Quaker Strongrooms

We are delighted to announce that we have completed the core work of the Wellcome Trust funded project to catalogue and preserve the records of the Friends Ambulance Unit (FAU) and Friends Relief Service (FRS) from World War Two. 

Both collections have been repacked in conservation grade materials, and fully catalogued on our online public access catalogue to make them accessible for research. 

We are very grateful to the Wellcome Trust for funding this work, and their support during the pandemic, and also to our heroic project archivist Jill Geber who managed to maintain a positive attitude throughout, when the pandemic made this project seem at times impossible. 

One of the most important, and satisfying elements of this project was the conservation work. Parts of these collections were completely unfit for use due to their fragility, and most of the collection was in danger of becoming unusable due to the damage being wrought by rusting metal fastenings. Paper was crumbling in some parts, and due to overfilled files and boxes, a lot of the material was under strain.  

Despite the huge setback of not being able to work with the collections for much of 2020, Jill managed to repack the collections, cleaning paper, removing damaging fastenings, transferring into archival quality files, protecting individual documents with melinex sleeves where required, and packing all into acid-free boxes within the project timeframe. One mind-boggling figure which demonstrates the size of the job is the number of brass staples used across the collections: over 9,000! The photos below show the difference which has been made; ensuring these collections suffer no further deterioration.

The cataloguing work was the other major task, made no less difficult by the complexity of Quaker organisations; FRS had no less than 12 main committees, some with sub (and sub-sub-) committees, and attached departments for each committee, plus extra departments not governed by committees (phew!). They needed organizational charts to keep track at the time, and Jill created a few herself trying the understand how both organisations functioned. 

Both collections are now available on the online catalogues under the below links. Under these top levels records, you will see the hierarchy browser where you can expand to see the whole collections. 

Friends Ambulance Unit World War Two catalogue

Friends Relief Service World War Two catalogue

These collections provide a huge amount for researchers. From detailed insights into day-to-day life in evacuation hostels for children and the elderly in Britain, to high level discussions about how this work influenced development of social services theory for postwar planning; from accounts of incredibly varied medical work in the field in China and North Africa, to eyewitness testimony to the destruction left behind in mainland Europe, and the tangled chaos of the postwar political scene, there is huge scope for new research as well as much for the family historian and those with general interest in humanitarianism and World War Two.

Normally around this time of year we would be on a stall at the annual History Day run by the Institute of Historical Research at UCL, which gives researchers a chance to meet staff from libraries, archives, museums, and publishers, and gives us all a chance to eat free sweets and collect postcards, bookmarks and other freebies from the different stalls!

This year the event has moved online and there is a programme of online talks which you can check out here: https://historycollections.blogs.sas.ac.uk/programme/. History Day has teamed up with this year’s Being Human festival; Britain’s festival of the humanities which happens every autumn. The theme of this year’s Being Human festival is New Worlds which feels timely given the current global situation. This blog is our contribution to that theme.

Quakers, among others, are talking about the current coronavirus situation and the opportunity it gives us to Build Back Better. This made us think about times in the past when Quakers have similarly sought to turn a crisis into a moment of reflection and opportunity to create a New World on peaceful and more equitable grounds.

Both World Wars in the 20^th century were experienced as unprecedented upheavals for society at the time with total breakdown of normal life for many directly involved. Quakers during both wars saw the opportunity provided to rebuild society in a positive way, and we are going to focus on some ideas that feel equally relevant to conversations around building back better today.

World War I was characterised by some Quakers as a failure of the capitalist system, and of empire.  A number of Quakers were self-described socialists while others would have shied away from this label, but they all saw the system in place in Britain at the outbreak of WWI as containing untenable inequalities of wealth and power.

Quakers established a committee, in 1915, to look at these inequalities called the War and Social Order Committee which produced a manifesto: Foundations of a True Social Order in 1918. You can read their manifesto here: https://quakersocialorder.org.uk/

Their feelings about the system which had created the climate for global war are summed up in the following quote from Friends Social Union to the Quaker Yearly Meeting in 1915. Reading this quote, it struck us how one could change the word ‘war’ for ‘pandemic’ and apply this to today’s situation.

