Quaker Alphabet Blog 2015-2017 - T for Truth

In these days of post-truth and bare-faced lies in public discourse I am convinced that it is more than ever important for Friends to stand firm in their testimony for the truth in whatever form that manifests itself.

When I went to work in Friends House Library in London and first consciously encountered Quakers, one of the things which most impressed me was the carefulness with which my questions were answered. I was often required to wait while a sufficiently truthful answer was thought about and given and I learned to love that weighty pause.

I learned to be careful in my own speech, not always to say the first thing that came into my head and to be as accurate as I could be. Knowing that this carefulness and respect for the truth was a basic testimony of Quakerisn made it more attractive to me.


Another part of the testimony to truth and also to equality showed itself through not using titles, but calling oneself and others just by name. There were some problems with this at work and with banks etc. but I persevered. Respect can be shown in other ways than in using the 'vain titles of the world' for as Fox put it 'True civility stands in truth'.

We may have different views of the truth, especially when exploring our spiritual lives, and those different views deserve respect. Listening with an open mind and expecting to be listened to in the same way are both ways of finding truth and can bring us closer together in that true civility.

Telling the truth and being careful not to repeat lies that are maskerading as truth are both vitally important to me. That was true before I became a Friend but it is even more so now. Whatever the accepted norms of the wider society may become I know that Truth matters and I shall continue to try to speak truth to power as well as in my everyday life.

Quaker Alphabet Blog 2014 - J for James Jenkins

I wrote a little about James Jenkins last year in my post about his father Zephaniah Fry but I am glad to have the opportunity now to say more about him. As I said before James was born in 1753, the illegitimate son of Zephaniah Fry of Chippenham and his servant Ann Jenkins. Both his parents were disowned by the Society of Friends for adultery, although Zephaniah was readmitted after only two years.

James's father wanted no contact with him and his mother was not allowed to bring him up. He was raised by a non-Quaker nurse in a village near Bristol until he was ten when he was sent to London as an apprentice to John Fry, a cheese dealer. At first James was ignorant of any family connection but eventually his master's brother told him, 'We are both thy kindred, being nearly related to thy father.' Later his master's father, another John Fry, called him nephew, a name that James received 'with surprise and pleasure'.

High Flatts Meeting house

James was ashamed of his illegitimacy and felt that he had to earn acceptance from his newly-
discovered family by making every effort to please them. He began to attend Quaker meetings and his master sent him to school, first in London and then for three years boarding at High Flatts in Yorkshire, an isolated place which James described as ‘a desolate area of rough moorland about fourteen miles long and seven in width’. After this limited education James was bound apprentice in 1768 to Hannah Jesup, a widow in the grocery trade at Woodbridge in Suffolk. When after three years Hannah married an Irish Quaker, Robert Dudley, James went with them to Clonmel in Ireland.

In Clonmel James blossomed. He became an ironmonger, made friends with other young Quaker men including Robert Dudley's son from his first marriage, began to read more widely and started a common-place book. It was in Ireland too that James joined the Society of Friends and he always judged Quakers against the standard of what he found there. Although Irish Friends rigidly enforced ruled of dress and conduct, because they were a small and isolated community they also cared personally for one another. In Ireland young Quakers like James were welcomed, consulted and made to feel important whereas in England James was not allowed to be more than an observer of the Quaker scene.

Clonmel Quays

When James completed his apprenticeship in 1773 he became clerk to a firm of Quaker merchants in Waterford. After seven years he had accumulated savings of £300 and joined in a partnership with other Friends selling Irish cheese to England, but the enterprise failed and he lost most of his capital. For the next fifteen years James led a precarious existence in business in England in various capacities, using all his Quaker connections but finding it hard to make ends meet.

James's financial position was not helped by the fact that he had taken on family responsibilities. He married the Irish Quaker Elizabeth, or Betsy, Lamb in 1780 without a dowry but with the promise of a substantial legacy from her father Benjamin which never materialised. on top of this Betsy suffered from ill-health for twenty years, her various complaints exacerbated by almost constant childbearing. She suffered thirteen miscarriages and bore ten children of whom seven died young, leaving three sons who survived into adulthood and died in 1806 at the age of 47.

James's prosperity improved in 1795 when he was employed by his uncle John Fry's stock brokerage
firm after Joel Cadbury, who had a prior claim as a son-in-law, withdrew because he could not cope with the chaos and uncertainty of the market. Although many Quakers disapproved of dealing in stocks, seeing it as a form of gambling, James discovered that he had a talent for it and became a prosperous broker. In 1819 he retired to Folkestone and left his flourishing business to his sons. Unfortunately they did not inherit his ability and within five years they went bankrupt and were disowned by Friends.

Folkestone Harbour

These further financial difficulties, together with the early death of two of his sons, were a great blow to James but he rallied and managed to somewhat recover his fortunes. When he died in 1831 at the age of 78 he was described by Kent Quarterly Meeting as 'Gentleman', an epitaph which would have given him great satisfaction.

James Jenkins left little behind him financially but his great legacy is a manuscript, Records and Recollections which he left for safe-keeping to a fellow-Quaker who made sure that it was preserved and passed down from generation to generation until it was deposited in Friends House Library in 1918 and eventually published in a scholarly edition in 1984.

