50 Fun Facts About Quakers

Which Oscar-winning British actress went to a Quaker school in York and has called the faith essential to her work?

Judi Dench. A Quaker since her schooldays at the Mount School, she is best known as M, the spy chief who sends James Bond out with his licence to kill.

Who founded the Quaker movement in mid-17th-century England?

George Fox, a weaver's son, preached that anyone could know Christ directly, with no need of ordained clergy, and was jailed again and again for it.

How did the founder say the nickname 'Quaker' began?

A magistrate he told to tremble at God's word coined it, by the founder's account: Justice Bennet 'was the first that called us Quakers'. The word had earlier been used for sects that shook in religious fervour.

On which English summit did the founder have his 1652 vision of 'a great people to be gathered'?

Pendle Hill. From its top he saw the sea bordering Lancashire, and within weeks he was preaching to a great crowd on Firbank Fell, winning the converts who carried the movement across England.

What name is given to the travelling preachers who spread Quakerism in the 1650s?

The Valiant Sixty, also called the Publishers of Truth, came mostly from the north of England and included women preachers, at a time when pulpits belonged to ordained men.

Which 'mother of Quakerism' hosted the early movement at Swarthmoor Hall and married the founder in 1669?

Margaret Fell. Jailed in Lancaster Castle from 1664 to 1668 for holding meetings at her house, she wrote 'Womens Speaking Justified' there, arguing that women had every right to preach.

Which preacher was tried by Parliament for blasphemy after entering Bristol in 1656 in imitation of Palm Sunday?

James Nayler. Parliament had him pilloried, branded on the forehead with a B for blasphemer and jailed; freed in 1659, he was reconciled with the movement's founder.

Under which king did the Toleration Act finally make Quaker worship legal in England?

William III. The Act of 1689, passed months after he and Mary II took the throne, let dissenters worship openly after penal laws that had put thousands of Friends in jail.

What pronoun were Quakers famous for using as an ordinary form of address?

Thee. The founder wrote that he was 'required to Thee and Thou all men and women, without any respect to rich or poor', so Friends refused everyone the more deferential 'you'.

At a traditional Quaker wedding, who signs the couple's marriage certificate as witnesses?

Every guest in the room signs, children included. With no clergy to marry them, the couple declare their promises before the whole meeting, so the whole meeting witnesses the match.

What is Quaker unprogrammed worship, practised in Britain and by a minority of Friends worldwide, mainly made up of?

Silence. Friends sit waiting with no set programme, and anyone present may rise to speak briefly if they feel led; sometimes the whole hour passes without a word.

What does a Quaker 'clearness committee' help a member to do?

Weigh a big decision such as marriage. The committee does not hand down advice: it listens and questions, on the belief that the person can find the answer within.

How is a decision reached at a Quaker business meeting?

Those present sense the way forward together: no vote is taken, and the clerk records a decision only when the whole meeting feels it has come to unity.

What is the 'plain calendar' used by traditional Quakers?

Numbering months and days instead of naming them let Friends avoid names that honoured pagan gods, so Sunday became First Day and January First Month.

In SPICES, the acronym many American Quakers use for their testimonies, what does the E stand for?

Equality. The belief put women among the movement's preachers from the 1650s and made Friends early campaigners against slavery; the other letters are simplicity, peace, integrity, community and stewardship.

What is the Quaker term for the divine presence believed to guide each person?

The inward light is why Friends saw no need for ordained clergy: if something of God is in everyone, anyone at a meeting may minister to the rest.

Early Quakers enraged judges by refusing to remove what in court?

Their hats. The founder wrote that God 'forbade me to put off my hat to any, high or low'; magistrates read it as contempt, and it helped put thousands of Friends in jail.

Which American frontiersman, born in 1734, grew up in a family of Quakers?

Daniel Boone. His family moved to the North Carolina frontier in his teens, and he later helped blaze the trail through the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky.

Which East African country, where American Friends opened a mission in 1902, has more Quakers than any other nation?

