The following excerpt comes from Margaret Hope Bacon’s ‘Penn as a Peacemaker’, available at the Chestnut Hill Monthly Meeting web page.
…the Quakers in England did not split. There was one meeting, Fritehley, and a couple of other smaller meetings that did split off to be Quietists. But the majority simply wallpapered over their differences, and the whole Society shrank and shrank until I think they were down to 5,000 Friends in the British Isles. They knew they simply had to do something.
I don’t have my dates quite right here, but at a certain point, 1870, 1880, Friends were finally allowed to go to Oxford and Cambridge. They had not been permitted to go into higher education because of their dissent. We began to have a new generation of young, educated Friends who began to look into the situation and wonder what the problem was. And in 1895 they called a conference in Manchester, England, called the Manchester Conference, and began to look back on some of the things that had led to this situation and also to inquire why were they not in touch with the American Friends, because by this time there were far more American Friends than British Friends, and the American Friends were quite active. Some of these new, young, educated British Friends were traveling and meeting the American Friends.
Following the Manchester Conference they decided that they would like to get further education in Quakerism, and this led to the establishment of Woodbrooke, which is the predecessor of Pendle Hill. No sooner did they have Woodbrooke then they began to invite Hicksite Friends to Woodbrooke, and they did that so much that they finally had to write to Philadelphia Yearly Meeting and say, can’t you send Orthodox Friends? Well, this was unheard of in that British Friends had been so active against the Hicksite Friends.