ABSTRACT

This quotation derives from a report in the local press in Birmingham, UK. It describes a gathering at the local Meeting House of the Religious Society of Friends (also known as Quakers) in Bull Street on the evening of 21 January 1937, one of many such gatherings that had been held in Birmingham and elsewhere since the

outbreak of the Spanish Civil War some six months earlier. The meeting’s purpose was both to raise awareness of the conditions in Spain, particularly as they affected children, and to raise money for the relief effort.2 As a description it captures two elements that are central to the focus of the article that follows – first the speakers’ use of personal, eye-witness testimony intended to mobilise support for the relief effort, and second the use of the visual, in this case lantern slides, to “prove” the truthfulness of their accounts and to illustrate the transformative power of the relief effort.