The Life and Times of the Inventor John Crosfield

By Richard Crosfield

John Crosfield (1915-2012) CBE DSc MA

This is the story of the long life of an inventor, artist, entrepreneur and family historian born into a prominent Quaker family, as seen through his own eyes. His correspondence begins at the age of nine, when he is sent to a boarding school where he is bullied, undernourished, badly housed and frequently ill. But he learns to play the violin, to paint in oils by an inspiring art master and takes an early interest in engineering.

He describes his days at Cambridge, Munich under the Third Reich and WW2 when he develops new mines for the Admiralty in Portsmouth. We see him working in his London attic developing electronic applications that revolutionise colour printing and how he builds up a company to make and sell them to printers around the world. Forty years ahead of his time, he is the first artist to be inspired by images of nature magnified under an electron microscope. He called them 'Micropaintings'.

His son Richard links his life to contemporary events, beginning with John's father witnessing a Zeppelin raid over Hampstead in 1915, and his Uncle Bertie's account of shooting down two Zeppelins over England.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Legend Press
• Release date: May 26, 2017
• ISBN: 9781787194267

Book preview

memoir.

1. Friday 22 October 1915

John kept a copy of The Times from his birth date, 22 October 1915. Its front page is filled with classified advertisements, including one for BELGIAN LINGERIE HAND-MADE (War Bride Trousseaux shortest notice a speciality), and a long list of contributors to the Russian Prisoners of War Relief Fund. The Role of Honour on page 3 lists 2,810 casualties in the ranks and a smaller number of officers, all on a single day. There were the usual reports of battles raging from Rheims to Gallipoli to Riga, but the main subject at Prime Minister's Question time concerned Zeppelin raids over England, particularly London.

Six weeks earlier, John's father had witnessed the Zeppelin raid that provoked the debate in the House of Commons. He was reading in his Hampstead study when he heard 'a noise exactly like a train in the distance which gradually grew louder and louder.' He rushed outside 'to try and detect which direction it had gone in, when there was a bright flash and the first loud boom. More explosions followed in rapid succession. . . There was silence for a little while, and I was just starting to run to the Heath, when I saw straight in front of our little avenue the Zeppelin most beautifully illuminated by a searchlight beyond Parliament Hill.' The gun at Parliament Hill began to fire. The airship did not seem to move and 'It was absolutely broadside on to us, and looked a rich golden colour with the beam of a searchlight full on it.' Shells burst 'quickly, one after another, only about half as high as the Zeppelin. . . It suddenly began to come rapidly in our direction.' Just as he feared that the Zeppelin would bomb them after all, a shell burst close to it. 'Its tail immediately sunk and for an exciting minute we thought the Zeppelin was coming down. However, it no sooner got in a very sloping position, so steep that it looked as though all on board would slide down to one end then off it went into the air and disappeared into a cloud.'

This was L 13, the only one of four Zeppelins to reach London on the night of 8 September, destroying 61 Farringdon Road with a 300-pound bomb, killing 28 people and injuring 87. Most were onlookers, who came out into the streets to watch the show.

In 1915, there was no effective defence against Zeppelin raids. Artillery pieces, placed around the capital by the Admiralty, when the War Office refused to take on London's defence, were too few and their gunners poorly trained. The newly formed Royal Naval Air Service's aeroplanes only flew at night when the sky was clear and they could find the way back to their airfields. And their armament, consisting of service rifles and light machine guns, was unequal to the task. Britain's response was to try to bomb Zeppelins at their bases on the ground. In a letter to The Times, Rider Haggard proposed building airships that could be launched to take on the Zeppelins.

