Short answer to: Are any well-known people Quakers?

Judi Dench narrated the 2007 film "Go Inside to Greet the Light" (sponsored by Quaker Outreach in Yorkshire and Yorkshire Sculpture Park) which gives a flavour of the powerful spiritual experience of Quaker meetings for worship.

  Judi Dench attended

  a Quaker school,

  although the family

  were Methodist,

  shading into C of E.

  She liked the

  uniform but also took the school's ethos to heart. "At the Mount they very much cherished the individual," she told one interviewer. "I was grateful to become a Quaker because I'd found that in some other church services you didn't really have to do anything. A Quaker meeting requires extraordinary concentration and it also creates in one a private core, so that you have a stillness about you. That has been very valuable, especially in my profession."

from Yorkshire Post Saturday Magazine, December 4, 2004

text and photo from www.djdchronology.com

---

Simon Risley in the Friend magazine (12 October 2007) made a list of some Quakers who might be said to have had a degree of influence on the world around them. He also invited readers of the Friend to send in a list, ranked in order, of the five Quakers (living approximately within the last 100 years) they believed to have had the most influence on others.

Here is a list of some of those names (in alphabetical order) which might be "well-known" in the UK today.

Joan Baez  Singer, songwriter and political activist 1941-
Jocelyn Bell Burnell  Astrophysicist and discoverer of pulsars 1943-
George Cadbury  Manufacturer, philanthropist and social reformer 1839-1922
Judi Dench  Actor 1934- (see details in left column on this page)
Arthur Eddington  Mathematician and cosmologist 1882-1944
Paul Eddington  Actor 1927-1995
Sheila Hancock  Actor 1933-
Gerard Hoffnung  Humourist, cartoonist, impresario and broadcaster 1925-1959
Jane Lapotaire  Actor 1944-
Kathleen Lonsdale  X-ray crystallographer and pacifist 1903-1971
Philip Noel-Baker  Nobel Peace Prize 1959, started FAU, Olympic silver
medallist (1500m) and Labour MP 1889-1982
Gerald Priestland  Journalist, author and broadcaster 1916-1982
Donald Swann  Composer, humourist and songwriter 1923-1994
John Greenleaf Whittier  Poet (wrote the hymn "Dear Lord and father of mankind") 1807-1892

Simon Risley noted, "There is almost no representation [in this list of names] in manufacturing and trade � formerly a Quaker stronghold. The days when Quaker commercial influence was at its height have long gone. Huntley & Palmer, Barclays and Lloyds banks and the great chocolate manufacturers [including Rowntrees] are no longer Quaker owned or controlled. Even the one industrialist on the list, George Cadbury, was making plans for what would happen to the Society once the backing of wealthy Quakers such as himself ceased."