Quaker Alphabet blog Week 27 - N for Henry Stanley Newman

Henry Stanley Newman in 1870

Henry Newman was born in Liverpool in 1837, the only son of Josiah Newman and Harriet Wood. Henry was educated at Bootham School in York and his mother died when he was 14. His father set up a grocery business in Leominster, Herefordshire and Henry began to work there in 1858. He married Mary Ann Pumphry in 1863 and they had six children, three girls and three boys. After his marriage Henry adopted the name Stanley to distinguish himself from his uncle. 

Henry was a constant and active attender of Quaker meetings for discipline. He was universally known at Yearly Meeting and was clerk of his Monthly Meeting for over twenty years. He was recorded as a minister in 1869 and took a large part in the series of Tent (or Mission) meetings held in the district which led to the rapid growth of Leominster and surrounding meetings. He was aware of the changes taking place in the Society of Friends in his time with a growth in numbers of convinced, sometimes working class, members and the falling away of the sons and daughters of old Quaker families. He was concerned that these new members should be educated in Quakerism and welcomed moves to broaden the appeal of the Society, like the Manchester conference of 1895 as helpful.

Henry Stanley Newman in later life

Although Henry lived in the same small town for most of his life he was engaged with the wider world. He was much involved in mission world-wide as well as locally and was secretary for many years of the Friends Foreign Mission Association. He faithfully attended meetings in London even though this meant a five hour train journey from Leominster. He also travelled farther afield and visited missions in India in 1880-1881 and Pemba in 1897. From 1888 to 1890 he travelled in America visiting all the Yearly Meetings, both Orthodox and Hicksite.

Henry was also very involved with local causes. He was one of the founders of Leominster Adult School and was leader of the Leominster Men's School for 54 years. In 1869 he founded the Leominster Orphan Homes in two houses under one roof in Ryelands Road, one for boys and one for girls, with a total capacity of about 40. Orphans under the age of ten were admitted irrespective of creed, cared for and educated to be useful members of society.

Orphans Printing Press in Leominster

In 1873 Henry established the Orphans Printing Press in Leominster with three aims - to generate money to support the Orphan Homes, to provide an industrial training for at least some of the orphans in its care and to publish materials which would act as a force for good. A gas powered press valued at £100 was installed and the children set to work for three hours each morning, continuing their lessons in the afternoon. By 1874 Henry noted that 'there seems to be a more healthy tone about them, now they feel they are earning their own bread and learning a useful trade'. Even when, in a few years, Parliament prohibited the employment of children, several of the orphans were employed by the printing press when they were old enough.

The Friend in 1901

In the later part of his life  Henry Stanley Newman was an enthusiastic and energetic editor of The Friend. He took up the post when he retired from business at the age of 54 in 1892, changed the journal from a monthly to a weekly publication and oversaw its printing in Leominster at the Orphans Printing Press. Although The Friend in his time certainly reflected his interests in mission and in education he was broad in his sympathies and his editorship helped to keep British Quakerism united during a critical period. He died, still editor of The Friend, in Leominster on 23rd October 1912 aged 75.




 

Quaker Alphabet Blog - Week 26 - M for Katharine Moore

Katharine Moore in 1989

Katharine Moore was one of the most inspirational teachers I have ever encountered. I sat in the front row of her lessons on Blake and Jane Austen when I was 16 or 17 and felt my mind almost physically stretched by her erudition and enthusiasm. She spoke to her pupils on equal terms and demanded an equal engagement in return. At the time I did not know anything about her life or that she was a Quaker but over the years I learned more about this extraordinary woman. I am glad that many years later I wrote her a letter acknowledging my debt of gratitude and this blog post is a way of continuing that.



Una Katharine Yeo was born in 1898 in Reigate, Surrey. Her father, a rigorous Presbyterian, worked in London in insurance. In her memoir Queen Victoria is very ill (1988) Katharine summarises the religious atmosphere in which she was brought up. 'God and Jesus . . . roughly corresponded to my father and mother. God and my father were all-powerful and all-knowing: they gave orders and had to be obeyed; sometimes they shouted. My father could not shout so loudly as God when it thundered, but he had a good try. Jesus and my mother never shouted, and they loved me whatever I did, though they too liked to be obeyed.' 

Lady Margaret Hall today

However certain he was of his own beliefs Katharine's father was not narrow minded when it came to his daughter's education. She was sent to Wycombe Abbey school and from there her father encouraged her to gain a place at Oxford in the first exhilarating period of women's acceptance as full members of the university. Katharine spent three very happy years (1918-1921) reading English at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford inspired by teachers such as Janet Spens, the Elizabethan scholar, Walter Raleigh, first Oxford professor of English literature, and Gilbert Murray, regius professor of Greek. 

Her degree equipped Katharine for her future work as a teacher and writer and a short interlude after university, working in the Lady Margaret Hall Settlement in Lambeth, was an eyeopener about poverty for a middle-class girl. Very shortly afterwards, however, Katharine's time was to be fully taken up by different responsibilities. In 1922, she married Dr Harold Moore, a widower twenty years her senior with three young girls, and soon she herself had twins, Jane and Christopher, for whom she wrote her first children's book, Moog, in 1936, with illustrations by Jane. This was followed by a series of educational books for children. Her marriage was very happy and her husband - later a CBE and the first president of the Institution of Metallurgists - continued the supportive tradition of the men in her family. 

