In the Days of Rain

by Rebecca Stott

  But by the time, six months later, that he put on his suit and took himself off to 3M’s UK head office in Birmingham, JT Junior had proclaimed that Brethren should no longer eat with non-Brethren, because eating together was ‘an act of fellowship’. The charter once again pointed to Paul’s letters, 1 Corinthians 5: 9–11 this time: ‘I have written to you in the epistle not to mix with fornicators,’ Paul wrote; ‘not altogether with the fornicators of the world, or with the avaricious and rapacious, or idolators; since then you should go out of the world. But now I have written to you, if any one called brother be fornicator or avaricious, or idolator, or abusive, or a drunkard, or rapacious, not to mix with him; with such a one not even to eat.’

  The Brethren fishermen who sailed in mixed crews up at Eyemouth, Port Seton and Peterhead now either had to find ways of eating separately from their fellow crew members on tiny boats with a single cabin, or had to leave the crew. Understandably, they caused offence. Non-Brethren sailors began to refuse to sail with Brethren sailors.

  When my father told his new employers he could not eat or drink with his work colleagues or clients, they accused him of hypocrisy. He’d eaten with them during his job interview, they said. Why not now, only a few months later? He tried to explain that this was a new rule in his Church; that he was simply following orders. He even tried to quote the passage from 1 Corinthians 5, but no one was interested.

  It is difficult to convey the scale of the devastation that the ‘eating rule’ caused, not just in the workplace but in Brethren homes around the world. If a Brethren husband was living with a non-Brethren wife, he could no longer eat at the same table with her. If a Brethren daughter had taken her elderly non-Brethren mother to live with her and her family, the mother would have to eat in a separate room. If a Brethren teenager did not want to join the Brethren, he or she would have to eat in another room. Brethren children had to come home from school, or eat at a separate table in the school canteen, to avoid being contaminated by non-Brethren children. My mother picked us all up from school at lunchtime and gave us a meal at home. When we drank the bottles of milk the school provided, the teachers had to usher us into a different part of the room from the other children. No one explained why. I suspect no one really knew how to.

  Many ex-Brethren told me stories about how difficult it had been at work once the eating rule was imposed, how lonely and isolating it was. My father’s closest friend during the sixties, William, agreed to meet me for lunch with his wife in a restaurant on the Essex marshes forty years after we’d last seen each other. I couldn’t help feeling we were meeting out there, miles from anywhere, in an almost empty restaurant, because we needed to be sure we would not be overheard. Outside, the halyards of sailing boats clanged against their masts.

  In 1960, William told me, when my twenty-two-year-old father was selling tape in Birmingham, William was working in a raincoat factory as a sales representative. He was also in his early twenties, also newly married. He was doing well at work, gaining trust, establishing his place in the team. But with the new eating prohibition, suddenly he could no longer socialise with his colleagues. He had to eat at a different table in the canteen, and explain that this was a religious rule. He didn’t dare break it in case someone saw and reported him.

  His colleagues were offended and baffled, he told me. He became increasingly isolated. Every day he felt he was walking on knives, that he might be sacked at any moment. He dreaded lunch and coffee breaks, and would search for excuses to get out of the office. It was impossible to concentrate on work. Soon, he said, he was lurching constantly between anxiety, insomnia, frustration and rage. My father, working amongst the bright, ambitious young men of 3M, must have felt the same.

  William knew that what was going on was wrong, but neither he nor his wife had ever lived outside the Brethren; they could not imagine doing that. They were frightened. He’d broken Brethren rules as a young child, just as I had done, just as my father had done. He’d hidden Brethren-banned books like Biggles in the saddlebag of his bike under Brethren-approved books about birdwatching and astronomy. He’d even considered leaving altogether when he was older, but when he’d tried to talk to his mother about his doubts, she’d said sternly, ‘Something’s wrong with you, William,’ and he’d started to wonder if perhaps she was right. When he expressed his concerns about the eating issue in a letter to a family friend, and told her he was thinking about leaving the fellowship altogether, the friend had written back, ‘Are you really prepared to kill your mother?’

