Quaker Interests
He was treasurer the Anti-Slavery Society until his resignation in 1926. He was Secretary of the British Quaker Anti-Slavery Committee and was concerned among other things with the establishment in 1897 of a Mission in Pemba, one of the Zanzibar islands, now in Tanzania, to help freed and escaped slaves there. Slavery was finally legally abolished in Zanzibar in 1909.
Because of his knowledge of Russian and his expertise, he was asked by the Meeting for Sufferings in November 1891 to go with Francis William Fox to Russia and investigate the reported famine there. Brooks returned, reported on January 15, 1892 to the Meeting and left again with Herbert Sefton Jones, who was fluent in Russian, on February 15 with funds for a Quaker relief effort and an urgent need to distribute food before the spring thaw would make transportation difficult. The Friends concentrated their efforts on Samara but also went to Tatarstan and other adjacent regions. Some of the travel was by railway but much was by horse drawn sledge. Brooks returned home on April 12. In the end, the Russian famine of 1891–92 killed between 375,000 and 500,000 people.
In 1895 he and Thomas William Marsh (1833–1902) waited on the Czar to plead the cause of religious dissenters in Russia, and he was later active on behalf of the Dukhobors when permission was secured for them to emigrate. In 1899 he visited Leo Tolstoy with John Bellows.
Between 1896 and 1899, he was Clerk of the Friends Armenian Relief Committee, which raised £18,000.
He was a Joint Secretary, with Ruth Fry of Friends War Victims Relief Committee 1914–24, He was later, chairman of its Executive Committee, and if needed, giving almost daily help to the small and overworked office staff. His son, Alfred, also served on this Committee.
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Famous quotes containing the words quaker and/or interests:
“this old Quaker graveyard where the bones
Cry out in the long night for the hurt beast
Bobbing by Ahab’s whaleboats in the East.”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)
“... there is nothing more irritating to a feminist than the average “Woman’s Page” of a newspaper, with its out-dated assumption that all women have a common trade interest in the household arts, and a common leisure interest in clothes and the doings of “high society.” Women’s interests to-day are as wide as the world.”
—Crystal Eastman (1881–1928)