I hadn’t expected his story to be full of the minutiae of Brethren leadership conflicts. Through all the hours I recorded him that week, my father kept to a ruthlessly straight chronological line, describing each new Brethren edict, each new struggle for power, month by month, excommunication by excommunication. We both knew he was running out of time, that he couldn’t afford to meander. But he only got to 1963, the year before my birth, before he was too tired to continue. He was still only twenty-five then, tall and lanky, a fledgling preacher, and already the father of a son.
‘But how did you feel?’ I’d interrupt. ‘What did my mother think about that? Wasn’t that the month that Chris was born? Didn’t you cut his umbilical cord?’
I kept trying to get him to step sideways, out from amid the Brethren patriarchy and their closed rooms and doctrinal disputes. I wanted him to tell me about the family home, where my mother was having babies and sterilising bottles, that detached, four-bedroom, mock-Tudor, half-timbered house opposite Hove Park, with the lilac tree in the garden, and the bush with the white berries that you squashed between your fingers, and where our tricycles made tracks in the morning dew.
We’d lived through those dark years too, after all, and had been marked by them. But it wasn’t just that I wanted to be in this story of his. It was that I was increasingly certain that the full picture, the one he couldn’t bear to look at, had to include our day-to-day family life and our private dreams as well as the dramas played out in the Brethren corridors of power. It had to include the women and children as well as the men. It would only be half a story without them.
But my father had only one objective in the hours I recorded him: he wanted to understand how he and the other Brethren men of his generation had been bewitched, turned from decent, earnest, promising young people into brutal Brownshirts. He had to understand that before he could be ready to die. It struck me that even after we’d recorded five hours of that interview, he was getting the facts down, but still not really understanding what they meant. I think he knew that too.
It wasn’t just me he was talking to. When he woke in the night in those last days he’d open up his laptop to write to a group of eighty or so ex-Exclusive Brethren all over the world on an online forum called PEEBS.net. The name came from a word outsiders had often used to describe the Plymouth Brethren: Peebs, or the PBs. The site had been set up by ex-Brethren to provide a place for escapees to get support and to talk about their experiences. It had a flashing red ‘Rescue’ button on its home page. My father had been talking to the PEEB community for six years, sometimes every day. He seemed to have become an important presence there. It was where he’d met my stepmother.
Now that they knew he was dying, these ex-Brethren from Australia, London and America had gathered online to listen and to console. They hadn’t kept interrupting with the wrong questions. They knew what to say, and what language to use.
One of the first things I had to do after my father died was to write to these people to tell them that he’d gone; that yes, that was what his silence meant. I told them about the owl that had come for him. I told them he had died a good death with his family around him. I thanked them.
In January 2013 PEEBS.net mysteriously disappeared. The ex-Brethren webhost, Tim Twinam, who ran the site from a log cabin in Vermont, and who’d been wrestling with Brethren legal action for five years or more, suddenly wasn’t answering his emails or his phone. People were saying the Brethren had either paid him off or threatened him. His seriously ill wife, they said, had just had expensive hospital treatment, more expensive than they could have afforded without outside help.1 Even now, no one really knows what happened to make Tim Twinam shut down the site.
But all those conversations and exchanges and words my father had left on the PEEB site hadn’t disappeared. A member of the community sent me a transcript of everything my father had posted, retrieved from a data dump somewhere. It ran to hundreds of pages. More ex-Brethren websites and blogs sprung up after PEEBS.net had been closed down, my informant told me. ‘That’s the thing about the internet,’ he said. ‘You can close down one part and another part will grow somewhere else.’
As I read the to-and-fro of daily banter in the transcripts, my father’s conversations with ex-Brethren from New Zealand and Australia, Germany and South Africa, I was struck by how many different voices there were. Some were irascible, others grief-stricken or furious; many were still devout Christians, while others were zealous atheists. They teased him; they sent him poetry; they wrote to tell him about what the Brethren were doing now; they told him about someone who’d escaped and was being sheltered, about what had happened in their houses in the sixties and seventies, and sometimes about what was still happening.
The PEEB community must have been, it seems to me now, like a Greek chorus in the chambers of my father’s mind as he slipped away. All through those last weeks, while I had been asking my clumsy questions, long after he could no longer reach for his laptop, these people were in the house, in his head, attending, a hushed, respectful presence. They helped him to face his death, but they had also helped him to remember. They reminded him that his story was their story too.
2
My parents flew back to Britain from South Africa in September 1959 for the final year of my father’s Cambridge English literature degree. They rented part of a house close to the Cambridge Meeting Room. My father went back to his rowing, his classes, his books and essays, his Brethren undergraduate friends. My mother bought second-hand furniture, sewed curtains, washed his rowing kit, and cycled two miles every day to her new full-time job as an accountant for Spillers flour mill up near the station. They broke bread with the Cambridge Brethren at the Mawson Road Meeting Room on the Lord’s Day.
They wouldn’t have had much time alone. Every night my father’s friends came to the house and sat up talking late as they’d always done, except now they talked about the Brethren families who were leaving.