Kenya. Three Friends from Cleveland, Ohio, sailed for Mombasa in 1902 and built a mission at Kaimosi; by 2017 Kenya counted about 119,000 Quakers, far more than the United States.

Which branch of Quakerism holds services led by a pastor, with hymns and a prepared sermon?

Evangelical Friends. Their services resemble Methodist or Baptist ones, a style that arose in 19th-century America, while Conservative Friends, despite the name, keep the older unprogrammed meeting.

The 1827 Great Separation split American Quakers into Orthodox Friends and followers of which preacher?

Elias Hicks. The Long Island minister had urged a boycott of goods made by slave labour; opponents branded his followers Hicksites, though they called themselves the Liberal branch.

Quaker schoolteacher John Dalton gave the first scientific account of which condition, one he had himself?

Colour blindness. Dalton, best known for his atomic theory, guessed that the fluid in his eyes was tinted blue and asked that they be examined after his death; it proved perfectly clear.

Which ruler did Quaker missionary Mary Fisher, banished from Boston in 1656, later travel largely on foot to address?

The Ottoman sultan. Mehmed IV, camped with his army at Adrianople, heard her out through an interpreter and offered her an armed escort onward, which she declined.

Which Quaker, one of the 'Boston martyrs', was hanged in 1660 for defying a Puritan ban?

Mary Dyer. Banished on pain of death, she came back to Boston anyway; after her hanging the story reached Charles II, who ordered Massachusetts to stop executing Friends.

Charles II named Pennsylvania not for its Quaker founder, William Penn, but for which relative of his?

His father, Admiral Sir William Penn. The founder had suggested plain 'Sylvania', Latin for woodland; the king added the Penn to honour the late admiral, to whom the Crown owed money.

With which Lenape chief is William Penn said to have made a treaty of friendship under an elm at Shackamaxon?

Tamanend. He became an American folk symbol of fair dealing between peoples, and New York's Tammany Hall political machine grew out of a society named after him.

Which New England colony became a refuge for Quakers driven out of Puritan Massachusetts?

Rhode Island. Founded on freedom of conscience, which its 1663 royal charter guaranteed, the colony drew Jews as well as Quakers.

Which American icon did Quaker politician Isaac Norris order for the Pennsylvania State House in 1751?

The Liberty Bell. Norris also chose its verse, 'Proclaim liberty throughout all the land'; the London-made bell cracked on its first test ring and local metalworkers recast it in Philadelphia.

Why did the Quakers behind Britain's 1787 abolition society need Wilberforce as their voice?

Barred from Parliament by an oath Quakers would not swear, they needed an MP to carry the cause; no Quaker sat there until the 1830s, when one was at last allowed to affirm instead.

Which New Jersey tailor and Quaker preacher travelled the colonies urging Friends to free their slaves?

John Woolman. He made his journeys on foot where he could, wore undyed clothes and shunned goods tied to the slave trade, and he persuaded many Friends to free the people they held.

Which Indiana Quaker was nicknamed the 'President of the Underground Railroad'?

Levi Coffin. He and his wife Catharine turned their Indiana home into a depot that helped thousands of fugitives north; in 1847 he moved to Cincinnati to open a store selling only goods made by free labour.

Which Providence merchant helped fund the slave ship Sally in 1764, then became a Quaker abolitionist?

Moses Brown. At least 109 of the Sally's 196 captives died; he later joined the Friends and fought the trade, while his brother John became the first American tried under the 1794 law against it.

Which Quaker prison reformer, the 'Angel of Prisons', was on the £5 note from 2002 to 2017?

Elizabeth Fry. Horrified by a visit to Newgate in 1813, she pressed for women prisoners to be held apart from men and guarded by women, changes the Gaols Act of 1823 wrote into law.

Which Quaker abolitionist, excluded from the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention, helped organise Seneca Falls in 1848?

Lucretia Mott. Turned away as a delegate in London because of her sex, she met Elizabeth Cady Stanton there; eight years later the two launched the women's rights convention, planned with local Quaker women.

Which two US presidents were raised as Quakers?

