Patrick Comerford
York was teeming with tourists when we stayed there during the weekend. Tourism is a year-round part of York’s economy, and tourists are attracted by York’s Roman, Viking and Saxon heritage, York Minster and city centre locations, such as the Shambles.
York also has a strong Quaker tradition, embodied in families such as the Tuke and Rowntree families, the pioneering mental health work at the Retreat, and Bootham School and the Mount, two of the seven Quaker-run schools in England. There is a Quaker meetings at Friargate in York and five other meetings in the York area and Quaker burial grounds at the Retreat and in Bishophill.
The Quaker Burial Ground in Bishophill opened in 1667 and closed for burials in 1854. The headstones include those of the American Quaker John Woolman (1720-1772), a prominent spiritual writer and an early abolitionist, the American lawyer and grammarian Lindley Murray (1745-1826), the writer William Alexander (1768-1841), and several members of the Tuke family.
Bootham is the name of a street in York runs along a ridge of slightly higher ground east of the River Ouse. It follows the line of Dere Street, the main Roman road from Eboracum to Cataractonium (Cattherick), and many Roman remains have been found in the area.
York City Council describes the street as ‘the finest of approaches to the city bars’. The tree-lined street is lined with expensive houses, hotels and prestigious offices.
The name Bootham probably comes from the Norse for ‘the place of the booths,’ referring to the poor huts in the area. From the Roman period, an alternative route from the bridge over the Ouse ran a short distance west of Bootham, and in the Saxon and Viking Jorvik periods, that was the main road to the north-west. However, after Saint Mary’s Abbey was built in this area, that road was blocked, and Bootham became the principal route. Part of the abbey walls runs immediately west of the south part of Bootham.
Bootham School is a private Quaker boarding school on Bootham. It caters for boys and girls up to age of 19 and has about 600 pupils.
The school was founded by the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) and opened on 6 January 1823 in Lawrence Street, York, and the first headmaster was William Simpson (1823-1828). The school is now on Bootham, near York Minster. It is based in 51 Bootham, a house first built in 1804 for Sir Richard Vanden Bempde Johnstone, but it has since expanded into several neighbouring buildings.
The school’s motto Membra Sumus Corporis Magni (‘We are members of a greater body’) quotes Seneca the Younger (Epistle 95, 52).
Notable former pupils include the 19th-century radical politician John Bright, the mathematician Lewis Fry Richardson, the physicist Silvanus P Thompson, the historian AJP Taylor, the actor-manager Brian Rix, the social reformer Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree (1871-1954), the Nobel Peace Prize winner Philip Noel-Baker, and the chief executive of Marks & Spencer Stuart Rose.
A house immediately across the street from Bootham School, 51 Bootham, was the birthplace of the poet WH (Wystan Hugh) Auden (1907-1973), who was born in York on 21 February 1907. The Auden family moved to Solihull a year later, and the future poet was educated in Surrey, Norfolk and at Oxford.
A few doors away, at the corner of Bootham and Saint Mary’s, is the birthplace of the social reformer Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree (1871-1954), whose pioneering work in social science and management influenced the founders of the welfare state.
Rowntree is known for his three studies of poverty in York (1899, 1935, 1951). He visited every working class household in York, and his methodology inspired many subsequent researches in British empirical sociology. By strictly defining the concept of poverty in his studies, he revealed how the causes of poverty in York were more structural than moral, such as low wages, challenging the traditional view that the poor were responsible for their own plight.
Seebohm Rowntree was a son of the Quaker industrialist Joseph Rowntree and his wife Antoinette Seebohm. From Bootham School, he went on to study chemistry at Owen’s College, Manchester, before joining the family firm in 1889.
He was an advocate of family allowances and a national minimum wage, and argued that business owners should adopt more democratic practices like those at his own factory rather than more autocratic leadership styles. He was a close of David Lloyd George and Rowntree’s influence can be seen in the Liberal reforms passed when the Liberals were in government.
Rowntree’s Quaker upbringing influenced his business practices; he believed that the existence of companies that paid low wages was bad for the ‘nation’s economy and humanity’. His firm broke new ground in terms of industrial relations, welfare and management. His reforms in the working condition of the workers included introducing an eight-hour day in 1896, a pension scheme in 1906, a five-day working week and work councils in 1919, a psychology department in 1922, and a profit-sharing plan in 1923.
The Mount School is a private Quaker day and boarding school for girls up to 18. The school was founded as Trinity Lane (or York) Quaker Girls’ School in 1785 by the Yorkshire Quaker, Esther Tuke, wife of William Tuke.
Their grandson Samuel Tuke, along with William Alexander, Thomas Backhouse and Joseph Rowntree, moved the school in 1831 to Castlegate House. The school to moved to its current location at the Mount, a large, purpose-built house, in 1856, and remains on the same site on Dalton Terrace, a three-to-five-minute walk from where we were staying.
Notable alumnae of the Mount include the writers Dame AS Byatt, Dame Margaret Drabble and Frances Wilson, and the actors Dame Judi Dench and Mary Ure.
The school’s ethos continues to reflect the key Quaker values of simplicity, truth, equality, peace, social justice and sustainability.
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