A Potted History of the Fellowship
Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze
Henry Hodgkin
The Fellowship was born out of a handshake.
On the eve of the First World War, a German Lutheran and an English Quaker parted at Cologne Station with the words, "We are one in Christ and can never be at war".
The Englishman, Henry Hodgkin, followed up this commitment by organising a conference in Cambridge in December 1914 at which the visionary statement, known as the Basis of the Fellowship, was drafted.
The Early Years
George Davies in his prison cell during WW1
During the First World War the Fellowship gave spiritual, emotional and practical support to the growing number of people who refused conscription on the grounds of conscience.
At the end of the war the International FoR was founded.
Between the Wars
1931 Disarmament Procession
It is a truism that the seeds of the Second World War were sown in the Treaty of Versailles.
Great preachers like Donald Soper addressed rallies with audiences of thousands to make the Christian case against a second world war.
The Cold War -Fifties and Sixties
Clifford MacQuire meets the Dean of Moscow
The use of atomic weapons against Japan raised the horror of war to a new level. Members of the Fellowship were heavily involved in the new Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, employing radical techniques of nonviolent resistance. The same techniques found new expression, and a deep spiritual and theoretical underpinning, in the anti-racist US civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King, in which many American FOR members took part. Peacemaking became ever more closely linked with liberation, as in the nonviolent struggles led by radical clergy such as Helder Camara in Brazil.
Vietnam and Northern Ireland
Catholic and Protestant children in an FoR Summer Work Camp
The Cold War ideology found its most brutal expression in the decade of slaughter in southeastAsia. This was the first war to be brought home to us every day by television- war as theatre. Many young people reacted violently to the ever-increasing US bombing. The Fellowship formed links with the Buddhist peace movement inVietnam, many of whose members committed public suicide to draw attention to the situation. The Buddhist peace delegation in Paris played an important role in facilitating the ultimate settlement of the conflict.
Closer to home, the human rights abuses and sectarian divisions in Northern Ireland came to national prominence in the 1970's. Many FOR members from Britain went to build links between the communities in a series of summer playschemes for the children of the estates. Others became permanent residents and worked, often secretly and at great personal risk, to mediate between the opposing paramilitaries.
Peace Camps and Pilgrimages
Diana Francis
Bede Smith, Doreen Hudson-Tobin and Ginnie Lander
The 1980's saw the arrival of US Cruise missiles at Greenham Common and Molesworth - part of a US strategy to make a nuclear war in Europe possible without threat to the US itself. The women's peace camp at Greenham is legendary, and signalled a growing awareness of the role of gender in peacemaking. Less well known is the camp at Molesworth, where a chapel of peace was built on the base and wheat was grown and sent tofamine-hit Ethiopia. During this campaign the FOR organised a peace pilgrimage by bicycle from Iona, the centre of a Christian peace witness, to Canterbury.
Towards the Millennium
Eirene Centre
In the mid-1990's, helped by some substantial legacies, FOR decided to establish a spiritual home at the Eirene Centre in rural Northamptonshire, as part of its vision to help people build peace from within themselves and their communities.
The FoR Banner in Hyde Park, 15th February 2003
A combination of office, retreat house and conference centre, the Eirene Centre welcomed many people unfamiliar with the peace movement.
Today
In 2003/4 a new strategic vision was developed which has seen new programmes developed, an increase in staff, the move of the office to Oxford and the sale of the Eirene Centre. Today as we look forward to our centenary FoR remains committed to opposing war and militarism, striving to promote those things which make for peace, justice and human rights and to continue to show the way towards what its founders called... "a world order based on Love."
With thanks to Gordon Slater