As we mark the centenary of the Russian revolutions of 1917 it is an opportune moment to remember two women who were in Russia throughout this momentous year. Florence Barrow and Annie R. Wells both travelled from Birmingham to Russia as part of a Quaker team to undertake relief work with refugees fleeing from conflict.

Peter Gatrell in his excellent book, A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia During World War I (Indiana University Press, 2005), records that by 1917 there were over six million refugees in the Russian empire. Both Florence and Annie went out to help, motivated by their faith as members of the Religious Society of Friends (also known as Quakers).

Florence and Annie drew on their experiences of voluntary and professional welfare work in Birmingham. Born in the city in 1876 Florence was the daughter of businessman and former Lord Mayor Richard Cadbury Barrow and his wife Jane Harrison. By the outbreak of the First World War she was an experienced voluntary social worker at the Birmingham Women’s Settlement where she worked with poor women in the Summer Lane area. She was also involved in various women’s organisations in the city, in peace campaigns, in her local Quaker meeting, and in an adult school class where she taught working class women. In 1916 she had already worked for a period of time in a quarantine station for Serbian refugees in Frioul near Marseille. Anne Rebecca Wells was the daughter of John and Elizabeth Wells of Sibford Gower. She came to Birmingham initially in 1904-05 as a student at the Quaker educational settlement recently founded at Woodbrooke, and subsequently became a health visitor in the city.

In July 1916 both women set off for Buzuluk in Russia, a long and uncomfortable journey. Once there they were involved in feeding, housing and medical programmes, and their first task was to gather data by visiting the thousands of refugees in the area. Florence kept a detailed journal in which she recorded her experiences and this, and letters home from both women, survive in the collections of the Library of the Society of Friends in London together with Florence’s autobiographical reflections on the period.

In her writings Florence described the practical hardships that the refugees and the Quaker workers faced alongside vivid descriptions of the local topography, and, of course, the very cold weather! She also alluded to the emotional toll that the work could take on the relief workers:

‘Before deciding exactly what form our relief work should take many hundreds of families of refugees were visited. I do not know that I ever have had a sadder & more depressing piece of work. To go into house after house & find old men, women, girls, children sitting inert unoccupied & hopeless, unwelcome guests in an already overcrowded home. One after another would tell of the good house they had left in the west surrounded by a pleasant fruitful garden.’

From Florence’s writing we can see that she felt a responsibility to listen to the stories of the displaced women and children whom she met and to disseminate information about their sufferings, both to raise awareness of the evils of war and, of course, much needed money for the cause. Practically, as well as providing food and medical care she also established occupational workshops for the women refugees where their spinning, weaving, sewing and knitting provided clothes and other necessary items and enabled the women to earn a small wage.

Comments on the political situation are rarer in her writings, but she did record how pleased and hopeful the Russian peasants in the Buzuluk area were by the developments that followed the February revolution:

‘In 1917 came the Revolution, the good news of which spread rapidly into even […] the remotest villages. Meetings were held & messengers explained what it all meant & there was much excitement & hopefulness.’

The political changes brought women’s suffrage to Russia. Florence was herself a supporter of the campaign to win the parliamentary vote for women in Britain as a subscriber to the Birmingham Women’s Suffrage Society. She was therefore horrified at how few Russian women voted in their first election due to lack of information and poor literacy levels, writing, ‘Think how one felt to be here the first time the women of the country had a vote and no one knew enough to vote.’

Of the Bolsheviks and subsequent political developments she wrote:

‘Such was my experience of the government which certainly in this district did not bring with it the anarchy of which people have read in England. Of course I only knew one tiny corner of Russia & I am not prepared to speak of anything but what I saw for myself.’

Florence and Annie continued to support the refugees and Russian peasants through political turmoil, bad harvests and famine. Annie returned to England in November 1917 and a few years later in 1923 she was appointed librarian at Woodbrooke where she stayed for many years. She died on 10 October 1956 aged 84. Florence remained in Russia until July 1918. She was undoubtedly politicised by her experiences in the war and joined the Birmingham branch of the Independent Labour Party with her brother Harrison Barrow in 1919. She went on to have an active career in relief. In 1919 she was part of a Quaker delegation to defeated Germany to investigate and assess the need there before going as a relief worker to Poland in 1920, where she later became head of the team of 80 British and American Quaker relief workers. When she returned to Birmingham in 1924 she became one of the founding members of the Copec Housing Improvement Society, and spent decades taking a very practical approach to the improvement of working class housing in the city. In the 1930s she worked with refugees from Germany and Austria. She died on 3 March 1964 aged 88.

Florence closed her recollections of her work with refugees in Russia with the following quote which, despite the differences of geography and historical context, is equally applicable to our own times:

‘Nevertheless we are convinced that the sufferings these people have undergone & are undergoing has a special claim upon us whose homes have not been destroyed by war or who have not been transported as unwelcome guests into districts 1000’s of miles away there to drag out year after year a dreary & miserable existence.’

 

‘Much excitement & hopefulness’: Birmingham Quaker Women in Revolutionary Russia

Dr Siân Roberts

—– This article draws on documents in the archives of The Library of the Religious Society of Friends, particularly Temp MSS 590. For more on Florence and her work in Russia and Poland see Siân Roberts, “A ‘position of peculiar responsibility’: Quaker women in transnational humanitarian relief, 1914-24” in Quaker Studies 27 (2) 2016 pp. 235-255.

Images reproduced with the permission of the Library of Birmingham.