In a lengthy statement to the House of Commons reported in The Times of 22 October 1915, the Home Secretary, Sir J. Simon, explained the difficulties they were labouring under to protect the public from Zeppelin raids. Approaching the English coast from the North Sea, the direction Zeppelins would take, given their navigational limitations, was not even known to their crews. Many never came inland, while others dropped their bombs on 'agricultural land and perfectly innocent people in provincial towns and villages'. The use of 'church bells and steam whistles' to sound the alarm would guide the enemy to their target. As they always came at night, when the population was 'naturally under cover', any warning would encourage people into the streets, where it was most dangerous to be. Moreover, theatre and cinemagoers had 'complained bitterly and wanted their money back' when their functions were halted and no Zeppelin passed by. Of course the authorities were doing all they could. They had spotters on the coast, special constables and the police ensured that street lamps were doused and that motor-cars turned off their powerful lamps. Train schedules were changed so that airships couldn't follow them into London. The Home Secretary concluded that 'On the whole, it is better not to attempt to warn people of the suggested approach of the Zeppelins'. A delicious argument that would have appealed to John.

John Fothergill Crosfield was born at the family home, Grove Lodge, Admiral's Walk at the top of Hampstead village in London on 22 October 1915. His parents named him after his ancestor Dr. John Fothergill FRS (1712-1780), an eminent eighteenth century physician, philanthropist and Quaker with strong ties to Pennsylvania. With Benjamin Franklin and the Quaker banker David Barclay, Fothergill tried, in 1774, to prevent the Revolutionary War in America by proposing a peace agreement to the British Cabinet; the Colonial Secretary was one of his patients. John inherited a plaster of Paris bust of the worthy doctor, a handsome man wearing a wig, that he placed in a prominent position in his study or drawing room, depending on the layout of his home. However, he avoided using the fusty Fothergill name, preferring John Crosfield (as he signed his paintings), J. F. Crosfield (the name of his first company) or John F. Crosfield (as author). His colleagues at Crosfield Electronics knew him as JFC, the moniker taken from his internal correspondence in his firm in imitation of his father, who signed off as BFC at the News Chronicle.

John's Uncle Bertie (Cadbury) was the only pilot to shoot down two Zeppelins during the war, a feat dear to John's memory. Bertie joined the Navy as an Able Seaman from Trinity College, Cambridge. After six months aboard a minesweeper, a role in the war that was approved by pacifist Quakers on the grounds that minesweepers saved lives, he transferred to the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) as a Flight Sub Lieutenant, a fighting role not approved by Quakers. On 9 August 1915, he flew his first mission from the Great Yarmouth air station to attack a Zeppelin but he lost it in a fog. By 1916, the RNAS had planes armed with machine guns filled with a mixture of tracer and newly designed explosive and incendiary bullets that could ignite the hydrogen gas used to inflate Zeppelins. Meanwhile the Germans had built faster and higher flying Zeppelins. At 200 metres long and 24 metres wide, they were as big as a battleship and could carry up to ten machine guns. Lieutenant Robinson, in an action joined by Bertie in a Short Seaplane, shot down a Zeppelin for the first time over England in the War on 3 September 1916. Seven weeks later, Bertie and two other pilots, Pulling and Fane, attacked and shot down the L 21 Zeppelin over Lowestoft. Pulling was awarded the DSO and Bertie and Fane the DSC.

For a year and a half, Bertie was engaged in anti-submarine patrols, aerial combat, training pilots in night flying and was responsible for the care, maintenance and repairs of the twenty cars and about forty 'land flying machines' of the Station. One night he was forced to ditch his plane in the sea and was lucky to survive, as most pilots died of hypothermia.

In April 1918, the naval and land squadrons were merged into the RAF and Bertie was promoted to Captain and later to Major. At the end of May 1918, after three years of uninterrupted activity, Bertie wrote, 'Strenuous days these and no respite. Proper hate this mounting every single machine that can fly, up chasing, but failing to beat hostile aeroplanes seen near coast. Expensive policy this scheme of keeping pilots always in the air, they cannot stand it. Most pilots have done 40 to 50 hours flying in a fortnight; 30 hours a month is generally considered very good. The greater the strain the more numerous the crashes. I had 35 machines in action three weeks ago; I now have 15.'