“The War has brought home to us a grave sense of our personal and corporate responsibility for the social welfare of our country. It is humiliating to find ourselves able to do so little to alleviate the social evils which the war has revealed….Some have become entangled in habits which they find it impossible to simplify without serious injury to the classes whose services they have accepted easily and thoughtlessly…..Others, again, have discovered in their own lives and conduct the same spirit of competitive self-seeking, which in larger spheres and on a wider scale leads to the disastrous cycle of war and war preparation…..As employers, consumers, and investors we are all of us bound up in a network of relations between trade, commerce, finance and national diplomacy, from which we cannot as individuals, break free.” Report of the Friends Social Union to Yearly Meeting 1915

The last sentence applies as much to the newly industrialised world, dependant on problematic empires, of 1915, as it does to today’s globalised consumer-based world dependant on underpaid labour and modern day slavery.

Quakers had some practical suggestions which still resonate today. One was the idea of a ‘state bonus’ which was similar to the idea of a Universal Basic Income being trialled in countries around the world today. This proposal was developed by Quaker couple Denis and Mable Milner who were among the first theorists in Britain to argue for the concept in their publication Scheme for a state bonus: a rational method for solving the social problem(1918).

There were similar ideas around living wage, and workers’ co-operatives so workers could have a real share in the dividends they helped create. Quakers wanted a system that “knows no restriction of race, sex or social class” with materials and land regulated so as to serve the greatest need.

Again although this sounds radical, most of the Quaker activities after the war were more reformist than radical in character and always eminently practical. Quakers were leaders in the Adult School movement which wanted to lift people out of poverty through education, and started a government backed allotments programme which focussed on the alleviation of poverty in industrialised areas. Quaker employers were known for trying to create fairer conditions for their employees although there were not many examples of workers’ co-operatives among the big Quaker businesses.

The War and Social Order Committee became the Industrial and Social Order Committee and continued its work until the early 1960s. We have not had the opportunity to study its later work in much depth (and are not currently onsite to access our collections!) but the organisational history on our catalogue record is possibly revealing. The minutes from Meeting for Sufferings, the corporate body which created committees and laid them down considered, in 1956, that the committee’s work was too ‘unpractical’ and the committee complained of being underfunded. This could mean many things but it could possibly reflect the tension between more radical socialist members of the Society of Friends and those who did not identify as Socialist – was the Committee too polemical?

Meeting for Sufferings goes on, in 1957 to say:

“It [the Industrial and Social Order Committee] would need to “work in close association with any committees already in existence which are concerned with particular aspects of the social order, e.g the Penal Reform Committee (qv), the Friends Temperance and Moral Welfare Union (qv). Under present circumstances, the Industrial and Social Order Council will need to keep in touch with the Peace Committee (qv), the East-West Relations Committee (qv) and the Race Relations Committee (qv), since the national and international aspect of the industrial and social order must be reviewed together“

Again, this could show an admirable understanding of the intersectional nature of economic justice, or a reluctance to focus on changing economic systems and directly political campaigning.

Obviously there was major disruption to the ideas around development of the new social order by World War II. Quakers had gained a lot of experience in relief work before and after World War I, and World War II would see them become an effective, modern, and influential humanitarian organisation working alongside bodies such as Save the Children and Oxfam. By the end of the war some Quaker humanitarian workers were given influential positions in bodies which looked at how to rebuild better after the devastation of war.

Around two thousand young, full-time, active, keen, men and women pacifists joined the Friends Ambulance Unit and Friends Relief Service organisations during WW2. They were utterly opposed to war as the way to resolve international disputes. They were convinced that damage done by war brought about the worst suffering, not only on those who fought in its battles, but also on the millions of civilians who were caught up in it. They volunteered to work directly in a number of the theatres of war, to contribute in any way possible to alleviate the suffering first at home and later on the battlefields and in the devastation and destruction following the campaigns. 

