I was fortunate in having a large family archive dating back to the earliest days of Quakerism and when my mother, Joan Barlow, died in 2007 at the age of 93, I became its custodian. Its contents had always intrigued me as a child: our old Bible of 1616, family trees and old letters dating back some hundreds of years, plus first-hand accounts of historical events by my great-grandfather, Frederick Goodall Cash, of Queen Victoria’s coronation and Wellington’s funeral, and my grandmother, Mabel Cash Barlow, describing a visit to the House of Commons in 1889.

Along the way, I discovered, with the kind help of Pamela Clark, the Registrar at the Royal Archives at Windsor, some unexpected antecedents which included a distant ancestor in General George Monck, the man who restored Charles II to the throne and was himself related to Richard III. And then there was the eccentric cousin, John Camden Nield, who with no known royal affiliations and for reasons best known to himself, willed his entire fortune of half a million pounds to Queen Victoria in 1852, with which she bought Balmoral.

Apart from the memories of my extended family and the aforementioned archives, I was also greatly assisted in my research by the Library at the Quaker headquarters at Friends House in London and their helpful staff, as well as the historians at the Quaker Study Centre, Woodbrooke in Birmingham, the one-time Cadbury home with which my family had been associated since its inception as a college in 1903. I should also mention the Quaker Family History Society, which generously supported my research with financial help from its trust fund.

The Quaker family of Barlow goes right back to the very birth of the Society of Friends sometime around the 1660s, when its founder George Fox was gathering his first followers about him. Much of our earliest Quaker ancestry is gleaned from our family Bible, in which over the 350 succeeding years, my forebears noted their marriages and the names of their children. It is known as the Lancaster Bible, after its first owner, James Lancaster, our earliest recorded Quaker ancestor, who was among the first to join up with Fox. This Bible still shows the salt water stains from the nearly disastrous moment when he dropped it in the rapidly rising sea water as the tide came rushing across Morecambe sands when he was fleeing persecution. It has been handed down through his daughter’s family ever since and now belongs to my elder brother David.

Quakers, it seems, have been fairly assiduous in maintaining family records, making it somewhat easier for the present day genealogist to trace their families right back to that early time. Also, up until the late 19th century, Quakers only married within the faith, and hence any of our family trees form an intricate network of interlocking families. When I was at the Quaker school Leighton Park in the 1950s, many of my peers were my close or distant cousins including such well-known Quaker names as Cadburys, Darbys, Frys, Rowntrees, Braithwaites, Hoylands, Brockbanks, Taylors and Nicholsons. Because of this interconnectedness of many Quaker families, it became customary for families to address each other by the title of ‘cousin’, though they might only be second or even third cousins! Indeed, when I was a child, I remember my father’s redoubtable mother always referring to members of her extended family by the prefix of Cousin. Not, as we might talk today of ‘my cousin Fred’ but almost as a title on its own, endowed with honour on its bearer, as being a member of the close Quaker diaspora. So my book about the family, entitled He is our cousin, cousin tells the story of many of my ‘cousins’ from the last 350 years!

Founding father
My grandfather, John Henry Barlow (1855-1924), was the first to write a history of the Lancaster Bible, in the Quaker publication The Quarterly Examiner in 1898 and I can’t do better than repeat his scene-setting introduction:

“In the year 1616 the printing house of Robert Barker, ‘Printer to the King’s most excellent Maisetie’, (sic) was busy with an edition of the Bible. It was only five years before this that the Authorised Version had been published and we may therefore suppose that when the sheets were finally bound into volumes, they found a pretty ready sale. One of these lies before me on the table as I write…”

James Lancaster was born in 1610, just six years before the printing of this Bible, on the island of Walney in what is now Cumbria (it was historically part of Lancashire). Young James was a yeoman who lived in North Scale on the northern edge of Walney Island, a former royalist stronghold during the English Civil War. In fact Quakerism in the 17th century was the natural refuge of those who disagreed with the Presbyterian nature of the Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell, though ironically, as it turned out, it was actually Cromwell who would become the most sympathetic to Fox’s beliefs and who eventually gave the Quakers their religious freedom.