On 5 August 1918, Bertie was at a charity concert, 'when a cross-eyed RAF orderly struck me with his converging vision.' He was wanted at HQ: three Zeppelins were 50 miles northeast. 'Knowing that there was only one machine available that had the necessary speed and climb - its twin [a D.H.4 biplane] having already gone - I saw that the race was to the nimblest . . .

'I roared down to the station in an ever ready Ford, seized a scarf, goggles and helmet, tore off my streamline coat, and, semiclothed, with a disreputable jacket under my arm, sprinted as hard as ever Nature would let me, and took a running jump into the pilot's seat . . .

'I released my bombs to lighten ship, but my machine did not climb as it should have done. I had as my observer Bob Leckie DSO, DSC, who has had a good many scraps with Zeppelins and has destroyed one. . . Thus I had an expert in the back seat.

'Immediately on leaving Yarmouth, I sighted 3 Zeppelin airships to north-east, distant about 40 miles, steering west at a slow speed, and I gave chase.' Bertie attacked the Zeppelin 'slightly to port so as to clear any obstruction that might be suspended from the airship.' Leckie trained his gun on the bow of the airship, three-quarters way aft, blowing a great hole in the fabric. 'A fire started which quickly ran along the entire length of the Zeppelin. The Zeppelin raised her bows as if in an effort to escape, then plunged seaward in a blazing mass. The airship was completely consumed in about threequarters of a minute.' The other two Zeppelins fled at high speed and though he closed with the second and set it on fire, Leckie's gun jammed and the fire was extinguished.

'I was unable to use my front guns as I had reached my ceiling . . . There was nothing for it but to abandon the chase. I was lost. I think that half-hour, diving through 12,000 feet of cloud in inky blackness on a machine that I had been told could not land at night, even if I made land again, was the most terrible I have ever experienced.' Bertie landed the plane and 'To my horror I discovered that my bombs had failed to release, and that I had landed in a machine which I thought I was certain to crash and catch fire with two 100-lb. bombs; also that my life-saving belt had been eaten through by acid from the accumulator.'

Bertie reflected in a letter to his father, 'Another Zeppelin has gone to destruction, sent there by a perfectly peaceful 'live-and-let-live' citizen, who has no lust for blood or fearful war spirit in his veins. It all happened very quickly and very terribly.'

They had shot down the L 70 and killed Peter Strasser, the chief commander of Germany's Imperial Navy Zeppelins. Bertie and Leckie were recommended for the Victoria Cross and both were awarded the DFC. A wounded soldier from Yarmouth told Bertie's father that Bertie was carried through the streets of the port after he had downed the L 70. Zeppelin raids over Britain caused the death of 556 people and injured over a thousand.

At the War's end, Bertie married the daughter of a clergyman and left the Society of Friends. He was told that there was no place for him at the Cadbury family business, but he found a job at Frys, another chocolate manufacturer, which was associated with Cadbury's. From there he worked himself to the Cadbury Board. He remained in close touch with the RAF, which awarded him the honorary title of Air Commodore, to the end of his life. In 1957 he was knighted by the Queen. John remembered Bertie as 'a tall, very good natured man, and a warm and friendly uncle.'

Bertram and Eleanor on their wedding day 1910

John was the third child born to Bertram (1882-1951) and Eleanor Crosfield (1885-1959). Bertram was joint Managing Director of the Daily News, a left-wing newspaper founded by Charles Dickens, which Bertram's father-in-law, George Cadbury (1839-1922), the Chairman of Cadbury Brothers, had bought in 1902 to disseminate his progressive social views. The family of five with Nurse lived at Grove Lodge, a six-bedroom Georgian house with a walled garden, in a little Hampstead street dominated by huge plane trees and within a few minutes' walk of Whitestone Pond and Hampstead Heath.