Walthamstow Hall school

In her 30s Katharine Moore discovered Quakerism and with it a belief in a gentler, more compassionate God than that epitomised by her father. As her children grew older she looked for employment and in 1943 was offered a part-time teaching post at Walthamstow Hall school for girls in Sevenoaks, Kent where the family then lived. She wrote an account of her wartime experiences in another memoir A Family Life 1939-45 published in 1989. After the war she was offered a full-time post at Walthamstow Hall and remained there until her retirement (and afterwards when she returned to teach one day a week and I was one of her pupils).

In 1947 Katharine and Harold's son Christopher, then 23, was drowned in a holiday accident. Katharine spoke of the terrible loss as dividing her life in two, but she strove for, and ultimately attained, the goal of turning suffering to good account, gaining a depth of understanding of other people's tragedies. She was very busy with her family but always found time for teaching, reading and writing - the life of the mind balanced with domestic life.

Joyce Grenfell

In 1957, in answer to a perceived slight to her beloved Oxford professor, Walter Raleigh, Katherine Moore wrote to the entertainer Joyce Grenfell and this began a 22-year pen friendship which ended only with Joyce's death in 1979. They agreed never to meet in order to express themselves with greater freedom and this resulted in an unusually satisfying exchange of ideas, the record of an extraordinary companionship of minds, particularly in spiritual and religious matters. As it went on the correspondence did contain personal matters too, especially after the death of Katharine's husband Harold in 1972. Some of their letters were published in 1981 under the title An Invisible Friendship.

Katharine Moore's first book for adult readers, influenced by her Quakerism, was an anthology, The Spirit of Tolerance, commissioned by Victor Gollancz in 1964. The titles and subjects of Katharine's later non-fiction books reflect her preoccupation with women's need for independence and her religious development - Cordial Relations: The Maiden Aunt In Fact And Fiction (1966); Victorian Wives (1974); and She For God: Aspects Of Women And Christianity (1978). 

 As she grew older Katharine continued to develop her writing and thinking. She published her first novel,Summer at the Haven (1983), set in an old people's home with an old lady as its central character, at the age of 85 and received the Authors' Club Silver Quill Award for the most promising first novel of 1984. Her unusual subject came from her own experience - old age and its unacknowledged fears, pleasures and trials - and another two novels on the same theme followed, The Lotus House (1984) and Moving House (1986). Critics were enthusiastic, comparing her to Elizabeth Gaskell, and she gained a devoted following among readers of all ages. After her three full-length novels, she produced a witty and humane collection of short stories, Six Gentle Criminals (1990), and an exercise in historical recreation, A Particular Glory (1994) the fictional biography of Damaris, daughter of John Wesley's friend and mentor Vincent Perronet, vicar of Shoreham, Kent, where Katharine lived. 

Katharine Moore remained always involved with life, family, friends, Quakers and the life of the mind, living on until 2001 when she died at the age of 103. "I never had much time for old people," she said in her later years, "so, perhaps, this long life is God teaching me a lesson." Her whole life was a lesson to those who read her books, were inspired by her teaching or knew her as a friend and I am grateful to have been one of that number.

Quaker Alphabet Blog Week 25 - M for Meeting Houses

Come-to-Good in Cornwall with stable at side

Meeting for worship does not require a meeting house but the buildings in which Quakers gather together do reflect something of what Quaker community means and has meant over the centuries.

In Britain Yearly Meeting one of the most striking things about Quaker meeting houses is their variety. Some meetings do not have their own building but gather instead in members' houses or in hired rooms. This may be a decision reached because of lack of numbers, local circumstances or as a witness to simplicity. After all, when Quakerism began this was the way in which local meetings started out.

Manchester Mount Street

The earliest meeting houses, from the 17th and early 18th centuries,

Slough - a modern meeting house

look like houses of the period, even if they were in fact purpose-built. A little later they may take on more of the appearance of a chapel and in the expansiveness of the 19th century sometimes become quite grand. There have been relatively few purpose-built meeting houses in the 20th century but there are some notable exceptions. In modern times Friends have often adapted buildings erected for other purposes - as a house, a shop or even a masonic hall!

Wimbledon - once a house

Barnstaple - once a shop

The new meeting house in Newcastle - once a Masonic hall!

Wallingford 'stand'

Inside these different buildings there will be a meeting room and the way in which this is set out also says something about Quakers both past and present.

Slough meeting room

From the 17th to the beginning of the 20th century a meeting room had a 'stand' at one end where the ministers and, sometimes in lower seats, the elders and overseers sat. They faced the rest of the meeting who were sitting in rows of benches with men on one side and women on the other. In modern times these distinctions melted away and chairs and benches are now usually arranged in a circle with only a table, often containing flowers and perhaps copies of Quaker Faith and Practice and the Bible, as a focus. In modern meeting houses this modern practice is quite natural but in older rooms it can feel as though one is 'camping out' in the middle of somewhere originally arranged quite differently. Certainly in Reading the circular arrangement makes the acoustic quite difficult although I have found that a speaker can be heard quite clearly from the redundant ministers' 'stand'!

Reading meeting room - camping out!

Skipton meeting room

I have just moved from a large 19th century meeting house and a large meeting in Reading to a smaller 17th century meeting house and a small to medium size meeting in Skipton. The architecture of both can be inspiring in different ways but in the end for me the power of meeting for worship comes from a community of people gathering together and that can happen wherever I am.
 
If you want to get a fuller impression of the variety of meeting houses in the British Isles may I recommend John Hall's photostream of Quaker Meeting Houses on Flickr from which all the illustrations for this post are taken.