‘Our Priestly Visits took place mainly in the evening,’ she wrote, ‘sometimes just with my dad, my parents, or all of us together, sometimes in the lounge, sometimes around the dining room table.’ No one drank anything, because the priests weren’t allowed to eat or drink with Brethren under discipline. ‘At one stage,’ she wrote, ‘my dad was required to write a list of all the sins he had committed before the next visit. When he handed them the list, he was told it “wasn’t good enough” and he had to try harder to remember things he may have done!’8
Even if people did find some way to leave the Brethren, the priests could still knock on their door at any time. Several of the people who wrote to me described finding a pair of priests waiting outside their workplace, intent on getting them to come back into fellowship.
‘They used to wait until my staff had gone home and show up at the business,’ ‘Philip’ wrote. ‘Luckily I had a front vestibule in which visitors had to ring and wait for the door to be unlocked. I would just freeze in my office chair and not move or make a noise. I would hear a low rumbling of voices until they left.’9
The priests were, like my father, family men, raising their children, minding their grandchildren, cutting the lawn or washing the car on Saturdays. My father would come home late at night, and lie in bed next to my mother with his head full of the remembered tears and sobs and wails from the evening’s confession. Worse still, he may have lain there planning new ways to extract the confession he’d failed to get. And when the last years of the sixties rolled round, I’d have been sleeping in the next room, or lying awake clutching my stuffed rabbit. In the morning he’d be planning his next preaching over breakfast, while my brothers and I quarrelled about which of us was to have the cream at the top of the milk bottle. He’d be searching for a scripture to support a new disciplinary procedure while my mother would be clearing away the dishes or brushing out and plaiting my long and unruly hair.
No wonder he lost his temper so often, and no wonder my mother had to hurry us into the sitting room so many times and lock the door. There must have been so many things he couldn’t talk about. Was this why he’d beaten me so badly at the age of three? And it wasn’t just my family living in a state of anxiety and terror, nor was it just my father enforcing the rules. ‘Priestly Visits’ and ‘Care Meetings’ were going on not just in our little seaside town, but in Brethren households all around the world. They are still going on.
There were more suicides. On Hayling Island in 1961 a couple told their twenty-year-old son, a travelling car salesman who wasn’t in fellowship, that he could no longer eat with them or his sister, or even come to the house. After spending several months in exile, distraught about the shame and distress he was inflicting on his parents, and the prospect of never seeing them again, he gassed himself to death.
Elsie and Winnie Rhodes, two elderly unmarried Brethren sisters, ran a small egg farm at Watling Street in Staffordshire. In 1961, local Brethren told them that under the new rules they’d have to leave the Egg Marketing Board or be withdrawn from. The small red stamp of the Marketing Board was, Brethren told them, the sign of Satan’s system. Deprived of their livelihood, the sisters quickly fell into debt. A cousin, concerned that she had not heard from them for some time, drove to the farm, but Elsie and Winnie didn’t open the door. ‘We were shocked by what we found,’ the cousin told a journalist. The farm, once a prosperous family business, had been horribly neglected. ‘The hen pens hadn’t been cleaned out and the gates were hanging on their hinges.’10 In June 1962, forced to sell their smallholding and terrified of the consequences, Elsie and Winnie walked together into a local lake and drowned themselves.
6
At around the same time as the Rhodes sisters’ deaths, Stanley Milgram, a distinguished psychologist at Yale, began a famous series of experiments about obedience. He’d read the reports of Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem the year before. ‘Could it be,’ he asked himself, ‘that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders?’ Were Germans more than usually obedient towards authority figures? How far would a study group of Americans go in obeying an instruction if it involved harming someone else?
Milgram took forty volunteers individually into a closed laboratory room. Each was told by men in white coats to inflict electric shocks on a paired ‘learner’ in another room every time that learner made a mistake. What the volunteers didn’t know was that the ‘learner’ was being played by an actor.
Even Milgram was shaken by the results. Sixty-five per cent of participants continued obeying orders, believing that they were inflicting shocks to the very highest level – 450 volts – even when they heard screams of pain, and even when they knew they could kill the learner with voltages of that level. Every one of the participants continued to 300 volts. The experiment has since been replicated by other teams, and the results have been roughly the same.