The FAU and FRS’ approach to chaos of wartime situations was first to conduct surveys of real need in the immediate crises. For example in the Blitz of 1940-1941, members on the ground in London and other British towns and cities quickly analysed and carefully worked out which sections of the bombed-out population affected were in most need; who were being neglected or overlooked by the authorities, and directed their efforts to fill that gap by offering their services of organisation, labour and support to make a difference to the lives of those who were suffering. FAU offered medical and ambulance service and assisted in the organization of shelters and rest centres; FRS offered social service with a real interest in the methods and practice of voluntary social work, of the greatest value to the existing local services which had been thrown into disarray by the devastation. 

FRS members developed an insatiable thirst for social reform, were extremely interested in the experience which came to them and were concerned that the fruits of it should be made available to those who would, in the long run, work in the field.  Useful work was done and in maintaining and spreading the idea of voluntary social work. 

The first example of this was FRS’ pioneering work in addressing the failure of British social policy in providing for the evacuation of old people from bombed-out areas in the Blitz. This experience shone a light on the lack of provision for elderly care in pre-war times as well.

One of the lessons learned, which surprised Quaker relief workers initially, was that many of the elderly were neither grateful nor happy at being removed from their homes and social networks, despite being moved to safer and in some cases materially improved environments. This led Quakers to consider the emotional and social elements required to thrive as well as the physical and logistical. This informed some of their thinking about postwar social care and whether it should happen in the home, or in external institutions such as care homes.

FRS was not the first body to look after old people but it was the first to think carefully about the problem, analyse its elements and call the attention of the authorities and communities to the needs they were meeting. Several FRS members made important contributions to the work of the Rowntree Committee of the Nuffield Trust (Roger Wilson, war-time head of FRS, was a member of the Committee), which made a large-scale enquiry into the needs of the elderly, and whose report, Old People, became a classic work on the subject.

Alan Pickard’s film on life at Oldway House, Wellington, Somerset, Those who are Old aroused enormous interest in what could be done and when in 1945 the Service produced a practical handbook, Hostels for Old People, embodying the experience of FRS workers, it quickly ran through two editions.  Its main lessons were: hostels should be small, so that the residents feel that they belong to a community that is not dominated by the need for administration; residents should be carefully selected, so there may be a reasonable balance of temperaments; and hostels should, as a rule, be mixed.  Through its work among old people, FRS made some contribution to the understanding of their needs in the 20^th century British community. Many found their permanent vocation in caring for the elderly; and up and down the country, Friends used the experience gained in and through the FRS to help the old people’s welfare committees which were developing in many districts. 

Another important activity FAU and FRS members undertook, was work in Citizens’ Advice Bureaux in in the bombed and devastated areas of London and targeted provincial towns and cities.  Citizens’ Advice Bureaux were inaugurated by the National Council of Social Service, and became one of the most valuable of all the war-time developments in the field of social work. The CAB system became a highly popular source of information and assistance to those who were in distress through air raids or other causes and could not pick their way through the maze of wartime regulations and provisions.  FRS always had at its disposal a number of members who were thoroughly familiar with current legislation and regulations that affected the ordinary citizen and could help them navigate bureaucracy to get what they needed in terms of support.

This interest in the nuts and bolts of delivery of social care and social services reflects the practical mindset of the projects dealing with poverty after WWI.

The events of World War Two would leave Quakers with two other major areas of campaigning for change over the next decades and continuing today, that of the rights of the refugee, and resistance to nuclear weapons. Again two topics which unfortunately are still so relevant today.

When we think about the New World we want to create after the pandemic is over, we could do worse than reflect on the experiences of the 20^th century and the ideas people had to prevent those wars from happening again, many of which would have created a stronger, fairer society better equipped to face today’s challenges.

Jill, project archivist for FAU-FRS cataloguing project

I joined Friends House Library in January 2020 as Project Archivist.  Over the next 2 years I will be working on a Wellcome Trust Funded project to catalogue the World War Two archives of Friends Ambulance Unit (1939-47) and Friends Relief Service (1943-48) to make them more accessible to researchers.