  A cousin introduced me to an ex-Brethren woman she knew who lived near me in London. I asked her to dinner. ‘Ruth’ – she didn’t want me to use her real name either – was seventy. She and her parents had lived through the JT Junior years. I asked what had happened in her family as a result of the eating rules. She still found it difficult to talk about, she said. Even fifty-five years later, it was painful for her to remember.

  She’d been the only child of a Brethren father and a non-Brethren mother. Before 1960 that hadn’t been too much of a problem, she said. She attended Sunday Meetings with her father and uncle and aunts; her mother didn’t. In 1960, when JT Junior began to enforce the new separation rules, her uncle, struggling to keep his job and to comply with the new Brethren rules about professional associations, committed suicide. Ruth was fourteen. Only weeks after her uncle’s death, the local Brethren told her father that if her mother didn’t join the fellowship he’d either have to leave her or leave the Brethren.

  Late one evening, two of the local Brethren priests came to their north London home. Ruth watched the whole episode from the top of the stairs. Their home was unclean, the priests said; it would contaminate the local assembly. Was Ruth’s mother now ready to join the Brethren? When her mother told them she wasn’t going to join, they turned to her father. Was he now going to leave his wife? When he said no, that he wasn’t going to leave her, they told him he’d have to leave the Brethren. The two priests then left.

  Ruth went to bed as she was told, but the house had ‘an atmosphere of unbearable tension’. She was woken up some time later by frightening sounds from downstairs. She ran down the stairs just in time to rescue her mother from being strangled by her father. He had her on the floor with his hands around her neck. Ruth had to use all her force to pull him off.

  ‘When he turned towards me,’ she said, ‘it was with an unrecognising, wild look in his eyes unlike anything I’d seen before.’

  The next morning a doctor referred her father for psychiatric treatment. Soon after, with her mother still refusing to join the Brethren, the three of them left the fellowship altogether, leaving behind all her father’s family, who would not be able to speak to them again. Her parents stayed together, Ruth said, but their marriage never really recovered.

  Everywhere this new hardline separatism was making life difficult for Brethren – sometimes unbearably so – but as my father would tell the BBC interviewer sixteen years later, there was also something exhilarating about that collective suffering. JT Junior kept on telling them that suffering was ‘The Thing’. Consider Christ’s suffering on the cross, he’d roar at them. And you think you have it bad?

  I found a picture of my father in the years he worked for 3M. He was dressed in a good suit, well-cut. He looked handsome. There were several pens lined up in his top pocket. He was standing alone in some kind of conservatory, looking not down over that great view, but up, as if he were about to preach, and was waiting for inspiration. He looked lonely, lost in his thoughts. A single hook hung from the wooden window frame. It made me shudder. It looked ominous, hanging out there in the void of his future, as if he were snagged on it, or a puppet to it. I wondered if my mother had taken that picture. Had she seen the hook too?

  My father, photographed around 1960

  The choice of jobs for young Brethren men like my father narrowed dramatically in the early sixties. Almost every line of professional work was now out of reach for most of them: banke
rs, architects, engineers, pharmacists, teachers, engineers – they all had professional associations. Most employers would not take on an employee who refused to eat with his colleagues or clients or to join a union. Married Brethren women were not allowed to work now at all.

  Next, JT Junior banned university attendance. Being a member of a university, he declared, was like being a member of a union. Education corrupted; it nurtured the natural mind rather than the spiritual mind, and it took young people away from the home and the watchful eye of their parents and other Brethren. All Brethren young men and women enrolled in degree programmes now had to either leave their universities or leave the Brethren. My father had just slipped through. He’d be one of the very last Brethren to have graduated.

