EDITOR'S FOREWORD
The weather is a persistent
preoccupation with us. So many conversation start with a
comment about the current state of the elements: 'Gusty,
today.' 'Yes it is a bit blowy.' There is just enough there
to break the ice (no pun intended.) Each participant has
acknowledged the presence of the other, as a matter of
politeness, and signalled his /her non - controversial
intention by readily agreeing that the day is indeed rather
breezy. The conversation may now continue harmoniously,
neither wishing to break the convention that one does not
dispute the other's meteorological observations when offered
as an opening gambit.
Our reaction to the experience of
weather is so important to us. Apart from its physical
effects, making us shiver or perspire, scorching us or
soaking us, it has emotional consequences for us, lifting
our hearts on bright blue-sky days, casting us down when the
clouds are lowering and the rain stings our faces. People
and the weather have much in common; we are both subject to
moods, indeed we sometimes associate our own mood with how
the weather is behaving. Writers employ a device they call
'pathetic fallacy' which allows them to suggest the changing
mood of a story by changing the mood of the weather. Stormy
weather is a favourite device for raising tension,
fermenting emotion, suggesting trouble and strife to come.
Shakespeare regularly whips up a tempest when dark deeds are
in hand. Dracula and Dr. Frankenstein's monster are never
seen out and about in fair weather. Tam 0'Shanter encounters
the Devil during an Apocalyptic bout of storminess, and even
the Wizard of Oz owes (tricky vowel modulation, there) his
very existence to a hurricane in the Bible-belt. By tympani
and sounding brass, base drum and shrieking strings,
composers hurl thunder and lightning at us, crush us beneath
toppling masts or slam us against adamantine cliffs. There is
no surviving the uproar of a symphonic storm at sea, nor the
titanic passions of the composer who unleashed it.
We cannot
disassociate ourselves from the weather because it is our
immediate and enduring contact with our universe. The
elements compel us day by day, hour by hour, as they shift
and change, to acknowledge the awesome power of the
universe. Night used to have a similar effect, but our urban
life style has masked the stars and veiled the moon so that
we are now blind to the endless vistas of galaxies and
constellations, crowding the night sky. The weather is in us
and around us, feeling, thought, experience, the tangible
reminder that we too are of that same creation that makes
the sun to shine, the rain to fall and the wind to move the
clouds, stir the forest or send the sea foam dancing across
the sand.
There's a red sky tonight. I expect tomorrow will
be calm and fair.
Wm. S. Stephen. (Editor)
Tel: 01224 317450
E-mail: william134@btinternet.com or editor@suf.org.uk
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GRAND QUIZ NIGHT.
In order to raise funds for
Church projects we shall have a GRAND QUIZ NIGHT on Friday
7th March at 7.30pm. - 10.00pm. in the Transport Club,
Canal Road, Mounthooly.
Teams of four will compete. People
may decide to make up a team before hand or join a team on
the evening. This is a FUN event. There will be several
rounds of questions for the teams to answer. No prior
experience is required. No enormous fund of general
knowledge is necessary. A special Fairtrade Quiz within the
Quiz will also be available. There will be a Raffle. Each
member of the Winning Team will receive a prize.
During the
evening a Stovies supper will be served. Tea/coffee and
biscuits will be available as will the pay-as-you-go bar.
Tickets, £5.00 per person, are now available from the Church
Secretary. This event is run in association with Fairtrade
Fortnight.
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ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING
Our A.G.M. takes place on
Sunday 16th March, 10.30am - 12.00pm. The Nomination
Meeting to receive names of candidates for the vacant places
on the Committee will take place immediately after the
Service on Sunday 2nd March. A list for the names of
candidates and their proposers and seconders is on the
Notice Board. Retiring by rota from the Committee this year
are, Kathleen McGregor, Joan Matthew, Maureen Watt and Alan
Prosser, all of whom are eligible for re-election.
The Annual
Report and Accounts are distributed with this Calendar.
Members are reminded to take these documents with them to
the A.G.M. Only fully paid-up members are permitted to vote
at the A.G.M. Subscriptions are £25.00 or £12.50 concession
and should be handed to Kathleen Bruce. Our A.G.M. is our
opportunity to review the past year, consider our current
circumstances, arrangements and practices and make decisions
about our immediate and long-term future. In order to form
an impression of the views, reactions and wishes of our
members, a full turn out is helpful, therefore, please
attend if you possibly can.