People obey, Milgram concluded, not just if they recognise the authority of the instructor as morally right or legally based (the white coats and the laboratory conditions of his experiment), but because that authority relieves them of responsibility for what they do. We learn this kind of unthinking obedience, he pointed out, in the family, the school and the workplace. He did not add churches to this list, though he should have.11
Why had those decent young Brethren men turned into bullies? Because closed, rule-bound, discipline-focused totalist systems like the one we lived through made dissent virtually impossible. It paralysed people. Even if men like my father knew that what they were doing was wrong, they didn’t know how to oppose it. Even if they refused to comply, they couldn’t stop the bullying, because they’d simply be expelled, and someone else would step forward to take their place.
7
I knew there was money being made from JT Junior’s system, but it took me some time to realise just how much, or how the system actually worked. When JT Junior and Bruce Hales put the vast Brethren revenue-collecting system in place in the sixties, they began by setting up tax-free payments described as gifts; they channelled these through the Brethren publishing house we called the Depot.
When I was growing up, my family was always talking about the Depot. Grandpa was at the Depot again. Something or other was a Depot matter. Someone had telephoned from the Depot. I knew that the Depot had something to do with the ministries, the rows of colour-coded Brethren books that lined the shelves in our sitting room. I was taken to its offices once as a small child. I remember a small brick building, windowless corridors, piles of boxes, and an untidy room with desks and typewriters. It reminded me of the Stott and Sons warehouse with its secret rooms and back staircases. I wanted to play there, but Grandpa Stott would never have allowed that. He left me in a small side office with a Bible while he attended to Depot business in another room.
Since 1931, the Stow Hill Bible and Tract Depot had published volumes of Brethren ministries, the Day Dawn calendar, Darby’s Bible, and various Brethren magazines, first from a shop in Wales and then from premises in Kingston upon Thames. Until the 1950s it had been a bit of a wing-and-a-prayer operation, run by four part-time trustees, with various Brethren and non-Brethren employees and a Brethren manager who liked to do the editing, and some censorship, himself.
The manager’s idiosyncrasies had become a thorn in the side of JT, especially when he’d been trying to press the new Holy Spirit line in the 1950s, and the manager kept editing those sections out of his printed ministries. JT resolved to be patient, but the cuts infuriated his son. In the last years of his father’s life, JT Junior spent hours counting the number of cuts the Depot manager had made to his father’s addresses. He couldn’t understand why his father put up with this insubordination.
Immediately after JT’s death in 1954, my grandfather was appointed to one of the four prestigious Depot trustee positions. Within weeks the Depot manager had been sacked, no doubt by my grandfather acting under JT Junior’s orders.
Soon af
ter his appointment, my grandfather began to assemble an anthology of the new harder-line ideology, designed for Brethren boys. He called it The Way Everlasting. It was first published in 1958, when my father was nineteen. My grandfather must have had his own sons in mind when he planned it. It contained extracts from thirty-four Brethren senior ministering brothers, from John Nelson Darby to JT, including three by himself, one by my great-grandfather Hugh Wasson, and five by Gerald Cowell. The book warned of the dangers of worldly literature, advanced education, trade unions, and all other Christians. It was an immediate success, selling 18,000 copies in its first year, almost twice as many as the volumes of JT’s ministry the Depot sold over the same period. Like Mao’s Little Red Book, published six years later, it was small enough to be carried in the pocket. My father’s friend William, in his late teens when the anthology came out, remembers hearing it lampooned by another Brethren boy as ‘Bob Stott’s Bumper Book for Brethren Boys’.12
If my grandfather had seen what was coming, he’d have kept his pen dry and his head down. A year after the book came out, JT Junior took the leadership position. He excommunicated Gerald Cowell and all his supporters a few months later. When the Depot’s four trustees met in the summer of 1960, JT Junior decreed that all Cowell’s writing was to be excised from Brethren printed ministries. From now on, the Depot would print approved ministries only; there’d be no more magazines, Day Dawn calendars, or books for young people. There were to be no more reprints of The Way Everlasting. In front of 2,000 Brethren assembled in Central Hall that summer, my grandfather was forced to confess that his book had been based on a ‘revival of the Sunday School principle’, and been judged wrong. This was the first of what would become a wave of public confessions.