My father was studying The Faerie Queene, a long Protestant allegorical poem written by Edmund Spenser in the late sixteenth century. He’d composed it, Spenser wrote, ‘to fashion a gentleman of noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline’. The gentle knight of the story, the Red Cross knight – named for the red cross emblazoned on his shield, like the knights of the Crusades – goes through a series of ordeals and trials. It must have been perfect reading for my father.
When I looked at the annotations in his hardback copy, shelved next to Arthur Mee’s Book of Everlasting Things, I was struck by how he’d turned the poem into a theological thinking ground for himself, by how many scriptural references he’d added in the margins, many distilled down to mere numerical references: Tim 2:2; Cor 3:5; and so on. ‘Can you explain the difference between the Solomonic and the Davidic codes?’ my father’s friend William remembers him asking one night that winter. William couldn’t, but my father could. He seems to have been sharpening his rhetorical tools and gathering ammunition. He was preparing to enter the ring as a Brethren combatant. He knew he’d have to know his scriptures inside out if he was going to win against the older Brethren.
JT Junior, sixty years old, was also preparing himself for a fight. He’d been waiting in the wings for thirty or forty years, biting his tongue, furious about the way his father’s ‘new light’ on the Holy Spirit had been ignored. Now that he’d assumed leadership he wasted no time in asserting his authority. He had some things to prove.
In the spring of 1960, only months after he’d taken the leadership, JT Junior placed an absolute ban on membership of professional associations. ‘If you’re not with me,’ he told the Brethren, ‘you’re against me.’
Thousands of Brethren white-collar workers around the world ‘unyoked’ and resigned from their professional associations. Many lost their jobs. The Brethren were now in the news. They’d be in the papers most months throughout the 1960s.
Although many Brethren were now leaving the fellowship in protest against the new hardline edicts, JT
Junior remained defiant. The great winnowing had begun, he declared. It was, he said, a clear sign that the Rapture was close.
‘You either had to commit yourself or get out,’ my father said years later when he was interviewed for a BBC documentary about the Brethren. ‘It became a bit of a crusade … Before, it had been a bit flabby and inconclusive. Now it was something that you could either accept or reject, something very clear-cut. People were suffering for it – giving up professional associations and losing their jobs, and giving up jobs that involved entertaining clients, and so on. This is why I said there was a spirit of a crusade.’2
JT Junior spoke about the Brethren as his ranks; together, he promised, they would rout Satan on his own battleground. ‘We must keep in mind,’ he wrote, ‘that the Lord is a man of war.’3 And by the time he flew to the UK from his home in New York in late July 1960, ready to drive his new hardline militaristic separatism home, he was in full war mode. The timing was good. Cold War tensions were running high. There were new charismatic leaders on the world stage too: Billy Graham was rallying millions to his evangelical crusades; JFK had just been nominated as US presidential candidate.
JT Junior had won the battle over professional associations. Now it was time to step up another gear and clean up all the Brethren households once and for all. Brethren had no business eating with non-Brethren, he declared. It was time to build some walls.
JT Junior gave an address at Park Street, Islington, in July 1960, entitled ‘The King and his Men’, a speech designed to rally a new generation to his crusade against Satan. My father was in the auditorium that day; his father, as a trustee of the Depot, was now sitting up on the platform.
In a series of notes I found in one of my father’s files, he described the ‘King and his Men’ speech as the principal turning point in his own radicalisation. I can see why. He was twenty-two and newly married, head of his household. He’d spent his life up to then cowed by his own father’s absolute authority. He’d been following the Red Cross knight through The Faerie Queene. He was ready to become a leader, and he wanted a place up on that platform for himself.
JT Junior took as his scripture that day the story of King David capturing Jerusalem in 2 Samuel 5: 6–10. The Lord wanted the Brethren to go to war, he told his audience, to become David’s men, to take risks on the battlefield, to capture Jerusalem. Now was the time. But although he could see that the young men in Britain were ready to fight, he told them, the older Brethren were holding back, hesitating, because they were self-important, stuffy and stuck in their ways. They didn’t have the stomach for the fight. They’d have to be barred from the house, he said, if they didn’t commit. The young bloods – the Davids – would show them what was what. They shouldn’t put up with these dithering old men any more.
It was a clever move. JT Junior was marshalling the young against the patriarchs. It was the 1960s, and he was using the spirit of revolution and revolt that was already in the air to promote an extremely right-wing puritan crusade in which the young would take the lead.4
For my father, imagining himself as a knight taking on the corrupt forces of Roman Catholicism, as a soldier in David’s army defeating the Jebusites against all the odds, or as David himself taking on Goliath, that address, as he put it, ‘reset the agenda’. It stirred his blood. He may have been sitting down in the auditorium with his Brethren friends, while his father was up on the platform, but nothing was set in stone.
‘Now,’ he wrote in his notes, ‘a sizeable, and powerful, number of young Brethren began to rise up and make themselves heard … Driving the traditional brethrenistic element in Britain on to the back foot, making them feel defensive, that was a very important part of the whole campaign … JT Junior persuaded us young Brethren that we’d inherited a radical tradition but the old people had turned it into a comfortable establishment. It was our job to stir them up to radicalism again.’
