Issue 26-04-2013
Featured story
Thought for the Week: Live adventurously
During the war years, in a world engulfed in violent conflict, members of the Friends Ambulance Unit (FAU) and Friends Relief Service (FRS) witnessed to their pacifist convictions. They made their choice and ‘lived adventurously’. In the spring of 2011 Staffordshire Friends forwarded a concern to Meeting for Sufferings that...
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Inauguration
Several hundred people travelled to Staffordshire from all over Britain, on Saturday 20 April, for the inauguration of the Quaker Service Memorial at the National Memorial Aboretum. A number of members of the Friends Ambulance Unit (FAU) and Friends Relief Service (FRS) were in attendance, together with family members and friends,...
The Friends Relief Service
Walcheren 1944 I was sent in 1944 with a Friends Relief Service Team to Holland. We worked on the island of Walcheren, a saucer-shaped island at the mouth of the Scheldt. It had been so heavily fortified by the Germans that the allies decided that the only way to regain it...
Answering that of God
In the first year of the second world war a tribunal heard evidence about a ‘fine young man’, a Methodist Sunday school teacher and Cambridge graduate, whose conscience forbade him to take up arms. He was my father, Richard Wainwright, and the hearing’s ruling in his favour led...
Friends Meeting House, Frenchay, Bristol
When the doors of the house are shut, Eyes lidded, mouth closed, nose and ears Doing their best to idle, fingers allowed out Only on parole; when the lovely holy distractions, Safe scaffolding of much-loved formulae, Have been rubbed away; then the plant Begins to grow. It is hard to...
Here
Here, silence amongst the great and the fallen nearby, a meadow of cornflower blue and poppy red, a place of remembrance, reflecting sorrow and loss: of sacrifices given and honour to the dead.
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The China Convoy: Pacifist idealism in China at war
Few of the FAU (Friends Ambulance Unit) members who volunteered for service in China fully appreciated the situation into which they were projecting themselves. China had not yet joined the Allies, but its sufferings since the Japanese invasion in 1937 had been widely reported in Britain. For the overwhelmingly British FAU,...
Memories
Oonah Pim is a very sharp, observant woman. She is shrewd and thoughtful, always keen for a conversation, loves discussing all aspects of life, the nature of people, and, as a birthright Quaker, the changing forms of Quakerism and spirituality. She loves meeting young people and, especially, children, relishes our...
Letters - 26 April 2013
Blood and flesh We are grateful to see correspondence regarding blood and organ donation (12 and 19 April). We are also extremely grateful to all those blood donors who have helped our daughter, Ros, back to health after life-threatening bleeds owing to her bleeding disorder, von Willebrands disease. We are not grateful...