  JT Junior’s extreme rules of separation in the early sixties forced thousands of young men either to join Brethren businesses or to start up their own. They must have been relieved to leave non-Brethren jobs after all the social isolation and anxiety that the eating rule had caused. This generation of Brethren young men were enterprising and resourceful. A group of cousins in Sussex set up a company that imported wood to make matchboxes decorated with Sussex scenes. Others sold fudge or honey, hardwood flooring or handcrafted kitchens. Older Brethren were expected to provide loans for these new businesses and to keep them afloat if they ran into trouble. Most flourished.

  JT Junior, guided and advised by his son-in-law Bruce Hales, and Bruce’s brother John, now set about creating a global infrastructure for wealth-creation and accumulation, all under the direct management of Brethren leaders. Later, they’d work out ever more inventive ways to avoid paying taxes, including using gift aid and trusts, and campaigning for charitable status. Soon the Brethren would be very rich indeed.

  5

  ‘A ruthless gestapo had been set up to enforce Big Jim’s new rules,’ my father told me.

  ‘Gestapo?’ I said. ‘Isn’t that a bit extreme? Nothing in the Brethren story compares to the scale of what the Nazis did.’

  He’d been reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich again – I’d seen it open on his study desk.

  ‘It’s not the scale of what happened,’ he insisted, ‘it’s the pattern. There’s always a charismatic leader and a group of people who are cut off from the world. They’re slowly brainwashed into thinking they’re the chosen ones; that they’re surrounded by evil and that if they want to save themselves they have to do exactly what they’re told. It’s the same pattern every time.’

  Later, once I’d started reading books on the social psychology of cults, I could see he was right. ‘Totalist systems’, as experts called them – and that could mean the whole Maoist regime or a cult like the Exclusive Brethren – did have common patterns. They all depended, for instance, on a network of enforcers and interrogators to operate effectively.

  He and other young Brethren men, my father said, had hauled themselves up onto their hind legs to turn themselves into the two-legged thug pigs of George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

  But what did that mean? What had he and William – and other men like them – actually done in the sixties that was so bad?

  My father had not been able to face writing that part of his life story. He’d died trying to face it. So I wrote to William to ask, as carefully as I could, if he had interrogated other Brethren, or if he remembered anything my father had told him about all of that.

  It was just too painful to remember, William replied a few days later. Too shameful. It made him shudder. But he would try.

  ‘Unlike your father,’ he wrote, ‘I was only involved with three cases. They were all men. It was normal for two Brethren to conduct the questioning. Usually it took place in the sitting room, but with the understanding that we were not to be disturbed.’

  I thought of fourteen-year-old Ruth watching from the top of the stairs as the black-coated priests interrogated her parents. It was easy to feel for her. Now, for the first time, I was beginning to imagine what it might have been like to have been one of those priests, knocking on doors late at night, embarrassed and ashamed but not able to show it, making older men confess to having had sexual thoughts, humiliating them.

  ‘If a confession was finally made,’ William wrote, ‘it was something quite innocuous or trivial, usually about [unfulfilled] sexual desires, at least in all the cases I was involved in. The sessions could last for two to three hours; sometimes they’d go on till quite late at night. I used to go home feeling that I was probably more guilty than the person we had humiliated.’

  Although there may have been many Brethren priests in the sixties who were confident that they were routing Satan, there were also men like William who felt very uncomfortable with what they were doing. I’d seen this discomfort in the body language of three Brethren priests interviewed in a documentary the BBC made in 2003; the Brethren were doing everything they could at the time to counteract bad publicity. Those three men, dressed in perfectly pressed white or pale-blue short-sleeved cotton shirts, sat on one side of a table clutching their Bibles and answering the interviewer’s questions.

  They looked like rabbits caught in headlights, I thought, as I watched the interview, paused it, and played it back in slow motion. Each time I replayed the scene and saw how nervous they were, the sight of them there behind the table scared me a little less. The youngest of the three, in his late thirties, seated in the middle, had talked, with an attempted assurance, about how he’d been lost to the darkness but had returned to the light. But every time he tried to defend Brethren expulsions, or the way they shut people up, he stuttered, hesitated, and stuttered again. His eyes darted from side to side, looking for guidance from the two older men.