So in many ways Cumbria could be said to be the birthplace of Quakerism. George Fox preached on Pardshaw Crag, drawing huge crowds, and Pardshaw and Pardshaw Hall, near Cockermouth, became strongholds of Quakerism from its earliest days. As Fox continued to travel throughout the region, groups naturally coalesced and on Sunday, 13 June 1652 on Firbank Fell, over a thousand people gathered in the open air to hear him preach. This now famous gathering has often been recorded as the first-ever Quaker Meeting.

Pillars of the community
The history of my family since those momentous early years is also very much the history of the Society of Friends, since most of my ancestors have at one time or another been caught up in the great issues that have engaged the Society since its inception. From persecution and pacifism to temperance and anti-slavery, one or another of my family have been leading champions. Along the way we also come across sailors and silk merchants, wool merchants and cheese merchants, pioneering businessmen and distinguished academicians – and all of them devout Quakers. Many of these redoubtable people left an indelible mark in their communities and town archives and local newspapers were readily made available to me in the course of my research, often with generous help from local historians.

In my childhood we learnt from our parents and grandparents about the history of our family and the story of the bible, and the long list of notable forebears who were set before us children as exemplars, with the idea that if we could really claim lineage with past ‘makers of history’, we too must do something for our country in our own day and generation.

In the 18th and 19th century many Quakers became businessmen as they were excluded by law from politics and large areas of professional public life and went instead into industry, where their reputation for honest dealings greatly facilitated their success. The leading families, such as many of my relatives – the Cash family weavers of Coventry, the iron founder Darbys of Coalbrookdale, the biscuit manufacturers Carrs of Carlisle and the Cadbury chocolatiers of Bournville – were a close-knit highly interrelated community, with strategic marriages to secure family businesses, who supported each other and maintained high standards in their work. I was often grateful for the archives of all these families and of their companies, which have enabled me to corroborate facts were they were missing in our own collection.

Family mystery
Much of what was missing was anything of significance relating to my mother’s family, which was surrounded in some mystery. I knew that my maternal grandmother had been orphaned when only a few years old and spent her early years in an orphanage in Birmingham, but I had been unable to pin down very much about her or her family. I was, therefore, particularly grateful for the help of professional genealogist Anthony Adolph – with his skills and knowledge and the few facts that I was able to provide him with, he was able to trace the precise orphanage and indeed details about other members of her family of which we knew nothing. He was also able to find details of her parents and the date of the death of her mother in childbirth in 1883 and of her father in an industrial accident two years later. It was a tragic story, but also revealed how, with help from the Quakers on the board of the orphanage, especially members of the Cadbury family, she and her sister were able to prosper. Eventually, with this encouragement to get on, and with her own dogged determination, she was able to provide a good life for her children, who themselves later married into Quaker families in Birmingham. Within a hundred years, one of her grandchildren was knighted and another rose to the top of the BBC. So I am enormously indebted to Anthony for his detective work in revealing this side of the family.

Today the membership of the Society is no longer raised in the big Quaker dynasties of former days, with most present-day Friends being newly converted. No longer do the famous old Quaker names run the big companies synonymous with their family, as many of these firms have been taken over.

Nonetheless, Quakers can still be found running small firms along Quaker lines and there are, of course, many successful Quakers in business. But by and large, Quakers are now active in other ways, working for social change, often through the old trusts such as those of the Rowntree family, and have become very involved in the setting up of the many non-governmental organisations such as Greenpeace, Amnesty International or Oxfam.

But today, as Quaker historian Ben Dandelion, points out in a reference to the familiar pictures of Quakers in their simple dress and bonnet, “Now that we no longer begin our spiritual journey in the tailor’s shop, being a Quaker is far easier than it used to be. We have a private life and personal beliefs; we pick and choose our understanding of testimony and our opportunities for service and how often we come to meeting.”