Bertram was taken ill with tuberculosis in the autumn of 1916 and he spent the best part of a year in a sanatorium at Mundesley, a coastal village in Norfolk. The rest of the family moved to the Manor House in Northfield, Birmingham to be with Eleanor's large family; she was the fifth of eleven children and the youngest was then only ten. Eleanor wrote to Bertram, 'My beloved', that John's elder brother George complained, I do wish children didn't have nurses and then they would see more of their mothers. I don't see nearly enough of you, you always go out when I want you.

The family was back in Hampstead in time to witness the 7 July 1917 daylight air raid, this time by 22 Gotha biplane bombers, over London. They were being taken for a walk on Hampstead Heath opposite Whitestone pond when they saw approaching what they took to be a flock of birds. John's older sister Margot (Margaret) recalled that a soldier on crutches told them they were aeroplanes. 'The huge anti-aircraft gun in the enclosure of the little reservoir just behind us began to fire shells over our heads making a terrific noise. . . Johnny was already in the pram, Nanny popped me into the other end of it, Dodie [George] grasped the handle and we dashed for home. As we turned into the Grove, Mummy rushed towards us, with neither hat nor coat on, and helped us bustle into the house. I was very frightened."

57 people died and 193 were injured in this bombing raid and, for the first time, the government evacuated children from London. Although air raids over Britain are reckoned to have cost Germany five times the damage they inflicted in lost aircraft, Britain was forced to maintain 10,000 men, with hundreds of searchlights and anti-aircraft guns, and twenty squadrons of fighter planes to defend the country. To avoid further air raids, the family, less Bertram who was still in the sanatorium, went to live in a house at the Wych Cutting in the Malvern Hills, close to the Cadbury family holiday home at Winds Point.

Bertram returned from Norfolk in 1917 and wrote to his mother, 'to let you know what a very successful home-coming this has been. . . I am sure the change from Mundesley will do me further good, and already temperatures and every symptom have still further improved on Mundesley. . . John proves a most amusing surprise. He is much more lively than I expected him to be and chirps out his funny little words all the time like a bird. He seemed to spot me as the real and original Daddy at once which was gratifying. The other two are just as I hoped to find them, just the same but a little older.'

Bertram sold Grove Lodge to the playwright, novelist and future Nobel Prize winner John Galsworthy for £2,000 in 1918. Bertram had paid £350 for it eight years earlier. Then he had thought 'Grove Cottage [Lodge] is very nice but very

tiny and awfully expensive for its size.' The growing family needed a larger house, but even more pressing was the need to escape the air-raids over London and the thundering boom of the anti-aircraft gun just 100 yards from the house. Galsworthy did not occupy Grove Lodge until after the war.

John at Westridge 1919

2. Childhood, the Family and the Quakers

In October 1917, the Crosfield family moved first to Malvern and then to a new house they called Westridge in Beaconsfield where Ned (Edward) was born on 21 September, seven weeks before the end of the War. John would grow up to be the shortest of the four boys, reaching 5' 7", which he attributed to the poor nutrition he had received in the war years. He described Westridge, their new home, as a 'newly built house with more room than Grove Lodge, on the side of a hill with a fine view of distant fields and beech woods. The garden covered three or four acres of hillside, which our parents made very attractive with terraces, a lily pond, rose beds, herbaceous borders, a rock garden and pool, and a hard tennis court.' The lily pond had no lilies because they used it for bathing.

John in the lily pond, where he nearly drowned, with Margot,

while Mick watches from the edge 1921

Margot recalled, 'One summer evening I was surprised to see Mum dash towards the lily pond in her smart evening gown and jump straight in. Then I looked and saw Johnny floating in it head down with his blue overall like a balloon all round him inflated with air. Mum pulled him out quickly and all was well.' John wrote, 'Although I was only five at the time I can remember only too well the trapped air keeping my head firmly under water. I was pretty desperate for breath . . .' Mick (Michael) and Ray (Rachel) were born at Westridge in 1920 and 1924 respectively.

