JOHN MORLAND’S LIFE

Taranaki Daily News, 10 November 1934, Page 21 (Supplement)

JOHN MORLAND’S LIFE

OLDEST ACTIVE QUAKER. MEMORIES OF 96 YEARS. The first winter after the Victorian Era began was a particularly severe one’. One night the old Royal Exchange in the City of Loi. don caught fire, and could not be saved because the water supplies were frozen, says the Children’s Newspaper. It was on this memorable night, early in 1838, that a Quaker mother, Hannah Coleby Morland, took her baby boy John, by coach to see ■ his grandmother at Kelvedon in Essex. Despite the severity of the weather and the bitter cold of the journey it is clear that the baby took no harm, for, having passed from boyhood to manhood, and from young manhood to old manhood, John Morland has only Just died at the age of 96. His life has covered all but a few months of the reign of Queen Victoria, the reign of King Edward the Seventh, and nearly up to the silver jubilee of King George. John Morland had many memories 1 of things and people. Among the strangest '- perhaps is. that of the now forgotten atmospheric railway which ran at the bottom of his father’s garden, after the family had moved from their London home in the Minories to the then countrified district of Croydon. This railway had been built in the bed of the disused London and Crdydon canal, and the train was propelled by a cod from the bottom of the carriages which linked up with a suction pipe between the metals. The difficulty was to keep the pipe airtight, and there ewas always a certain amount of anxious uncertainty as to whether the train would reach the next pumping station. But by the time John Morland had reft Bootham school at York, and was travelling daily from his home at CroySon to the School of Mines at London University, the steam trains had been eubstituted for the atmospheric ones on what had become the Brighton line. In 1870 . John Morland joined his prother-in-law in a sheepskin rug business at Glastonbury, and he was connected all the rest of his life with this firm, continuing to keep some of its b-ks until he was well over 90. His business was one of the first in the country to introduce a. welfare department for the benefit of its workers. He was always very active in Quaker work for -'ducation and missions. He remembered meeting Livingstone when he went to Liverpool to bid farewell to a friend who was going out with him. Till he was nearly 90 John Morland regularly came to town to take part in the Quaker Executive Committee which t— • met monthly in London for over 259 years, and this tall, kindly old man with a white beard was the most familiar and beloved figure of all at the Quakers’ yearly meeting last May. At these meetings he was a pattern to all his juniors, for, speaking with brevity and to the point, he mixed the wisdom of experi ice with a progressive and youthful outlook. For many years he was a member of the Somerset County Council, and was four times mayor of historic Glastonbury.