Through this blog I’ll be giving updates about the project’s progress, as well as sharing stories about interesting records I discover along the way.

I decided that the first collection to be tackled should be the Friends Ambulance Unit (FAU) archives, as it is smaller in size and more straightforward to catalogue. It comprises 47 boxes of material dating from 1938 to 1989. The material is in various formats: files of correspondence, reports and minutes, (some packed too tightly into their original, now unsuitable, 1940s boxes), personnel records, Convoy and Section records from areas of operation (particularly good for China), newspaper clippings, accounting records, drafts of chapters for the official history of FAU, camp diaries, journals, newsletters, bulletins, pamphlets, photographs and films.

Above is a snaphot of some items to show the range of material within the collection: documents in a variety of languages, printed items, photographs, personnel records etc.

The first weeks were spent getting to know the collection by undertaking a brief box listing, paying attention to the condition of the material for conservation planning. Fortunately, the collection seems to be in pretty good condition apart from the fragility of some of the wartime stationery used in the correspondence files and one or two volumes which need more than just basic conservation treatment. The box listing also allowed me to pick up on some files which have privacy/data protection issues, which will be given more consideration later.

The box listing has given me an overall view of the archives and some good pointers to how to approach its cataloguing. A general picture of the various functional bodies within the FAU has emerged, and thanks to some traces of the original filing systems, it has been fairly easy to spot how the record series were originally kept and what functions of the FAU these records reflect. Reading through the Accessions folder for this collection, the old handlists, and a few documents in the FAU files, a clear picture emerged of how the archive was formed from multiple deposits of records between 1947 and 2014.

Luckily for us, the men and women of the FAU had decided even before the war had ended to write a history of the Unit as a record of its achievements and its contribution to the Quaker ideal of pacifism in action. This published official history of the FAU written by A.Tegla Davies, Friends Ambulance Unit – the story of the FAU in the Second World War 1939-1946 (published in 1947) is very readable and includes much detail which is useful in helping me understand the FAU’s organisation and administration.

The next step was to read through all the series of minutes of the FAU’s governing body – its Council, Trustees and of its major Committees – Executive, Staff Meeting, Finance, Publicity and Advisory which contain a wealth of information on the evolution of the FAU’s administration and some snippets of information which were unknown, for example that the FAU attempted to find someone to act a records-keeper-cum archivist, but the Executive Committee sadly reported that ‘no suitable person could be discovered for the position of Archivist’ among its members. [FAU Executive Committee Minutes, 2 Oct 1945 Minute 3571].

All the information gathered from these initial tasks has been written up into a file of notes on the provenance, custodial history and administrative history which will lay the groundwork for the top-level catalogue entries when the cataloguing stage begins.

Having completed these initial tasks of taking intellectual control of the FAU archives, I feel confident that the next stage of careful arrangement of the collection can soon go ahead.

My first impressions of the collection, following the box listing and background reading, was of admiration for the courage and commitment of this group of men and women putting their pacifism into action, doing all they could to relieve the suffering of soldiers and refugees alike in the worst war zones imaginable.

I was struck by what a democratic body the FAU was and how its members constantly strove to organise themselves in the most simple and efficient way to undertake their tasks of medical, ambulance, transport, relief and rehabilitation work, often in the most primitive and physically challenging conditions at home in the Blitz of 1940-41 and then further afield in the war zones.

From an archivist’s perspective, it has been a pleasure to find the administrative history of the FAU so well-documented. I noted with interest how important the documentation and reporting of their work was to the FAU, in the constant and detailed correspondence, official and personal, between overseas Sections and Headquarters.

When the FAU focused on the winding-up of the war-time Unit, its Executive Committee considered what method should be adopted for sorting Unit records and preserving those of permanent value.

