Nonviolence to feature in Remembrance Sunday programme
-03/11/06
Quaker and author Grig
Nonviolence to feature in Remembrance Sunday programme
-03/11/06
Quaker and author Grigor McClelland will appear on national TV this Remembrance Sunday to talk about his role as a pacifist during the Second World War.
Grigor, aged 84, is interviewed in the ITV series The Way We Worshipped about his role in the Friends Ambulance Unit in Germany in the aftermath of World War Two, when he helped with the relief effort for a desperate population.
The programme features moving archive footage of Quaker relief work in Dortmund, Germany, when the town was in ruins following the war.
Grigor tells the interviewer how the Germans had been told to expect more violence and devastation following their defeat “and they were surprised to find that we were human beings”, just as the Allies also discovered that the Germans they had been fighting were not enemy monsters but fellow humans.
Grigor says his lifelong Quaker conviction that there is “that of God in everyone” led him to reject war and seek a constructive alternative to violence.
He later wrote a book about his experiences, Embers of War: Letters from a Relief Worker, which was published in 1997.
The Friends Ambulance Unit was a volunteer ambulance service founded by Quakers. It operated from 1914-1919 and from 1939-1959. It was mostly staffed by conscientious objectors.
The Way We Worshipped will be broadcast on ITV1 on Sunday 12th November at 12pm
Nonviolence to feature in Remembrance Sunday programme
-03/11/06
Quaker and author Grigor McClelland will appear on national TV this Remembrance Sunday to talk about his role as a pacifist during the Second World War.
Grigor, aged 84, is interviewed in the ITV series The Way We Worshipped about his role in the Friends Ambulance Unit in Germany in the aftermath of World War Two, when he helped with the relief effort for a desperate population.
The programme features moving archive footage of Quaker relief work in Dortmund, Germany, when the town was in ruins following the war.
Grigor tells the interviewer how the Germans had been told to expect more violence and devastation following their defeat “and they were surprised to find that we were human beings”, just as the Allies also discovered that the Germans they had been fighting were not enemy monsters but fellow humans.
Grigor says his lifelong Quaker conviction that there is “that of God in everyone” led him to reject war and seek a constructive alternative to violence.
He later wrote a book about his experiences, Embers of War: Letters from a Relief Worker, which was published in 1997.
The Friends Ambulance Unit was a volunteer ambulance service founded by Quakers. It operated from 1914-1919 and from 1939-1959. It was mostly staffed by conscientious objectors.
The Way We Worshipped will be broadcast on ITV1 on Sunday 12th November at 12pm