  When the producer of the documentary gave an interview to the Guardian, he said the priests had threatened him: ‘We’re rich,’ they’d said. ‘We’ll take you to the cleaners.’ One of them had told him, ‘The devil’s here. I can see him behind you.’6

  But what had it been like for my father, I wondered. How had he felt about making these visits that William described? I wrote to the PEEB community. What was it like, I asked, to be visited by Brethren ‘interrogators’ back in the sixties? Did anyone remember? And did anyone remember what it was like to be a priest?

  Ten or eleven people replied to my request for information. Some wrote just a few lines, some several pages. Everyone seemed angry or upset by what they remembered. Many of them, I noticed, had replied in the early hours of the morning. ‘You’ve opened up a real can of worms here,’ one wrote. The memories, she said, had made her shake.

  The answers I received were all about having been interrogated. No one wrote about doing the interrogating. Their stories were shocking, and remarkably similar. The men were called ‘priests’, not ‘interrogators’ or ‘exactors’, they said. Their visits were called ‘Priestly Visits’, or just – rather chillingly – ‘Priestlies’, or ‘PVs’. The interrogation might last two hours or more; it always took place in the family sitting room; no one ate or drank anything – the priests would be contaminated if they did – and no one else was allowed in the room, even when the priests were questioning a teenage girl.

  Sometimes the priests would be satisfied with a simple confession, and there’d be prayers and tears and ‘restoration’. But if there was resistance or denial, or if the sin was particularly grave, the priests would have to recommend to the ‘Care Meeting’ that the sinner be ‘shut up’ or placed ‘under discipline’. This meant consigning them to solitary confinement in a room in their family home, with no contact with any other family member, their meals left on a tray outside the door, for an unspecified period of time. The priests would continue to ‘visit’ every few days, sometimes for weeks or months, until they felt the sinner had ‘come right’ or was ‘in the clear’. The priests didn’t use the language of exorcism, my informants told me when I pressed them on this, but to me it seemed implicit in what they were doing. ‘Smell out the enemy,’ JT Junior had preached, ‘chase after him and kick
him.’7

  Most of the people who replied to my questions had been teenagers in the sixties. The misdemeanours they’d been questioned about ranged from acts that the Brethren considered very serious – such as falling in love with someone outside the Brethren, or being seen going into a cinema, smoking, or even having a cup of tea with someone who wasn’t Brethren – to imagined acts or thoughts. Licentious thoughts had to be confessed to as well.

  No wonder William had shuddered. No wonder he’d described Priestly Visits as a process of humiliation. And, as he had pointed out, if my father had done more Priestly Visits than most of these young men, it wasn’t surprising that he had not been able to talk or write about it.

  It struck me that a system of surveillance and forced confession like this must have been very effective. Even when the sinner had been absolved and allowed back into the fold, all the priests would now know their secrets, and would have seen them deeply humiliated. And, of course, every priest would have been terrified that at any moment the tables might be turned on him. Everyone was petrified into compliance.

  Sometimes when a Brethren teenager had been put under discipline, the whole family would be engulfed in the punishment. ‘Rachel’ described how, when she and her two brothers were teenagers in the 1960s, they’d been ‘shut up’ numerous times, meaning they were confined to the house and prohibited from contact with anyone. On one occasion she and her brothers had been made to leave the family home for a month, but usually the whole family were excluded at home together. When her youngest brother, then sixteen, had gone to see three Brethren priests to seek counsel about something private that worried him, they’d circulated details about what he’d disclosed. He’d been taunted by his Brethren peers, and suffered a nervous breakdown. Soon afterwards, the three siblings had been made to attend a Brethren Meeting in which their father was told he was ‘not repentant enough’, and they were all made to leave and be ‘shut up’ again.