John loved cars and 'Father had a lovely old pre-war car, a Léon Bollée [built at Le Mans]. He had designed the body himself, so that instead of having high and curvaceous sides as was the style then, it was comparatively streamlined and modern. The headlights worked from acetylene gas and had to be lit with matches. The gear lever was very stiff to push through the gate, and when Mother was driving she had to bash it through with her knee, which was usually covered with bruises after a drive.' After 1922, his mother ran a bullnosed Morris, cost £270, paid for by her father.

John went to a Montessori kindergarten held in the drawing room at nearby Witheridge, then owned by his Uncle Henry Cadbury, Bertram's friend and joint managing director of the Daily News. The kindergarten, run by a 'kindly Mrs. Potter', suited him well - 'We could do whatever we liked' - and he learnt to read at the age of four. He wrote, 'My greatest admiration was for Arthur Guy who was so strong for his age that he succeeded in knocking down the headmistress', the kindly Mrs. Potter.

From the age of five John, along with the rest of his family, attended Jordans' Quaker Meeting every Sunday. The meeting hall is a small, redbrick building set in its own land near the village of Jordans, just three miles by road from Beaconsfield. The Quakers built the meeting house here in 1688, the year following the Declaration of Indulgence, which allowed Englishmen to worship the religion of their choice at home or in chapels. It is still standing, surrounded on two sides by a large lawn, one part of it dedicated to a cemetery of identical headstones which today include those of William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, and John's parents. Inside the Meeting house, seven long benches are arranged in a square to face one another, while at the back there is a raised seating area normally reserved for the meeting's elders. The room, in Quaker style, is plain wood and devoid of all decoration.

John remembers, 'Our family sat on the left hand front bench at meeting while Uncle Henry [Cadbury], Aunt Lucy and family sat on the right hand one. Meeting lasted from eleven to twelve, but after an interminably long half hour children less than 12 years old walked out and up the hill to Jordans' Hostel for Sunday school. When we were small Mother often took this class and she was a very popular teacher. She was good at telling Bible stories and played the piano well while we sang hymns.'

Bertram and then Eleanor were Clerks of the meeting. John notes that neither of his parents ever spoke at Meeting. 'Perhaps this was due to shyness, or possibly in Father's case he was an agnostic at heart.' As both his parents were accomplished public speakers, this is strange, and might be one of those things that one misremembers in later life. Bertram was a keen golfer and, in later years, John recalls tempting him away from Sunday Meeting to play a round at Beaconsfield Golf Club.

'On Sunday evenings we would often gather around the piano while Mother played and we all sang hymns together.' Card playing was prohibited on Sundays until contract bridge, popularised by Ely Cuthbertson, reached Beaconsfield and captivated the family. In later years the family played tennis. All were keen players, though John, to his chagrin, was often left out as his parents and elder siblings, George and Margot, usually made up a foursome.

Quakerism played an important role in the family and much of their social life was centred on other Quakers. John's direct ancestors Thomas and Agnes Crosfield joined the Society of Friends after hearing George Fox speak in Witherslack, Cumbria in June 1652. On his mother's side, John's direct ancestor John Cadbury of Exeter had joined the Friends by 1725, when he married Hannah Tapper, daughter of Richard, who had been a Quaker for forty years or more. As Quakers, until well into the 19th century, who married outside the movement lost their membership, John's family were all brought up as Quakers.

Prior to the creation of the United Nations and its agencies, prior to the establishment of the Welfare State by the post 1945 Labour government and prior to the foundation of major NGOs such as Amnesty International, Oxfam, Save the Children, Survival International, Greenpeace and many more, the Quakers were a proud and singular voice for many of the social issues that were to dominate political thinking post 1945.

