Henry Hodgkin, The Road to Pendle Hill

by John Ormerod Greenwood

Overview

This pamphlet embodies, in revised form, a lecture given to the Friends Historical Association and the Friends Social Union at their joint Spring Meeting at Alloway's Creek Meetinghouse, South Jersey, on Sunday May 20, 1979. Its motive was to look at the personality of the first Director of Pendle Hill, in connection with the celebration of its 50th Anniversary in 1980. Part of the research derives from my book, Quaker Encounters: Volume 3, "Whispers of Truth"; for this book deals with the international work of the Society of Friends in which Henry T. Hodgkin was a leading figure. This material has been supplemented from the archives of Pendle Hill, through the good offices of Eleanore Mather, and from the official biography, Henry T. Hodgkin: A Memoir, by H. G. Wood, published in 1937.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940156998609
Publisher:	Pendle Hill Publications
Publication date:	07/16/2016
Series:	Pendle Hill Pamphlets , #229
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	207 KB

About the Author

John Ormerod Greenwood’s unusual family name came to him through a much loved grandfather who was a minister in the United Methodist Church. Ormerod, as he was generally known, was born in London in 1907, and began to attend Friends’ Meetings after World War I because of their peace witness. He joined the Society of Friends while a student at Cambridge, and served it as Elder, Overseer, Preparative Meeting Clerk, and Chairman of Central Committees. He has been President of the Friends Historical Society (of Great Britain) and of the Quaker Fellowship of the Arts. In 1978 he gave the Swarthmore Lecture at London Yearly Meeting on the subject of religion and the arts under the title of “Signs of Life,” and the same year completed his Quaker Encounters, a three volume study of Friends’ international work.

His main interests involved the theatre. He was the second President of the Cambridge University Mummers (founded by Alistair Cooke), and subsequently became organizing secretary of the Group Theatre of London which presented the plays of Eliot, Auden, Isherwood, Louis MacNeice and others with music by Benjamin Britten and settings by John Piper. For six years radio producer for the BBC, he later taught for eighteen years at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. His play, The Cave and the Garden, appeared at the Players’ Theatre, London, and he wrote the libretto of an opera, The Visitors, with music by John Gardner, which was presented both at the Aldeburgh Festival and at Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London.