Photo: The podcast ident with a chocolate bar.
Podcast on Quakers and chocolate
Ben Pink Dandelion explores ‘the mystical beliefs and radical equality espoused by the Quakers'
The Quaker Ben Pink Dandelion has shone the spotlight on Quakers and chocolate in a podcast exploring influential social reform.
The Red Heaven Oral History Archive is ‘an evolving archive of conversations, using the mode of oral history’, said its director Simon Machin. The podcasts cover ‘the radical and utopian nineteenth- and twentieth-century reformers, whose legacy to us in the twenty-first century is the social starting point that we take for granted in thinking about modern Britain’.
In Episode 61, ‘The Quakers and their Chocolate’, Ben Pink Dandelion explores ‘the mystical beliefs and radical equality espoused by the Quakers, and how the combination of a bias towards commerce and an exclusion from the universities and parliament drove them to industrial innovation and success in banking and capital formation, when the most eminent Quaker families intermarried and created business dynasties’, writes Simon. It also examines Quaker concern for their employees, through welfare policies in the workplace and the creation of model villages for workers.
According to Simon: ‘The recorded interviews are oral histories to the varying extent that they place each guest in context, exploring their connection to the significant people or movements under discussion. Each guest’s disposition is therefore integral to the conversation.’
The project has been inspired by Studs Terkel, who chronicled the modern USA.
