Elizabeth Cadbury, 1858-1951 (review)

48Bulletin of Friends Historical Association ism. Their lives and thoughts have left an indelible imprint on the Society of Friends. We remember Arnold Rowntree as a great Quaker, a great Liberal, a public man of influence; Sheriff of York, Member of Parliament in the Liberal interest, part owner of a great chain of newspapers, and a pioneer in the new fraternal relations of employer and employed, But his early years were founded on this practical, down-to-earth base, and it has a valuable lesson for our sometimes irrational modern idealism. I would like to give this vigorous and lively book to every young man of school-leaving age, before the pattern of his life is set. There is another practical lesson too. How is an energetic young man or woman, giving his or her daily best to an exacting job, to have energy left over to use spare time in evening committees, weekend visits to meetings , civic responsibilities, and the like ? John Wilhelm Rowntree, himself an ardent young Quaker, saw the potential of another in his cousin Arnold, and foresaw the coming overwork and tug of conflicting tasks; so he persuaded his father to provide Arnold with a man to act as his private secretary, and so double his capacity for Quaker and public service, without risk of breakdown. This might be one answer to the rising danger of professionalized Quakerism. And now, thanks to Elfrida Foulds for her easy, lively style, the skill with which she has gathered the threads of this various life together, and the warmth with which she has made her readers feel Arnold Rowntree as a living man. Westtown, PennsylvaniaJanet Whitney Elizabeth Cadbury, 1858-1951. By Richenda Scott. London: George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd. 1955. 200 pages. $2.50. Richenda Scott, despite her high qualifications for the task, must have had great difficulty in packing so much length and breadth of history, private and public, into a book of less than two hundred pages. Elizabeth Cadbury's vivid and triumphant life fell into three periods, each of thirty years or so. At the age of thirty she married George Cadbury of cocoa and Bournville Garden Village fame. Twenty years his junior, she took over the responsibility for the five children of his first marriage, and bore him five further children within the first five years ! Throughout their happy life together she not only shared intelligently many of his large-hearted and pioneering ventures in and around the cocoa works at Bournville, but engaged also in a host of social and philanthropic activities of her own, which were continued with unabated zeal and increasing scope after her husband's death in 1923, almost to the end of her long life, despite some twenty years of near blindness. The Quaker historical interest of the book lies especially, perhaps, Book Reviews49 in the following facts. Elizabeth Cadbury was directly connected with, and deeply concerned for, the creation of Woodbrooke in the very house that was the Cadbury home during the early years of her marriage. Again, she shared in the development of the Bournville Village Trust, of which she became Chairman at George Cadbury's death, and in the establishment of the Bournville Friends Meeting, which, because of its wider community responsibilities, included for many years in a mainly unprogrammed service the regular reading of scripture and the singing of hymns. Elizabeth (Taylor) Cadbury was an outstanding and somewhat unusual example of a Friend with a long Quaker family tradition behind her, who combined an exuberant evangelical faith and zeal (for example, in her ardent cooperation with George Cadbury in the Adult School Movement) together with an open-mindedness that carried her into the modernist Quaker movement as exemplified by the Summer School Movement and, of course, Woodbrooke itself. There were two other attitudes characteristic of Elizabeth Cadbury which reflected the depth of her Quaker rootage, despite the strength of her civic sense and the intensity of her outward activities. Though finding it hard to understand those who felt unable to render any kind of service to the state in wartime, she nevertheless incurred considerable unpopularity by defending the rights of conscientious objection in the non-Quaker committees...