Herbert Hoover and Richard Nixon. Hoover, orphaned as a boy and brought up by Quaker relatives in Oregon, first won world fame organising food relief for occupied Belgium in World War I.

Which American poet and abolitionist, author of 'Snow-Bound', was known as the 'Quaker poet'?

John Greenleaf Whittier. In 1838 a pro-slavery mob burned the Philadelphia hall that housed his abolitionist newspaper; the hymn 'Dear Lord and Father of Mankind' was later drawn from one of his poems.

Which organiser of the 1963 March on Washington was raised by a Quaker grandmother in West Chester?

Bayard Rustin. A lifelong pacifist who worked for the Fellowship of Reconciliation, he went to Montgomery in 1956 to advise Martin Luther King Jr. on Gandhi's nonviolent tactics.

What honour did the Friends Service Council and American Friends Service Committee accept for Quakers in 1947?

The Nobel Peace Prize. It honoured relief that took no sides: Friends fed the hungry in defeated Germany and in Soviet Russia after World War I and cared for children on both sides of Spain's civil war.

What did a Quaker volunteer unit do in both world wars?

Drive ambulances. The Friends Ambulance Unit became a recognised way for conscientious objectors to serve without fighting, and in the Second World War it took medical relief as far as China.

What is a 'Quaker gun'?

A painted log used to fake a cannon: Confederates lined their works at Centreville, Virginia, with them, and Union troops saw through the bluff only after the Southerners withdrew in March 1862.

Which British bank traces its origins to two Quaker goldsmith-bankers in Lombard Street from 1690?

Barclays. John Freame and Thomas Gould set up as goldsmith-bankers; the name came later, when Freame's son took his brother-in-law James Barclay into the partnership in 1736.

Which chocolate firm was founded in Birmingham in 1824 by a Quaker selling tea, coffee and drinking chocolate?

Cadbury. Sons George and Richard later moved the works to Bournville and built a model village for their workers, with gardens but, the family being temperance Quakers, no pub.

Which shoe company grew from a Quaker sheepskin business begun in Street, Somerset, in the 1820s?

Clarks. Cyrus Clark made sheepskin rugs, and his brother James had the idea of turning the offcuts into slippers, the firm's first footwear.

Which Quaker ironmaster's family at Coalbrookdale were key figures in Britain's Industrial Revolution?

Abraham Darby. At Coalbrookdale in 1709 he smelted iron with coke instead of charcoal, which made cast iron cheap to mass-produce; his grandson built the famous Iron Bridge nearby in the 1770s.

Why did the non-Quaker millers behind Quaker Oats choose the name in 1877?

It suggested honest value: both early owners claimed to have picked the name for that reason, and their man in Quaker garb became the first trademark registered for a breakfast cereal.

Quaker bodies are named for how often they gather, so what is the national body of British Quakers called?

Yearly Meeting. Local Friends do their business in monthly meetings, and Britain Yearly Meeting gathers the whole country's Quakers once a year, with no bishop or synod above it.

Which Philadelphia woman was expelled by the Quakers in 1773 for eloping with an Anglican upholsterer?

Betsy Ross. Born Elizabeth Griscom to a Quaker family, she was 'read out' of the meeting after ferrying across the Delaware to marry John Ross; legend later credited her with sewing the first American flag.

Which college near Philadelphia, founded by Quakers in 1833, is the oldest of the Quaker colleges in the area?

Haverford. Under its student-run Honor Code, students sit tests with no proctor in the room and schedule their own final exams.

Which Massachusetts island was once so Quaker that Herman Melville called its whalemen 'Quakers with a vengeance'?

Nantucket. Melville relished pacifists who were 'the most sanguinary of all sailors and whale-hunters'; in Moby-Dick the Pequod's owners, Captains Peleg and Bildad, are island Quakers.

Which merchant with Quaker roots left $7 million in 1873 to found the university and hospital that bear his name?

Johns Hopkins. He made his fortune as a Baltimore wholesaler and investor in the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, then left it for a hospital, an orphanage and a university, the biggest American bequest of its day.