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BETTY MILNE
It is with regret that we report the death
of Betty Milne, one of the Terrace Dancers and a helpful,
active and very generous friend of our Congregation. Betty's
Funeral service was conducted by Rev. Andrew Wilson of
Rubislaw Parish Church on 13th February at Aberdeen
Crematorium. Betty, who was a very dear friend of
long-standing of Lorna Forsyth, was a well-loved member of
the Terrace Scottish Country Dancers who feel her loss
deeply. We send Lorna and Betty's family our sincere
sympathy.
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FAIRTRADE FAIR
Fairtrade Fair, organised by
Sue Good, takes place in Aberdeen Music Hall from 10.00am to 4.00pm on Saturday 8th March.. There wll be many stalls and
various events, both entertaining and instructive, one of
which will feature Unitarians on the Music Hall stage.
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FASHION SHOW
If we do not raise funds this
year it is not for the want of trying. Sue Good and Rhona
Stewart are organising a Fashion Show on Saturday 12th,
April from 2.00pm to 4.00pm. The clothes on display are from the
current Fairtrade collection and many of the models are
household names in local Unitarian circles. Tickets,
including refreshments are £3.00 and will be on sale shortly.
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MAY FAIR
Our fund-raising event in May
is our May Fair, on Saturday, 10th May, from 10.00am to 12.00pm.
The usual array of stall will be available. There will be a
meeting to discuss arrangements after the service on Sunday
9th March.
As in the past this requires the whole-hearted
participation of all of us. We need goods to sell, people to
sell them and people to buy them. In particular we need
home-baking and toffee etc. and lots of bottles and
attractive prizes for the Raffle and Wheel of Fortune. Rhona
Stewart who will mastermind this event will be pleased to
receive any offer of help.
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FUND-RAISING TOTALS SO FAR
So far we have organised two
events to raise funds for our on-hand projects. In January
our Cotter's Sunday Lunch raised £47. 66, a goodly result as
money-making was secondary to the principal aim of
celebrating the work of Robert Burns and Scottish culture.
Our Nostalgia Night in February which was intended to earn a
penny or two as well as bring back memories, contributed
£187. 00 to our Project Fund.
We are very grateful to our
entertainers and caterers and to the members and friends who
supported us on both these occasions. As a result we now
have £234.66 in the kitty, thanks to our own efforts. Let's
keep up the momentum!
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WOMEN'S
LEAGUE PROGRAMME
MARCH 2008
| 5th |
Arrangements
for the League's 100th Birthday Party |
| 12th |
Arthur
Bruce Entertains |
| 19th |
Gentle Exercise |
Doreen Munro |
| 26th |
"The Eden
Project" |
Projected by Bill
Stephen |
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ROBERT WEDDERBURN
During the Summer of 1820,
William Wilberforce, the principal architect of the 1807 Act
of Parliament that abolished the Atlantic Slave Trade, paid
a surprise visit to a prisoner held in solitary confinement
in Dorchester jail, one Robert Wedderburn, convicted of
blasphemy, a journeyman tailor and Unitarian preacher.
Although Wilberforce was a devout member of the Church of
England and considered it his Christian duty to bring
spiritual comfort and enlightenment to the inmates of His
Majesty's prisons, travelling all the way to Dorchester from
London by coach, however, to talk to a man who had attacked
him in print and by word of mouth and whose political,
social and religious beliefs were anathema to him, was
surely above and beyond the call of duty. Why Wilberforce
did so has remained a mystery. He certainly did not go to
Dorsetshire to enhance his own reputation for generosity and
magnanimity as he went there incognito and he certainly did
not go to gloat. It is very likely that he went there simply
to do his utmost to save the soul of a man he admired, a man
of passion and great sincerity, who had devoted his whole
life selflessly to the great cause of slave emancipation,
but whose methods he considered extremely dangerous and
socially disruptive. The interview was conducted politely
but .:without warmth, neither man apparently making any
impression upon the other. However, Wilberforce presented Wedderburn with two books, saying, "I know you are an honest
and conscientious man", and four years later when Wedderburn
published his autobiography and a selection of his writings,
he dedicated the volume to W. Wilberforce MP. In spite of
their differences, they clearly respected each other deeply.
For years the slavery issue had been hotly debated, up and
down the country, the abolitionists arguing against it on
religious, humanitarian and moral grounds and the
anti-abolitionists on economic grounds. Thousands of people,
directly and indirectly, were employed in the Atlantic slave
trade; vast fortunes were being made by owners of sugar
plantations in the West Indies and much of this wealth was
funding the industrial revolution in Britain. Were this
trade to end, economic catastrophe would follow, not just in
the West Indies, but much more importantly in Great Britain.
