by Graham Taylor.
Last winter Grace Crookall-Greening died, a founder member of the Quaker Socialist Society in 1975, and an inspiration to the cause of ethical socialism. Grace wanted peace at home and peace abroad. She went seven times to Russia to try and further world peace through international co-operation, and she campaigned to establish industrial democracy in Britain by the spread of co-operative enterprises. Roger Baker, her friend and comrade, who also died last winter, had also joined the QSS in the mid-1970s, but his personality was the opposite of hers. Where she was dramatic, Roger was stolid, quiet and thoughtful, and few people realised what his contribution had been until after his death.
Roger was born in Tooting to Methodist parents but, his sister said, he found that the Methodists did not live up to their Christian values. After a degree at the London School of Economics, he worked in Montreal at the time of the ‘Quiet Revolution’ in the 1960s. On returning to England in 1967 he got a teaching job in Crawley, Sussex, and stayed there for the rest of his life. He became a Quaker member at Ifield Meeting in Crawley, where Grace Crookall-Greening also lived, and so it was inevitable that in 1976 she recruited him to the newly formed Quaker Socialist Society of which she was a leading figure.
From 1980 until 2023 Roger served on the Committee of the QSS, bar an intermezzo in 1996. In that year Roger took early retirement and decided to spend six months in Africa. Or perhaps it was the other way round. He took a great interest in his former pupils and offered to teach at a rural school near Masvingo in Zimbabwe where a former student was living. He soon discovered that the school was so poor they could not even afford to buy books. Nor were they allotted any books by the central government in Harare, as they did not have a library to store them in. Roger decided they would have a library, and on his return to Crawley his Quaker Meeting in Ifield soon raised £3000, which was all that was needed in Zimbabwe to build a brick building. In 1999 he returned for the opening ceremony. In the next decade Masvingo, a town of about 50,000 people, suffered acute decline when crime and violence spilled over from mass unemployment in South Africa, but Roger’s school library survived for several years as a small candle of enlightenment amidst the thick darkness of economic deprivation.
Roger was meanwhile active in the QSS. He had known well the charismatic founder of the QSS, Ben Vincent, and I asked him once what Ben was like. His reply was typically balanced: “Ben had a brilliant mind and seemed to know everything, and he had a wonderful sense of humour – but he was rather too full of himself for my liking.” This was typical. He always saw both points of view.
Roger’s contribution to QSS was to help organise their famous Salter Lectures, and write articles for their publications, critiquing consumerism and the cult of economic growth. Self-effacing as ever, he loved to tell the tale of the one Salter Lecture (“well, you could say it was organised”) which was an unmitigated disaster. The Quaker Socialists always hold their Salter Lecture at the same time as the Quaker Yearly Meeting, with the idea of offering a radical alternative. In 2011 the Yearly Meeting was held at Kent University and QSS invited, not an academic or trade unionist, but Tony Benn, the former Labour MP. Benn really was a radical alternative because for years he had led the socialist wing of the Party. However, they were then informed, as has happened before and since, that a room for the Salter Lecture could not after all be found. Undaunted, the Quaker Socialists set up a marquee in a nearby field. This was a splendid act of defiance but unfortunately they lacked the skills to handle in a field the technology either of the sound or the lighting. With poor sound quality, Tony Benn, old and rather deaf, either misheard or could not hear at all, the questions he was asked. Worse, because the immovable lights were angled towards the make-shift stage neither Benn nor the Clerk could see the audience. Roger had to act as an intermediary between Benn and the audience, first taking the questions to the stage and then taking the answers back. This was not the Quaker Socialist Society’s finest hour.
In the last few years Roger had turned his attention increasingly to the plight of refugees and asylum seekers. Crawley was near Gatwick Airport and he campaigned for the rights of refugee arrivals who, after landing, were kept in detention. He soon became Chair of the GDWG (Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group) and, working with the Labour MP for Crawley, Laura Moffat, campaigned against the inhumane policy of indefinite detention. Over the years, though they did not change the policy, they were able to assist several imprisoned individuals who were plunged in the depths of despair.
At first glance this brief summary may show Roger’s work as worthy but minor. However, as with many Quakers, what is on the surface does not reflect fully all the kind and patient work beneath. It was not until Roger’s funeral, at the 17th century Ifield Meeting House in March 2024, and then at his beautiful Memorial Service at St Mary Southgate Church in April, that the full measure of the man was revealed. Laura Moffat MP spoke, and so did his nephew Malcolm, his sister, a refugee he had helped, a student he had taught, and the new Clerk of Ifield Meeting, Steve Martin. It turned out that his house teemed not only with refugees and asylum-seekers he had helped but also with his former pupils, many of whom he had maintained contact with well into their adult lives. And everybody loved him. What a lovely character Roger was, they all said: the shy smile, the gentle manner, the wise comments, the astute assessments. As a friend of his observed at the end of a service laden with tributes to the kindest of men: “Nobody had heard of a Saint Roger before. But they have now.”
There was another Baker in the Quaker Socialist Society: Philip Noel Baker, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1959. Some might say he was successful, whereas Roger was not. But there are asylum-seekers and Zimbabweans who might beg to differ. The world peace of Philip Noel-Baker is not evident at the moment, but the fruits of Roger’s work stood up in the church of St Mary and spoke.
A former pupil reported that, near the end, when he was dying of terminal cancer, Roger told her, as a statement of fact, “I never really did anything that changed the world”. But often people like him are the ones who do. He looked after dozens of refugees and detainees and gave them hope. Failed pupils, we heard, received an infusion of confidence in their darkest hours, and his little library in Zimbabwe brought literacy to an illiterate community beset on every side with poverty and violence.
George Eliot said it best : “The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
Quaker Socialist Society 