The Religious Society of Friends, by casting aside churches, the ecclesiastical profession, mass, music and singing, baptism (not believing in original sin) and confirmation, church candles, icons and all religious art, had reduced Christianity to its barest bones. William Penn wrote 'But yet the less form in religion the better, since God is a spirit; for the more mental our worship, the more adequate to the nature of God; the more silent, the more suitable to the language of a spirit.'

For the newcomer, the role of silence in Meeting, which for the Quakers represents a time of contemplation, and the lack of leadership, enabling the simplest members to speak as they are inspired, can be unnerving. You can sit waiting to be moved by the spirit of the Meeting in a drab room and, as anyone can be moved to speak, the result can surprise you. At one Church Street Meeting in Reading, where John went to school, he recalled one such event. It was a heavy, humid day and torpor hung over the congregation. A large man slept across the aisle from John. He suddenly woke up, pulled out a handkerchief to blow his nose, and a ham sandwich he was carrying in his pocket fell to the floor. Oh my God! said the man in a loud voice, and the meeting answered Amen. Sometimes no one speaks at all, the silence continues until an elder, or some other friendly soul, relieves it with a reading from the Common Book of Prayer, or simply shakes hands with their neighbour, thus calling an end to the Meeting. But these are just the externals.

Founded in the aftermath of the English Civil War, Quakers were and are pacifists. Moreover, the Quakers are social progressives. Observing the horrors of slavery, a handful of Quakers, led by George Fox, started the English abolitionist movement in the late 1600s, although this did not stop Quakers in the American South from owning slaves. However, following the 1758 Philadelphia Yearly Meeting's decision to appoint a commission to visit Friends and induce them to free their slaves, slave-owning Quakers were gradually enticed to free them. By 1800, no Friend owned a slave and 18,000 had sold their homes and farms in Georgia and South Carolina to make the long trek to Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, and on to California and the Northwest Territory.

As early as 1751, by which time gin had became so cheap that drunkenness and alcoholism were serious social concerns in Britain, the Quakers urged moderation in the consumption of alcohol. Some supported the Temperance Movement in the early 1800s and in 1850 the Society of Friends formally endorsed the Friends Temperance Union. One of the founders was Bertram's great-grandfather, James Backhouse, and Bertram's mother was on the National Executive Committee of the Women's Temperance Movement. Under her influence, Bertram took the pledge of total abstinence and John writes he 'only took alcohol once. That was when he visited Finland with an important press delegation during their prohibition. The Finnish government knew that English newspapermen liked whiskey, so they especially imported whiskey and soda disguised in ginger beer bottles. He drank one and thought it tasted very queer.' It was to offer people something tasty but non-alcoholic to drink that the Quakers (Frys, Rowntrees and Cadburys) went into making cocoa.

Albert    and    Gulielma Crosfield

Albert Crosfield (1852-1931), John's grandfather, dedicated much of his life to the Society of Friends. At nineteen he was helping to prepare the Indian mission, and he evangelised in the East End of London while working at his short-lived candle business in the City. Soon he abandoned business to dedicate his time to the Quaker movement. Gulielma, his wife, explains, 'Commerce did not appeal to Albert, and fortunately our joint incomes did not make the effort necessary. No outward cares or responsibilities henceforth prevented him from following any path for the help of others, or on entering any field of religious service to which he believed his Master called him.'

Albert's father Joseph had founded Harrisons & Crosfield, which grew into one of the largest tea and coffee traders, with its own plantations, in the world. Gulielma's father, Marriage Wallis, had managed a successful grocery business, becoming Mayor of Brighton and Chairman of the YMCA.

Albert held senior roles in the Society of Friends including Clerk of the Meeting for Sufferings, which decides the priorities and sets the direction of the Yearly Meeting, and Clerk of the Yearly Meeting, the senior position in the Society. For fifty years he was a member of the Friends Foreign Mission Association (FFMA), nine of them as its Chairman. The first Quaker missionaries arrived in Madagascar in 1877, in India in 1878 and China in 1886. They opened medical dispensaries, leper asylums, orphanages and schools that included 'earnest religious work' to quote the 1891 session where Albert was present; the missions to Syria, Armenia and South Africa all presented reports.