Within the burgeoning Unitarian community this debate raged
as elsewhere, but perhaps even more intensely, given the
Unitarian dedication to the cause of freedom and the rights
of individuals. In 1788, in Birmingham Rev. Dr. Joseph
Priestley had delivered a famous sermon deploring the
practice of slavery throughout the world and the Atlantic
slave trade in particular. 'Slavery is perhaps the greatest,
and most crying evil under the sun' he declared. 'You will
consider all mankind as brethern, and neighbours.....As men
and as Christians, we should not rest ourselves not only for
our relations or friends; not only for our countrymen but
for the different inhabitants of Europe, Asia, Africa or
America; and not only for Christians but for Jews, Mahometans and infidels. And as we ought to feel for our own
distresses.' He argued that slavery was physically brutal,
morally degrading and in the end economically stultifying.
He claimed that British slave owners were the worst of all,
being cruel and inhumane in their treatment of their slaves,
regarding them, not as fellow human beings but as beasts of
burden, creatures of a lower order, intellectually inferior
and morally degenerate. Inspired by this address, many high
profile Unitarians rallied to the abolitionist cause,
including William Roscoe, MP. for Liverpool, the principal
slave-dealing port, and William Smith MP. for Norwich, who
worked hard to persuade parliament to pass the 1807
abolition bill an enlightened and humane piece of
legislation which changed the lives of millions of wretched
people.
Other Unitarians, however, found themselves, in a
very ambiguous situation, as their own livelihood depended
upon the slave-trade. For instance, at least one Liverpool
Unitarian James Irvine, was a slave-ship captain, and
although he himself had spent fourteen months as a slave in
North Africa, after escaping, continued to practice the
trade until his death, because, he said, he knew of no other
means of making a living. Others, indeed were slave-owners,
as were the Hibbert family, founders of the Hibbert Trust,
and owners of a sugar plantation, occupying four hundred
slaves. Many more benefited from the investment of
slave-earned money in factories, workshops, farms, roads,
canals and later railways. The abolitionist issue,
therefore, provoked much anxiety and heart searching as
vulnerable consciences struggled to reconcile deeply held
principles with practical economic concerns. To what extent
did the misery of the slaves in far distant lands outweigh
loss of income, impoverishment or at least reduction in
standard of living of hard-working, honest people in
Britain? Should Christian duty be the predominant concern in
this matter when the whole economy of the British Empire
might be jeopordised? This was an acute issue which would
not countenance compromise. Individuals were obliged to
align themselves with one side or the other.
The Unitarian
abolitionists fought a war of attrition over two decades,
both in their own religious community and nationwide, and by
amassing evidence, first-hand testimony from former slaves
and reformed slave-dealers of the appalling brutality of the
trade, persuaded Members of Parliament to admit eventually
that their case was unanswerable.
Unitarians today are justly
proud of the involvement of their forebears in this noble
struggle and several articles in the 'Inquirer' over the
past year have celebrated their achievements. However, one
omission from the lists of those so honoured is the name of
Robert Wedderburn who worked as hard as anyone in this
cause, and as a result suffered more than most. This
contemporary oversight may be explained by the fact that
Unitarian historians seemed to have overlooked him
altogether; while. all the other abolitionists are dutifully
listed in 'The Unitarian Contribution to Social progress in
England' R. V. Holt's encyclopaedic work, his name does not
appear,
Fortunately, other sources have been less reticent.
'The Edinburgh Evening News' in an article in March last
year (2007) acknowledged Wedderburn's lifelong commitment to
slave emancipation and Action of Churches in Scotland
Together organised a walk along the River Esk in his honour
and to celebrate the bicentenary of the 1807 Act. His
descendant, Lord Wedderburn, expressed his intention of
being present at the walk, in recognition of "Robert's
activities as an early anti-slavery campaigner."
