Ursula Kneisel
on behalf of the Pastoral Care Group
If you attended our Local Business Meeting on 1 November 2020, you will have heard mention of the Stoll Fund during discussion of the Annual Accounts. Some Friends may wonder who Marian Stoll was, and what purpose the fund serves.
When sorting through old documents recently, I came across an interesting article from the 43 newsletter of August 2010, written by John Cottis of Faringdon Meeting. (Reprinted below.)
I thereupon contacted John, who researched a bit further, and sent me some pictures of Marion Stoll’s embroideries, and the link at the end of his article.
The Stoll Fund (known some years ago as the Stoll/Pendleton/Warner Fund) continues to be used by the Oxford Meeting Pastoral Care Group to help Friends in need. If you would like to make a donation to the fund, this would be greatly appreciated.
Who Was Marian Stoll ?
Reproduced from 43 Newsletter August 2010: The Marian Stoll Fund
John Cottis
and more at www.EstherFitzgerald.com
Sometimes, when you turn over a stone, you come upon the unexpected. I was looking for the origins of the Stoll Fund in the archives so that we could decide whether it ought to be ‘restricted’ or ‘unrestricted’ in the Area Meeting’s accounts. I first found it called the Marian Stoll fund in accounts for 1992, when the ‘Marian Stoll Capital’ was valued at £1,850.
Hunting further back, I came to a file of minutes of Overseers from 1984 – 1990 with references to expenses for a visit to Jordans, for the costs of holidays for Friends, and for ‘Christmas gifts from the Marian Stoll Fund and the Pendleton bequest’, which seemed to confirm the idea that these funds started from legacies.
Further back still, in the Quarterly Meeting’s Book of Members, Marian Stoll was shown as a member of Oxford meeting in 1946. At this point, serendipity came to my aid, when I mentioned to the archivist cataloguing our Quaker records, what I was doing. “Ah! I think I remember seeing some papers about that”, and she came back with a few sheets that gave me the facts I needed. But the story amounted to much more than the facts.
Someone (I’m afraid I can’t remember who) had told me that they thought Marian Stoll might be American, and indeed she was. She grew up at a home for the elderly run by her grandparents. Her education seems to have been paid for by one of the residents, and later it was said of her that ‘she must have been born with a needle in her hand’. More likely, perhaps, she was called on to help with the darning from an early age.
She married, but divorced, I gather, in 1911. It was at the age of 42 that she first came to Oxford and found friendship in the meeting; and it was as Mrs Stoll that Ottoline Morrell took her photograph in 1931. Is it taken at Garsington Manor?
Searching the internet for anything about ‘Marian Stoll’ the first site I opened was from the National Portrait Gallery, who have this snapshot by Otteline Morrell in their photographic archive: ‘Marian Stoll – embroidress’. And then I looked at the site of Esther Fitzgerald (Rare Textiles), which proved very helpful in filling out her life as an artist and her link to the artistic world through Ottoline Morrell, with whom she corresponded. She had studied in Vienna (and she insisted on using Viennese wools throughout her life); she visited Paris; and came to Oxford in 1921. Her ‘wool pictures’ were exhibited in Oxford and at the V&A. She was featured in the magazine The Studio in 1927 and her work much praised.
She returned to America in 1931 and was featured in Life Magazine in 1940. She died in Southmayd Home, Waterberry, Con. in 1961 and left half her estate to the Home (with her pictures) and the other half to Oxford Meeting. She wrote of her time in Oxford, ‘I think of you so often, you were all so wonderful to me’.
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Forty-Three e-Newsletter • Number 501 • January 2021
Oxford Friends Meeting
43 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3LW
newsletter@oxfordquakers.org