Many in the Quaker movement objected to this missionary activity and the FFMA was run independently of the rest of the movement. On behalf of the FFMA Albert travelled through India in 1886 and again in 1909, where he realised that Indian Quakers should run their own affairs if they were to prosper. Today there are just 800 Friends in India.

In 1903 Albert took the overland route to China, via Berlin, Warsaw, Moscow, Chelyabinsk and Irkutsk, visiting Quaker and other Christian missions. He returned in 1904 via Shanghai, Hong Kong, Saigon, Singapore, Colombo, Aden, Port Said and Marseilles. He travelled with two companions, Dr. Wilson and Marshall Fox. Dr. Wilson, Secretary of the FFMA, had been a Quaker missionary in Madagascar for twenty years, where he had founded a hospital. His daughter was married to William Cadbury, a cousin of John's mother Eleanor. The overseas missions required regular visits to check on their needs and activities, to discipline those who had strayed or disobeyed the FFMA and to decide where to send new missionaries and where to house them. However, it was disturbing news from the China Mission that led the FFMA to send such senior members as Dr. Wilson and Albert to China.

A dispute had broken out between the missionaries, one group opposing the FFMA's instructions to concentrate on evangelism and the publication of the West China Missionary News at the cost of their lay activities. Seven missionaries sent a cable to London announcing their joint resignation, then recanted. A second dispute had erupted between the two ladies responsible for running the Chungking missionary school, leading one to inform London that the other had lied. A third concern was that two missionaries, who had just married, had been expressly told to delay their marriage until they had both mastered Mandarin. They all wrote to the FFMA . . . As one prominent missionary, Isabella Bird, wrote, 'The greatest trial of missionaries - is missionaries.' While the missionaries could cable London, this was restricted to the briefest messages as the expense was great. Letters took about seven weeks to arrive via the new postal service offered by the Russian Post Office, with all envelopes required to be marked Via Siberia. 11 February 1904 the service was suspended. The FFMA was sorely out of touch with their missionaries in China.

Arriving at Tientsin, three years after the Boxer Rebellion, Albert wrote to his wife Gulielma, 'Large areas were plundered by the Europeans and the Japanese. Native houses swept away by the acre that concessions might be grabbed by the strong. France suddenly drove out the Chinese and levelled their dwellings without pity . . . even Austria had a concession. So here we have England, France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Japan and Russia in possession of territory. Small wonder if China loves us but little. Small wonder that the Missionaries have had an uphill task these last years. . . The American Board of Mission lost about 700 converts in the district, most of who were killed . . . Several of the mission houses have shells embedded in them. Their preaching chapels in the native city were levelled to the ground. We saw the site of one, not one brick left upon another.'

Competition with the Catholic Church was so intense that 'If Beauchamp [Montague Beauchamp, the first Protestant missionary in Anping, Szechwan] should be murdered some day it will probably done by the Chinese, but by the order of the Priests, just as those 2 French protestant missionaries were murdered by Jesuit orders in Madagascar.' Beauchamp returned unharmed to England in 1911.

On a Yangtze steamer Albert noted, 'Below us are the Chinese crowded together in an atmosphere reeking with opium and tobacco. We took a walk around their quarters and watched two men indulging in the drug. Each smoke lasts a very few seconds. One man said he smoked 4 or 5 grams in a day.' This was particularly offensive to Albert, for his Quarterly Meeting had sent a petition to Westminster 'to instruct the Indian government no longer to grant licenses for the cultivation of the poppy.'

