This coming six weeks will provide a number of opportunities for Friends to learn about and contribute to our centenary celebrations.

Press Release:

On the day when World Military Spending for 2012* will be announced, thirty nine organisations will come together to promote the Global Day of Action on Military Spending (15 April 2013). These include Pax Christi, Fellowship of Reconciliation, Quaker Peace & Social Witness, Christian Ecology Link, Student Christian Movement, Northern Friends Peace Board , War on Want and Campaign Against Arms Trade.

This first meeting of the Board in its second century – at Sheffield Central Quaker Meeting House, on Saturday 9th March – was attended by Representatives from as far apart as North of Scotland, Nottingham, West Cumbria and North Wales. We were joined and hosted by Sheffield Friends throughout the day, providing plentiful supplies of tea, coffee and cake and a Friendly welcome.

To mark 100 years of Quaker peace witness in the North , NFPB is organising a walk of witness from 29th June to 5th July. The walk begins at Richmond Castle, where the ‘Richmond Sixteen’ (conscientious objectors in WW1) were imprisoned and ends at Menwith Hill, the US Air Force electronic communications base on the North Yorks moors. It links two significant sites of peace witness which span the Northern Friends Peace Board’s first hundred years.

Northern Friends Peace Board marked the centenary of its formation with a party at the newly refurbished Manchester Meeting House. Set up after a peace conference of Quakers in the North in January 1913, the Board has undertaken a variety of work with and for Northern Friends, supported by funding and representatives from throughout the North of Britain.

In the week that the Government “has revealed how it intends to spend £160bn over the next decade on new weapons systems, including a fleet of Trident nuclear missile submarines, two large aircraft carriers, helicopters, armoured vehicles, and unmanned drones.” [Guardian report ], Northern Friends Peace Board signed up to a Call to Action on military spending. This is in the build-up to the Global Day of Action on Military Spending on 15th April.

Northern Friends Peace Board was set up after a Peace Conference of Quakers in the North. The first of a number of activities and events will take place this Saturday at Manchester Meeting House, when past and present NFPB members, employees and supporters will gather to celebrate the longevity of the organisation and its activities. They will also hear about the resources that are being prepared for Quakers and others, with a new booklet and display being launched on the day.

The first of the events arranged to mark the centenary of Northern Friends Peace Board will be a special but informal afternoon at Manchester Meeting House, on 2nd February, from 2.00 to 5.00pm.

NFPB members met for their last meeting of the year (and of the first 99 years of this Quaker committee) in Liverpool at the end of November. Members from all parts of the North shared in worship, in telling one another about current peace concerns and activities in their area and reflecting in more depth on a number of issues.

The first of our centenary activities comes ahead of the year of the centenary itself. We have had calendars printed for 2013, using posters from different parts of NFPB’s long history. With one calendar for each month, this is just a small selection of the several hundred stored in our archives. It was difficult to choose which would be most appropriate. Some of the posters – including those not in the calendar – feature in the special Quaker Week issue of The Friend.