and Guildford Monthly Meeting (MM) was scathing: it reported that the firm had entered into ‘a series of transactions of great magnitude, foreign to the scope of their regular business’. But it did not believe Henry was wilfully deceiving. He had let his better judgement be tampered with, leading into grave miscalculations and unwarrantable risks. Apart from urging him to make reparations, the MM took no other action. The directors of the firm were tried for fraud but did not go to prison. Henry took the criticism to heart, sold his posh house, bought some cows, became a treasurer for a temperance group and generally kept his head down. Obviously, some lessons can never be learned across generations.

Samplers have never gone out of fashion, and the personal link they provide with the embroiderer make them very collectable. Carol Humphrey, honorary keeper of textiles at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, produced a beautifully illustrated book of samplers made by schoolgirls at Ackworth School which attracted what can only be described as ‘rave’ reviews in the embroidery press! Both Embroidery and Stitch magazines were impressed with the standard of work of Quaker schoolgirls in the late eighteenth and early nineteeth centuries. Their talents inspired sampler work throughout Quaker schools the UK and the USA. (Quaker School Girl Samplers from Ackworth is published by Needleprint.)

Labels: embroidery

News that the government is putting £11m into setting up 7,000 after-school film clubs delighted the editor who still talks about the Saturday morning pictures she enjoyed as a girl, where, it seems, anarchy was the prevailing mood.

The new film clubs are an attempt to introduce children and young people (aged five to eighteen) to a more eclectic cinematic experience – old movies and those from other cultures, so that Hollywood isn’t the only entertainment vehicle for them. Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday being one of the choices. (We wonder what they will make of that).

We recall that Lewes Friends Meeting have a ‘Society for Unappreciated Films’ for their young Quakers attending secondary school. Are we beginning to see a revival of those Saturday morning pictures of the 1940s and 1950s?

Labels: film

Train journeys through rural England are becoming toxic for green Quakers. Carol Barker, who’s from Ludlow, was travelling by train through Shropshire and Herefordshire when she was shocked to see so much biofuel production. She reached for her pen and sent us this:

The Rape of Shallot
(apologies to Tennyson)

On either side the roadways lie
Fields of miscanthus and of rape
That sting the eye, bring on the coughs
And lots of lolly for the toffs.
And by the fields the road runs by
To concrete towered Camelot.
And up and down the lorries go
While people stand with cries of woe,
Without a damned shallot.

We left the crops, we left the grass.
We watched the trees and bird life pass.
We saw the helmets through the gloom
As we searched on for Camelot.
Out flew the life of sea and tide.
The world had cracked from side to side.
‘The curse has come upon us’ cried the people of Shallot.

Labels: tennyson

Stories which stretched our imagination last week included a homeless woman in Japan who was discovered living in a cupboard after the resident of the house noticed his fridge being systematically raided. And pandas in China were given therapy after the earthquake severely damaged their reserve at Wolong.

Labels: china, japan

As usual the Friend covered Britain Yearly Meeting with a team of dedicated reporters, made up of staff, trustees and readers. Eye was intrigued to discover that the Friend had a new way of following events, by 'twittering'.
Twitter is a way of sending short messages of up to 140 characters online, like sending text messages. Indeed, some twits use text from their mobile phones to update their conversations.
Jez Smith led the twittering on our website and via twitter.com/quakers including summaries of some of the sessions and reaction to the Swarthmore lecture 'Minding the Future', by Christine Davis.
Eye learned that Jez was not the only twit at BYM. twitter.com/foxc, twitter.com/star_one and twitter.com/igwarrender also gave their perspectives. Eye wonders whether anyone else was involved...

Labels: twitter, yearly meeting

Have you gaps in your library's collection of Swarthmore lectures? Too many copies of one year but none of other years? It's the problem Peter Shilston has at Stafford Meeting. He wonders if there is a system for arranging swaps. We doubt it, Peter, but we invite Friends to contact him and set one up. He's at pshil@tiscali.co.uk (yes, we know not everyone has email, but there is usually someone in Meeting who has. We can provide an address, however, if you are stumped.)
You're wrong, there is an internet discussion group for Quaker Meeting Librarians. To join the group send an email to librarians-owner@lists.quaker.eu.org - ed.

Labels: library, swarthmore lecture

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'.

Labels: ruth fry

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