The three English Quakers carried on up the river, the boat bearing a pennant with the Chinese inscription literally translated as Great England Friendship Society - Gospel Doctrine Hall - Pastor Tseo, Tseo being the Chinese rendering of Crosfield. Three months after his departure from England, Albert reached Wan Hsien in Szechuan, and the China Inland Mission consisting of Mr. and Mrs Taylor and two children. A week later he was in Chungking and the Meeting House, where he witnessed a wedding instructed by R. J. Davidson in Chinese, a mix of Quaker do-it-yourself and a Chinese tea ceremony, followed by a Chinese feast. The three men from London spent six weeks with all the disputant missionaries.

Albert concluded, 'I think we may regard the affair of the reorganisation as ended. It has been a hard time with one or two, involving a good deal of mental suffering, but they have humbled themselves and made public acknowledgement of their past folly. . . As Fox told them collectively, no one will ever know all that we have gone through on their behalf. I think he and Dr. Wilson regard it as the hardest experience of their lives. It is not so with me. Our agreement amongst ourselves has been the greatest possible comfort. They are splendid companions to work with.'

Of course, the suppression of all forms of religion under Chairman Mao ended missionary activity in China and today there are just 95 members of the Society of Friends in the entire country. Missionary activity was most successful in Africa and Latin America. So Kenya, with 133,000 members, is the biggest community of Quakers in the world, while there are relatively large congregations in Bolivia, Guatemala and Burundi.

During the First World War, Albert visited conscientious objectors in prison, and both he and Gulielma were members of the War Victims' Relief Committee of the Society of Friends. This Committee opened hospitals and refugee camps near the Western Front; it rebuilt houses for people returning to areas that had been occupied by the Germans, and provided tools for farmers in France and Belgium.

John remembers that 'Every morning before breakfast he [Albert] would read from the Bible and then we would all kneel down while he said a prayer.' John judged his Grandpapa as 'quiet, thoughtful and affectionate.' He took John on country walks, identifying plants and their habitat, lessons which John recalled with pleasure for the rest of his life.

John's grandmother, Gulielma Crosfield (1851-1945), was as active in the Religious Society of Friends as her husband was. When she was seventeen she described in a letter to her brother how, when she turned sixteen, 'I was then spiritually about two months old . . . I'm quite willing to go wherever my Master calls me.' In 1894, she published The Golden Clew: Or, why We Children are Friends, stories to help children understand the meaning of Quakerism. In the 1890s, moved by reports of the massacre of Armenians in Turkey, she became Honorary Secretary of the Friends Armenian Relief Committee, a Quaker organization established in 1881 to provide aid to Armenians who had suffered from pogroms in Turkey. The 1894-97 massacre of perhaps 200,000 Armenians was tolerated by Sultan and Caliph Abdul Hamid II, who believed, at a time when the Christian Balkans were asserting their independence and the Armenians were demanding autonomy, that the woes of the Ottoman Empire stemmed from 'the endless persecutions and hostilities of the Christian world'.

However, what really engaged Gulielma was the question of women's rights. In 1911, she published a tract, Friends and the Women's Movement, where she highlighted the poor schooling and job opportunities for girls compared to boys. John chose this example for his Crosfield book from her tract: 'On going over a factory I saw a man working a special knitting machine and earning £3 a week. He was waited on by a woman who earned 10s. a week, and I asked the manager if the woman could not work on the knitting machine as well as the man? He said, Every bit as well but the Trade Union rules will not allow it [John's emphasis - he had unpleasant experiences with the unions at his own business in the 1970s]'.

Her paper coincided with the founding of the Friends League for Women's Suffrage, Gulielma becoming its first President. The objective of the Friends League was 'to secure for women the Parliamentary Franchise on the same terms as it is or may be granted to men.' It immediately affiliated to the Federated Council of Suffrage Societies. By 1913, the League had 800 members. Friends were careful to reject the violence used by some suffragettes, Gulielma writing, 'If women have anything to give our generation, it is that we claim a higher plane of service than of force.' Gulielma lived to see women obtain a limited franchise in 1918 and the equal franchise with men in