Born in
1762, Robert Wedderburn was one of several sons of James
Wedderburn esq. ~f Inveresk Estate, near Musselburgh,
possessor of a large sugar plantation in Jamaica, and
consequently a slave-owner and slave - trader. His mother
was one of his father's slaves, snatched as a young child
with the rest of her family from her native village in
Africa and transported to Jamaica where she was sold as a
slave. James Wedderburn had earned himself a reputation for
debauchery towards his young female slaves and was generally
regarded as a cruel and vicious master. Two months before
Robert was born, his mother, Rossanna, was sold to another
Scottish slave-owner, Lady Douglas, who seems to have been
more humane in her dealings with slaves. Part of the sale
agreement was that the child when born would be registered
as a free person, the illegitimate offspring of James
Wedderburn, and so Robert was brought up among slaves, by
slaves, and of course shared their life--style but was not
obliged to work in the sugar cane plantations. When he was
four years old, Lady Douglas died. His mother was sold on
without him and he never saw her again. He then moved in
with his grandmother, Talkee Amy, a prominent member of the
slave community, who in addition to possessing
entrepreneurial skills, valuable to her master, was also the
resident witch-doctor and chief practitioner of the African
Obeah religion. Both his mother and grandmother were highly
intelligent, independently-minded women who deeply resented
their enslaved status. Talkee Amy was also shrewd, cunning,
street-wise and a talented market-place-orator,
characteristics which Robert inherited and which helped him
survive in the slums of London. His father refusing to
recognise his very existence, Robert at the age of 16, like
many other young black Jamaicans, joined the Royal Navy in
which he served for several years. He eventually fetched up
in London, working as a journeyman tailor, living in the
black community of escaped slaves, servants and
ex-servicemen, all of them miserably poor, accommodated in
filthy, unsanitary tenements known as the rookeries, and
earning,a living any way they can.
Robert is deeply troubled
by his own life style and that of his neighbours, and that
of his friends and family in Jamaica. He is also unfulfilled
spiritually. His life seems to have no purpose or meaning,
passing in a relentless procession of days, spent working,
eating, sleeping, achieving nothing but bare survival. He
feels there must be something better for everyone than this
miserable struggle to stay alive. His conscience prompts him
to action....but what?
The issue is suddenly
resolved when he meets a Methodist street preacher, who
encourages him to become a Christian and to join the
anti-slavery movement. John Wesley, although a high Tory to
whom the very notion of democracy was terrifying,
nevertheless, was appalled by slavery, calling it in a
letter to Wilberforce, 'an execrable villainy which is the
scandal of England and of human nature,' and condemning it
out of hand in his book 'Thoughts on Slavery' published a
few years before Priestley's abolitionist sermon. Slave-emancipation seemed to Robert to be the inevitable
consequence of Christianity and in espousing both he was
finding himself an aim in life which would be fulfilling,
both spiritually and politically. As he had become aware of
his own intellectual gifts, he had also felt uneasy that he
had deserted his own people in Jamaica and that he had an
obligation to help them in their struggle for freedom. The
anti-slavery cause in Britain now gave him that opportunity.
Thus far, he appears to have been illiterate, having
received no formal education. However, he embarks upon a
study of political institutions, of current revolutionary
political literature and of the Bible. How he achieves this
is not clear, but the consequences were his decisions to
become a Spencean in politics, a Unitarian in religion and
in uniting the two, to develop what is now recognised as the
first attempts to develop a black Liberation Theology.
Tommy
Spence, a teacher, born of Scottish parents, published in
1775 a revolutionary political agenda which might be
regarded now as communist and was certainly democratic. In
addition to demanding universal suffrage with equal rights
for women and children, annual parliamentary elections, the
abolition of all empires and slavery, he advocated land
nationalisation, declaring that no individual had the right
to own the means of production which should be held by the
community and worked entirely for the common good. Tommy
Spence was imprisoned for sedition but his ideas took root
and eventually became the basis of the Chartist movement and
eventually influenced the agenda of the socialist party.
Robert Wedderburn became an ardent supporter of Tommy Spence
and devoted himself to spreading his ideas in London among
the factory workers and labouring classes, many of whom were
starving because of the high price of bread and mass
unemployment after the Napoleonic wars, and in Jamaica among
the black population whose demands for freedom were becoming
ever more strident.
