Here in the Library, we are all recovering from a busy and productive Yearly Meeting in Friends House held over the bank holiday weekend. Yearly Meeting is the annual gathering for Quakers from around the country to come together to discern the direction of travel for the Society of Friends, and take decisions that affect the Society at a national level.

When it is held in Friends House, we use it as an opportunity to invite Friends into the Library, who may not usually get a chance to visit us, and to highlight some of the support services we can offer Quakers, from help with their libraries and meeting records, to support for outreach and exhibitions.

We also open our doors as a quiet space to escape the hustle and bustle in the rest of the building, and this year, had a table of reading materials from our collections, and from the Library in Woodbrooke, based around the theme of the weekend for anyone who wanted some inspiration.

Yearly Meeting this year was exploring the theme of privilege and how this impacts climate justice, diversity and inclusion. This made for an interesting reading table with books ranging from ‘This changes everything: capitalism versus the climate’ by Naomi Klein to a zine on welcoming people who identify as non-binary.

We also had a thought provoking display inspired by the theme, which traced the acceptance of women into Quaker meetings for business. While Quakers have a good reputation for women’s rights and equality, our display highlighted some surprising dates on its timeline. George Fox was radical in encouraging women to have their own business meetings, and women were allowed to preach in Quaker meetings from the 17^th century, which again was revolutionary for the time; however women only joined the main constitutional Yearly Meeting in 1908, showing that Quakers were not that far ahead of the rest of society in valuing women’s voices as equal to men when it came to actual decision making.

Many Friends who visited were surprised by the timeline and it certainly started some interesting conversations!

The highlight of our weekend was undoubtedly welcoming the children from the Children’s Programme into the Library for the first time. We had two groups, 5-8 year olds, and 8-11 year olds, and as always when we welcome children to the Library we enjoyed their surprising questions, and the random things that take their interest! Book sniffing was en vogue with the 8-11 year olds; and the Great Books of Suffering provoked an interesting conversation about why Quakerism fell foul of the law in the 17^th century with the 5-8 year olds.

They took inspiration from some of the posters in our collection, related to the theme of the weekend, and came up with some of their own posters featuring recurring symbols of doves, trees, rainbows and globes.

The children’s programme was focusing on caring in response to the theme of the Yearly Meeting; we created a small display about caring for refugees for them, which gave us an excuse to get out a teddy bear! Jack Hoyland distributed the pattern for these teddy bears in the 1930’s so people could make their own for the child refugees from the Spanish Civil War. Although the children enjoyed this 80-year-old bear, there were some unhappy customers as we hadn’t got out our 100 year old bread roll for the display…..next time!

Yearly Meeting is always a nice opportunity to meet some of the donors of material that we have only conversed with over the phone or by email, and also to see some of our regular readers and writers. Judith Roads popped in to give us some copies of her new book on Quaker minuting, and some other visitors told us about forthcoming books we should keep an eye out for.

We hope everyone enjoyed the weekend as much as we did!