James had kept a diary for many years and used it to compose the story of his own life and to comment on the state of the Society of Friends as he saw it. His own history had brought home to him the hypocrisy that could be part of Quakerism in his time and he was concerned to be an objective observer and tell the truth. He therefore wrote 'alternative testimonies' on Quakers he knew when they died as an antidote to the bland hagiographies which were approved by the British Quaker establishment. He described their physical appearance, their idiosyncrasies of speech and behaviour, their good points and their failings. James retained a respect and love for Quakerism while still pointing out what he saw as abuses. His writings give us another view of 18th century Friends, showing them as fallible individuals rather than impossibly good role models, and James thereby does both us and them an invaluable service.

Quaker Alphabet Blog Week 50 - Y for Yearly Meeting

I can almost echo Amelia Opie when she said in 1843, 'Yearly Meeting has engrossed me much as usual, for I never missed one sitting since I obtained the great privilege of belonging to it '. I have certainly attended almost every sitting of Britain Yearly Meeting since I joined Friends in 1980 but in fact my first experience of Yearly Meeting was not as a member.

D Elton Trueblood

In 1975 I was working in Friends House Library and attended Yearly Meeting as a member of staff (with a red name badge to mark me out as I remember it). We were very busy attending to enquiries from Friends from all over the country and indeed all over the world. It was a great opportunity to get an impression of the wide variety of Quakers and to see them 'warts and all.' I particularly remember a visit from the weighty American Friend D.Elton Trueblood who stunned us with his parting remark as he left the library - "Now I must go and meet some real people"!

Edward H. [Ted] Milligan

The library closed when YM was in session and the librarian, the redoubtable Ted Milligan, encouraged us to go into the meeting where we sat together in specially allocated seats. As I was so new to Quakers and Quakerism he kindly sat beside me and explained what was going on and who people were. I particularly remember an elderly woman Friend dressed in a striking black hat and cloak and sitting in the front row  - Sybil White, then in her late eighties. I learned a lot about friends' eccentricities but was also inspired by their good sense and commitment.

Sybil White at YM 1978

But it was not just the people that drew me back to Yearly Meeting and into membership of the Religious Society of Friends. It was the experience, which amazed me then and continues to amaze me now, of a very large room full of noisy, opinionated, talkative people dropping all at once into silent worship. It was the power of that worship and the depth of vocal ministry that sometimes arose from it that reached me then and continues  - not in every meeting certainly but in enough - to reach me now.

I wish that more Friends would look outside their local meetings and take the opportunity to attend Yearly Meeting. Of course it is good to meet Friends from other meetings - as early Friends put it 'to see one anothers faces'- and to get a sense of the variety of Quakers. But it is by worshipping together, in such a large and diverse group as well as in our familiar surroundings, that we can reach for and find the Light that binds us all together in unity in spite of our outward differences.

Quaker Alphabet Week 4 - B for Books

Friends House Library

Although as I said under A for Arts, Quakers have often been hostile or ambivalent towards the arts in general, they have had a long history of writing and publishing books about Quakerism. 'Publishing Truth' was seen as an important way of reaching out to the world and telling others about what Quakers believed and stood for. Almost from the beginning Friends also collected writings both by Friends and against them - two copies of the pros and one copy of the antis - and these books and pamphlets formed the basis of the collection founded in 1673 and now housed at Friends House Library in London.

Not all these books were polemic.Writing about and sharing one's spiritual journey was also seen as important and even when these writings were not printed they were often copied and passed around among families and friends. Sometimes these spiritual autobiographies were published after the authors had died although they were sometimes heavily edited to take into account the changing sensibilities of later times.

From an alphabet by Paul Thurlby

 

Because Quakers were keenly aware of the power of books they wanted to make them widely available, sending out selections to local meetings and providing texts to be sold or given away to anyone interested in order to convince them of Quaker truths. But the Quaker establishment also wanted to control what was published and demanded that anyone who wrote a book about Quakerism had to submit it to the Second Days Morning Meeting (named for the day it met) for approval.

Texts might be edited, rewrites demanded and in some cases publication was denied. Even George Fox fell foul of this body when his Book of Miracles, with its stories of healings, was found too 'enthusiastic' for the times and rejected. Only the index survived from which Henry J Cadbury, in the early 20th century, attempted to reconstitute the original. The idea that Quaker writings had to be approved in order to be published by the Yearly Meeting has only fallen by the wayside in modern times when Yearly Meetings publish very little and any Friend can write a blog. Which is the better situation? Perhaps only time will tell.

Books have been an important part of my own journey to Quakerism. I first visited the Library as part of my Library School work experience and was struck by the warm welcome and good coffee that I received. Later I started a bibliographical MA on spiritual autobiography, which has remained a lifelong interest, and my reading included works by Quakers. Later still, when looking for a job, I remembered the coffee and the librarians and wrote on spec asking if there were any positions available. I got a job, loved it, and learned more about Quakers past and present through the books I read and the people I met. As with many others before me I found that although the writings were important in teaching me about Quakerism  it was the lives and struggles of the writers and their individual voices that spoke to me directly down the centuries. These were people that I got to know and this is the reason that I am including Quaker people as well as Quaker subjects in my alphabet so that others can find out something about the people behind the books.