It was agreed ‘Basic’ files should be compiled by areas, containing records which should be preserved. The selection should be undertaken by a member with intimate knowledge of each area.  Other papers should be destroyed forthwith. An immediate start should be made with areas in which the Unit’s work has been closed and which has been covered by the Unit’s Historian. [FAU Executive Committee Minutes, 4 March 1946, p 142]

In the final days of the organisation, the following report appeared in the Unit’s last information bulletin:

At Gordon Square [FAU headquarters in London] there has been much desperate activity to ensure that we leave everything neat and tidy by 30th June, when the Last Trump is due to sound.  Operation Huddle involves the closing of the… Ladbroke Grove and Onslow Gardens… hostels, the cessation of the Chronicle, Information and Transport offices, and the amalgamation of Overseas and Personnel with Welfare. The fires have been constantly alight with discarded files – the scandal at Bab-el-louk [FAU HQ in Cairo], the small talk at Rome [HQ in Italy], memories of Whitechapel [London hospital and relief work in the Blitz] and Kutsing [China Convoy HQ] and Vlotho [HQ in Germany] – all have perished in the flames, all save a modest four crates containing basic records for posterity.  When the smoke cleared away, we could make out the infant phoenix of FAU Post-War Service, which will continue to occupy 4 Gordon Square. [Fortnightly Information No. 226, 26 June 1946, p. 3]

That need for rapid and ruthless clearing out of files explains some gaps in the records.

The project’s progress was interrupted in March, when Friends House and the Library had to close because of the Coronavirus pandemic. Working from home has presented new challenges. More research, planning and writing have to take the place of working with the physical records until we can get back to the Library. I’m looking forward to beginning the sorting and arrangement of the FAU archives and returning the files to their original order as far as is possible.

For more information on when the Library will reopen, check our website: https://www.quaker.org.uk/resources/library/visit-the-library

Friends Relief Service pamphlet c.1945

This year there are several anniversaries coming up, but some of the most poignant, and perhaps relevant in today’s world, are the 75th anniversaries of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. These anniversaries remind us of the world’s horror in 1945 when the full extent of the Nazis’ persecution of Jews and others was revealed, and help us reflect on what conditions in society had made these crimes possible.

 
Earlier this year we were pleased to contribute to an episode of BBC’s Songs of Praise, which commemorated the liberation of Auschwitz. The programme featured interviews with Ruth Barnett, who came to England on the Kindertransport, and Quaker Peace & Social Witness peace activist Marigold Bentley, filmed in the Library reading room.

Last year we started working with the Holocaust Educational Trust on a powerful project run jointly by the Trust and UCL’s Institute of Education, which is bringing around 1500 schoolchildren to the site of Bergen-Belsen this February and March. Belsen 75 (https://www.belsen75.org.uk/) has put together learning packs for the children to prepare them for this visit, featuring some material from The Star, the weekly magazine published by Friends Relief Service workers to update Quakers about their work.

A team from Friends Relief Service were among the first British relief workers to accompany the British Army into Bergen-Belsen in April 1945. When the FRS team arrived, six days after the Army had got to the camp, they were faced with unimaginable conditions. Thousands of dead remained unburied, and around 40,000 people still living in the camp were suffering extreme malnutrition making them vulnerable to infectious diseases. The conditions were such that the Army would not let the women workers enter the camp for some days.

For some of the team, the conditions they witnessed tested their pacifism, leading them to think at points that they should have supported the use of force to stop Hitler; for most of the team however these thoughts were short-lived and throughout their accounts, they speak of the need to temper reactions to these crimes so the whole German populace were not blamed.

The decision to go into the camp with the Army had taken some deliberation and negotiation, as the Army had issued a non-fraternisation order to all British relief workers in Germany, meaning they were not meant to speak or communicate with the German public. Quakers fought against this, and for a time simply ignored it until the Army relented. Their work was always carried out with a sense that they were trying to create conditions in which future wars would not happen, and they knew recrimination would not pave the way to peace.

The pamphlet below shows a relief workers’ dictionary translated into French and German.

Friends Relief Service pamphlet c.1945

Pamphlet has translations of words useful to the work of relief workers in both French, and German

We were very happy that the Belsen 75 project thought the Quaker involvement was an important part of the story for these young people when learning about the liberation of the camp. The spirit of reconciliation shown by the FRS team in the face of these terrible crimes is a message as important in today’s world as it was in 1945.