I’m sorry to be veering a little bit away from the Forest in this week’s ‘Forest View’, but I can claim that this article is inspired by local reference. I was reading the January edition of ‘The Fifteen Bells’ the other day, and caught an item of great historical interest to me. ‘The Fifteen Bells’ is the monthly Parish magazine for the Church of England benefices of Newnham, Awre and Blakeney, and the item I’m writing about celebrates George Fox, of one of the founders of the radical Christian group, ‘The Society of Friends’, or ‘The Quakers’, as they are more commonly known.

Any reference to the Society of Friends takes me back to my early years in Darlington in County Durham. The town was dominated in the 19th Century by the Pease family, a Quaker dynasty of great industrialists, philanthropists and humanitarians. They promoted the first public railway to use steam, to connect the coal mines of County Durham to the newly industrialised sea port of Middlesbrough via Darlington. As well as railways and mining the family were heavily involved in woollen manufacturing, banking and politics. Darlington still has Arthur Pease and Gurney Pease Schools, and the town’s literary centre is the Edward Pease public library.

In the pre motorway days of my youth, all road traffic from London to Edinburgh was along the old A1 road. In those pre-motorway days, this arterial road ran through the centre of all towns along this road. Traffic had to manoeuvre its way around the statue of Joseph Pease which partially blocked Darlington’s narrow high street, until the M1 bypass opened in 1963. The statue has now been moved to a less obstructive part of town. Close to the centre of town there is still the Friends Meeting House and burial ground.

The town’s football team is known as the Quakers. The club’s supporters cheer them on with ‘Howay the Quakers’, which helped to bring about a 4-1 victory against the mighty Chelsea in an FA Cup replay at home in 1957. I now feel able to confess that I skipped school to enjoy that glorious occasion. Inevitably we lost heavily (6-1) against the Wolves in the next round, and the club collapsed many years later after various financial issues including an over-ambitious purchase of a new ground. However, that ground was taken over by my old rugby club, Darlington Mowden Park, in some sort of fire sale, and I try to get up there whenever Cinderford play away against my old club. Unfortunately, as both Cinderford and Mowden Park have been relegated from national to regional status since my last visit there, that is unlikely to happen again for some time.

Getting back to the Forest, the Society of Friends have a presence here, with a meeting place at the Hut, Berry Hill, and a library/bookshop at Newnham. It’s a humanistic, non-dogmatic, non-institutional institution, which has somehow managed to reconcile the industrial revolution of capitalism with a gentle and peaceful philosophy.