His intense Bible study led him to
reject much of what the Methodists had taught him, because
he could find no scriptural foundation for them, including
the doctrines of the Trinity, Atonement (which absolutely
horrified him) the eternal damnation of souls, and the
Divinity of Jesus. There was also no justification in the
New Testament for the practice of slavery. He had never felt
comfortable with the Methodist view that slaves ought to be taught how to endure their condition in patience until it
could be terminated, now he rejected it outright and mounted
a savage attack on the Methodist position. He became
licensed as a Dissident Preacher and founded a Unitarian
Chapel in Hopkins Street in Soho, where he preached several
times a week to capacity houses of the unemployed, the
destitute, tbe hungry, the down-trodden, the desperate and
despairing masses of tbe London slums. Although he was below
average height and stockilly built, be had an impressive
manner and an autboritative bearing. He was a fluent,
vigorous and colourful speaker, employing the language of
the street to get his religious and political message
across, his buge voice, still bearing its West Indian
accent, escaping tbe confines of the cbapel into the street
where people stopped to listen. What they heard was that
every living person was equal in the sight of God,
irrespective of race, colour or creed, and that God intended
all the world's resources to be available for everyone,
equally, thus eliminating the possibility of vast
differences in wealth, power and opportunity. Universal
brotherhood was the indisputable message of the New
Testament but so far none of the Christian Churches had
observed it. Indeed tbe Church of England, so far from being
Christian, was no more than a department of government and
was particularly ,prejudiced against the non-landowning and
politically powerless majority of the British population.
Freedom from outmoded notions, from authoritarianism, from
prejudice, from life-diminishing attitudes are all implied
in his religious teaching.
His religious and political
beliefs merged into one: preaching the one, he felt he had
to live the other. For several years, following the defeat
of Napoleon he became the leading revolutionary voice in
London, demanding better conditions for the poor, and
freedom for all slaves in British territories worldwide.
Although the 1807 Act had ended the transportation of slaves
across the Atlantic, it had not abolished slavery, which
still flourished unhindered. While William Wilberforce
preferred a gradual, softly, softly approach to
emancipation, hoping for some consensus between slave-owners
and abolitionists, Wedderburn, impatient and angry, pursued
an unrelenting campaign by means of letters, his antislavery
magazine, 'An Axe laid to the Root' and pamphlets advocating
immediate revolution. He incited the slaves in Jamaica to go
on strike, to practise passive resistance until they were
freed, and he alarmed the plantation-owners and the British
government by suggesting that, with the example of the
successful slave revolt in Haiti before them, the Jamaican
slaves might also free themselves violently.
For years, the
government Secret Service had monitored Wedderburn's
activities. (Indeed much that we know of his sermons has
come from transcripts made by spies at his meetings.) He was
regarded as a dangerous revolutionary, an extremist whose
influence upon the poorer classes and slave populations had
to be ended. Eventually, in 1822, they decided to muzzle
him. Having failed to implicate him in the Cato Street
Conspiracy to assassinate the Cabinet, the Government
charged him with blasphemy on the evidence of under-cover
agents, He had told his congregation that the Bible
contained a great many inconsistencies which indicated that
it had been written over many hundreds of years and did not
represent the work of one mind, however divinely inspired,
but by many, and demonstrated a gradual development in
spiritual enlightenment. It should not, therefore, be
regarded as the absolute and final truth but a reflection of
the level of understanding achieved at the time 9f its
writing. In sentencing him to two years solitary confinement
in Dorchester jail, the Lord Chief Justice agreed that there
were inconsistencies in the Bible but it was not
Wedderburn's responsibility to inform illiterate and
uneducated pet;Sons of these in language they could
understand. To do so was to undermine the authority of the
Bible, of religion and ultimately of the ruling classes. He
was being punished because his language was too explicit and
his teaching too effective.
There is no doubting Robert Wedderburn's Unitarian beliefs or his sincerity, we have
this on the authority of William Wilberforce, himself. By
the time of their interview in Dorchester Jail, his
theological thinking had advanced beyond the Bible, which he
said was too limiting to account for all the possibilities
of God. He said his Bible was now the whole Universe, a view
Wilberforce could not comprehend.
Why, therefore, has Robert Wedderburn been overlooked by Unitarian historians? Was he
regarded by the great and the good of the 19th. century as
being too revolutionary in politics and too avant garde in
religion? Did they perhaps see him as an unlettered
opportunist, masquerading as a Unitarian? Or was the
propaganda of his enemies that he was a violent and unruly
trouble-maker from the slums of Jamaica and London,
effective enough to have him for ever categorised as an
undesirable, who would only tarnish the reputations of more
worthy abolitionists? Whatever the reason for his neglect by
Unitarians, other bodies including the other Scottish
Churches - one wonders if they are aware of his blasphemy
conviction - are now anxious to honour him as an important
figure in achieving the final emancipation of slaves within
the British Empire, in 1833, just a few months before he
died. We hope he felt a life-time of struggle and commitment
had at last been vindicated.
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