‘A great sifting is going on,’ JT Junior kept repeating; sometimes he’d call it a ‘spewing’. This must mean, he’d tell them again, that the Rapture was close. The Lord was moving quickly: ‘The Lord is cleansing his temple.’ Time was running out. For the next eight years, every time things got difficult JT Junior would tell the Brethren it was a sure sign that Satan was ramping up his assault – and that, in turn, was a sure sign that the Rapture was getting ever closer.
3
When I read the transcript of JT Junior’s ‘The King and his Men’ speech, the rhythms of the language took me straight back into Meeting, where as a very small child I listened to my father’s and grandfather’s voices as they rose and fell, incanting and descanting. Satan was close, they’d preach; he was a trickster, always looking out for opportunities to use a wayward brother or sister to get himself inside our closed circle. The Brethren had all grown up thinking of themselves as besieged by Satan’s forces, who were rallying outside the walls of the Meeting Room, so JT Junior’s new rhetoric of attack rather than defence must have stirred their blood.
As a child I struggled to think of all those stocky men in their suits and hats going to war. It was even more difficult to imagine the sisters, in their hats and headscarves, whooshing up into the air when the Rapture came. I was always worried about how they’d keep their hats on and their skirts down.
But despite the apparent blandness of our suburban lives, according to those preachings and addresses, spectacular dramas and showdowns were always happening. JT Junior persuaded the Brethren that personal suffering and subjection to his absolute leadership were the only ways to fight back against Satan’s growing power. The mini-skirted sexual decadence of the 1960s, and the sheer number of Satan’s new converts out there, were, he claimed, sure proof that the Rapture was fast approaching. The Lord was sending the Brethren more and more powerful signs in order to keep his precious people walking in the light when everyone else was disappearing into Satan’s darkness.
So although my father was already primed for battle in 1960 by that heady collision of C.S. Lewis’s lyricism, Edmund Spenser’s Calvinism, and the bower-of-bliss-smashing Red Cross knight’s and JT Junior’s calls to arms, when his closest Brethren friend began to consider leaving, and then died suddenly, he persuaded himself it was a personal warning from the Lord.
‘A fortnight before his death,’ my shocked father wrote to his mother just after his friend Christopher Tydeman’s funeral in the summer of 1960, ‘Christopher was here [in Cambridge] for a weekend. He came at his own invitation. His last words to me were, “I’ll see you in a fortnight’s time if I’m still in fellowship.” He was upset and puzzled by recent happenings and when he came here he was full of questions. We talked very late both Friday and Saturday evenings. I wasn’t able to answer his objections, his mind was always more acute and analytical than mine, but I think we both became impressed as the discussion went on with the stress that is laid on action (“he that hears My words and does them”). I say we were both impressed because I don’t want to give the impression that he was the questioner and I the answerer. That was not so. We helped each other on Saturday night, I think.’
A group of my father’s Brethren undergraduate friends. Christopher Tydeman is second from the left
Christopher, still considering whether to leave, had gone to hear my father preach the following day. When my father drove him to the station, Christopher’s goodbye had been enigmatic: ‘Thank you very much for the weekend,’ he said. ‘I got my answer and it wasn’t what I expected.’ My father wrote to his mother that he’d been searching for an explanation of those words ever since his friend’s death.
Christopher wrote to my father a few days later. He’d come to a decision, he said, but he still did not reveal what it was. Then two weeks later, down in St Ives, he slipped on a rock pool, hit his head, and died.
At the funeral, Christopher’s Brethren father had taken his son’s undergraduate friends aside and told them that he was certain the death was ‘not an accident’. Did he mean that Christopher had
killed himself? Jumped? Or worse: was Christopher’s father telling those young men that his wavering son had been singled out by God, struck down and made an example of?5
Whatever it meant, my father changed. His letters were now full of crusading metaphors. Gone was the pleasure-loving, hesitant young man of the Cambridge years, and in his place there was a zealot, or at least the performance of one.
A few weeks ago I found a tiny newspaper clipping among my father’s papers entitled ‘Man Falls 100 Feet’. The man was Christopher Tydeman. He’d fallen from a cliff and died of his injuries, not slipped on a rock, as my father had been told. Was this the beginning of a larger pattern of cover-ups, secrets and lies around the increasing number of Brethren mental breakdowns and suicides?
4
In the spring of 1960, while he was finishing his last year at Cambridge, my father went for an interview in Birmingham for a job with 3M, the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company. 3M had been manufacturing products like masking tape and sandpaper in America since early in the century, and were expanding into global markets with new products, including surgical and audio tape. Their success, they told my father over lunch after the interview, was rooted in treating their employees as one big family. They were looking for bright, talented ideas people who could sell their products and help expand 3M’s place in the UK market.
Six foot four in height, affable, well-built, Cambridge-educated, and soberly dressed, my father must have looked and sounded impressive. He came, he told his interviewers, from a long line of travelling salespeople: his father had been a salesman for Dubarry and Roger et Gallet, and he himself had worked in South Africa as the assistant sales manager for the brand-new sales team of Wall’s ice cream. The job would be perfect for him, he told my mother when he was offered the position, as 3M wouldn’t require him to join a union or a professional association.
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