| This secretive Quaker chapel
is set back behind a garden in Bury's
trendy St John's Street. The garden is
open every day, a pleasant spot to sit
for a while in the busy heart of the
town, and as you step up to the path the
chapel reveals itself from behind the
trees and shrubs. What is not immediately
apparent is that this is a timber-framed
building of 1749, a date at which Bury
was rapidly expanding itself in stone and
brick. The white brick here frontage was
not added until 1870. There is a good
modern extension of 2008 to the south. In
contrast to just about every other
Christian denomination, the Society of
Friends was in steep decline in Suffolk
by the middle years of the 19th Century.
At the time of the 1851 Census of
Religious Worship, when the sizes of many
congregations were reaching their peak,
Quaker chapels were falling in numbers
and even closing - of the thirteen Quaker
chapels in Suffolk at the start of the
century, only eight still held regular
meetings by the time of the census. At
Bury St Edmunds, the 350 spaces in the
chapel (150 on the floor, 200 in the
gallery) played hosts to just 26 people
in the morning and 24 in the afternoon on
census day, the afternoon attenders
presumably being largely people who'd
been there in the morning.
And yet, the Quakers still
had influence, not least because of the
disproportionate number of prosperous
merchants among their members, including
two of the county's leading banking
families. Ironically, this may have been
partly responsible for their decline, as
the ordinary working people who flooded
the other non-conformist chapels saw the
Quakers, like the Church of England in
many places in the county, as the church
of their Masters. The fact that children
were discouraged from attending services
can also not have helped. And yet, the
Quakers have survived, and are respected
and valued as a contemplative movement in
a frenetic world.
Along with the Jews, the
Quakers were specifically excluded from
the requirements of the burial acts of
the 1850s, and were able to continue
burying their dead in urban chapel yards.
There is a lovely little graveyard here
in front of the chapel, with headstones
of the late 19th and 20th Centuries. In
the Quaker tradition, they are merely
inscribed with a name and the date of
death in numerical fashion.
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