The Friend is a weekly magazine in which Friends speak to each other and to the wider world, offering their insight, ideas, news, nurture and inspiration.
Nurturing Quaker community, each issue offers a space for Friends to share their concerns, and to support each other in faith and witness.
The Friend: enriching, inspiring and connecting the Quaker community since 1843.
What happened to the world I once knew? When I was growing up, current events were boringly predictable. Little did I know that the seeming equilibrium in world affairs was due to the underlying threat of apocalyptic violence. The cold war was the biggest and the longest Mexican stand-off in history, and I never even thought about it.
An Education, Health and Care Plan (EHCP) is a legal document that sets out the special educational needs of a child or young person, the support they must receive, and the outcomes that support is intended to achieve. But long before an EHCP is finalised, issues start in the everyday sounds of schools. Whether it is the low hum of lighting, noisy corridors, lesson bells, or a behaviour system that punishes neurodivergence as defiance, many young people feel unseen and misunderstood. For many across Britain, mainstream schools seem more focused on demanding compliance from exhausted students than on providing a space to truly thrive.
In 1873, Sarah Woodhead, a Quaker, became the first woman to pass the Cambridge University Mathematical Tripos exam. She was one of five ‘pioneers’ at The College for Women, at Benslow House in Hitchin, founded in 1869 by Barbara Bodichon, Emily Davies, and a raft of sympathetic Quaker families. This ‘infidel’ educational establishment was to become Girton College, Cambridge (built by Quaker architect, Alfred Waterhouse). In 1868, Bodichon’s close friend, the novelist George Eliot (born Mary Ann Evans, 1819-1880) had made a significant and – being herself a scandalous woman – anonymous contribution to her friend’s appeal to found what she herself had not been able to enjoy, a Cambridge University college for women.
I frequently see pieces in the Friend describing the work of Quakers within the system of prisons and allied institutions. Over the past decade I have been working on the other side of the criminal justice system, with victims of crime and the witnesses in their cases.
The British diaspora began only a generation or two before the formation of the Religious Society of Friends. Quakers often travelled along the same sea lanes to lands being wrested away from locals. For a few centuries, Brits and Irish migrants lived in paradox: driven out by inequalities, poverty and clearances at home, they became beneficiaries of imperial conquest overseas. For those who stayed on the rainy isles, and endured the worst of economic cycles and European fascism, after the war these ‘dominions’ became privileged fast tracks to migration.
‘You must read this!’ I was told when I first found Quakers. ‘It’s about the spiritual basis of our decision-making processes.’ Published in 1983, Beyond Majority Rule has the subtitle, Voteless decisions in the Religious Society of Friends. Reviewers have hailed it as the ‘best guide to Quaker decision making available’.
Jennie, let’s dance blue-eyed blues
above the vast open spaces of our past.
Let love accept the baton;
strange how one lifelong marathon
doesn’t seem so far.
Here we are, having boogied to the top of the Tor,
I hear you call out to the storm,
If you say run, I’ll run with you.
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