Sophia Sturge
Sophia Sturge (1849–1936) was a British
Life
Sturge was born in
Sturge was a president of
By 1900 pacifism had become the main focus of her activities and she attended several international peace conferences. She opposed the Second Boer War and supported the campaign against it led by the Nobel Prize winner Norman Angell. Sturge became a member of the Union of Democratic Control, which was a British pressure group formed in 1914. While not a pacifist organisation, it was opposed to military influence in government.[5]
On 7 August 1914, the British issued orders to detain all those considered to be dangerous. By the end of August, 4,800 people had been interned although many had been living and working in Britain for decades. On the day that WWI was declared, Sturge was travelling home from London to Birmingham when she saw queues of hundreds of Germans waiting to register as enemy aliens. She wrote a letter to Stephen Hobhouse, a fellow Quaker and prominent peace campaigner, to suggest that the enemy aliens would need help. Her suggestion led to the Quakers setting up the “Emergency Committee for the Assistance of Germans, Austrians and Hungarians in distress” (usually known as the Friends' Emergency Committee). Initially, the committee concentrated on finding people willing to provide employment to Germans who had suddenly been made unemployed; accommodation for those who had been evicted from their homes; and financial help. Many Germans who were reservists had been called home, leaving their British wives and children destitute. Sometimes the Committee helped people return to Germany.[6]
In December 1914, a group of
After the war Sturge went to the Netherlands, where she helped German children affected by the war. She also spoke at many British schools and published several works for children, including The Children of Hunger, a collection of children's letters from Germany and Austria written after the First World War. Over time, she began to question her attitude to Quakerism, and she became a member of the Church of England. However, she resumed her Quakerism before her death, on 17 January 1936.[2]
References
- ^ "Sophia Sturge". Women in Peace. Retrieved 6 June 2020.
- ^ a b c "Sophia Sturge". Geni. Retrieved 6 June 2020.
- ^ Johnson, Joan. "Sophia Sturge and the Connemara basket industry in Letterfrack, 1888-1905". Cliveden Arts Festival. Retrieved 6 June 2020.
- ^ Carroll, Kenneth L. (1979). "Quakerism in Connaught, 1656-1978" (PDF). The Journal of the Friends' Historical Society. 54 (4). Retrieved 6 June 2020.
- ^ Blaazer, D. (1992). The Popular Front and the Progressive Tradition: Socialists, Liberals and the Quest for Unity, 1884-1939. Cambridge University Press. p. 93.
- ^ "'Enemy Aliens' and Birmingham Quakers" (PDF). Quakers on the Home Front. Retrieved 5 June 2020.
- ^ "Quaker Women and the Hague Conference" (PDF). Quakers on the Home Front. Retrieved 5 June 2020.
- ^ Pankhurst, Sylvia (2000). The Women's Peace Conference in Women's Writing of the First World War (ed. A. Smith). Manchester University Press. p. 95.