Excommunicated husbands and wives, fathers and mothers were now bringing court cases against the Brethren and writing to their MPs. The Methodist leaders realised that the Exclusive Brethren, who rented their Central Hall every summer, were a cult that split families, and cancelled their contract with them. More suicides reached the press. The story of the Methodists throwing out the Brethren made it into the newspapers too.
The 1962 three-day Meeting took place in one of the conference halls of Alexandra Palace in north London. The proceedings were taped, transcribed and published. Kez found a copy I’d overlooked among my father’s papers.13 When I opened it, the cadences of the men’s voices and the phrases they used struck me as so familiar that I began to sweat. I’m a girl. I’m not allowed in here. I’ll get caught. I remembered all the times I’d been ushered out of our sitting room when the Brethren men came to consult with my father. My mother caught me once with my ear pressed up against the closed door, and waved me out into the garden. But I wasn’t going to miss the chance of listening in this time. I read on.
According to the transcript, hundreds of Brethren men had gathered in Alexandra Palace as usual. They’d flown in from all over the world – from Sweden, New Zealand, South Africa, France, Germany, Jamaica. I tried to reconstruct the auditorium in my mind. I knew their hats would be hanging on hooks somewhere. They’d have their Bibles on their laps. My father would be somewhere in the auditorium and my grandfather up on the stage, sitting with the three other Depot trustees, right next to the Man of God and his clever businessman son-in-law Bruce Hales, his new right-hand man. It was only a year since my grandfather’s public confession. He’d be trying to keep a low profile.
Alfred Gardiner, the longest-serving Depot trustee, took the microphone. They were making good progress in reprinting the hymnbooks, ministries and translations, he told the men in the hall, but the work was slow. Mr Hales had devised a new system that would make it possible to bring The Truth to Brethren all around the world much more quickly. Gardiner explained how it was going to work: there would be a new hardbound and numbered set of full ministries. From now on every Brethren house would be required to own a full set. It would cost £10 a year for the new volumes, and £60 for a complete set. Local enforcement officers would check that all households had them. Brethren were to start paying immediately.
Bruce Hales took the microphone. Reasonable, eloquent, matter-of-fact, he explained that the Brethren had been running a successful prepayment system in Australia for a while now. It made everything so much easier. If every household had a full set of ministries, all Brethren, especially the young, would receive the word of the Lord as it unfolded, as it happened.
I do the calculations. With an estimated 100,000 Brethren around the world in 1959, even allowing for 20,000 defections, there must have been at least 10,000 households remaining. The vast majority were in English-speaking countries – America, Australia, New Zealand – but even if you allow for the fact that some were non-English-speaking, that’s still at least £600,000 coming into Brethren coffers immediately, with £100,000 a year to follow.
In 1962, £1 was equivalent to roughly £20 at today’s values. That means that in this one-hour Meeting the Brethren agreed to pay the current equivalent of about £12 million up front, with £2 million in annual income to follow.
One of the young Brethren administrators who worked in the Depot general office during the 1960s told me about the impact of Hales’s prepayment system. He didn’t want me to use his name, so I’ll call him Frank. ‘The effect on the finances of the Depot was dramatic. I remember going to the bank with large amounts, many tens of thousands of pounds on one occasion (about £80k).’14
When I asked my father in those last days about how the Brethren’s money system worked, he was defensive. He was close to the end. His lucid moments lasted only twenty minutes at most. I should have been distracting him with music and poetry, I told myself, not pestering him with questions about the Brethren’s finances, but he’d been so insistent about this record of his, so anxious to get it down. There were so many questions I wanted to ask.
‘By 1962,’ I said, going back over my notes, ‘the ministries seem to have become more important than the scriptures. How did they get everyone to agree to pay so much for them?’
‘We didn’t see it like that,’ he said slowly, without even opening his eyes. ‘We were getting the truth straight from the Lord. We didn’t mind about the money. The Lord was working fast. He was on his way.’
‘The Rapture was coming, you mean?’ I asked. ‘You really thought it was that close?’
But he’d gone again, down into the morphine.
8
It became difficult to sleep at the Mill in my father’s last days. With death so close, we were all wired. I took snatches of sleep in the afternoon, drifting off in front of a Bergman film or when the cricket lagged. I’d judder awake, frightened, certain there was something in the room, something watching. I couldn’t shake off the feeling that my father and I were in trouble, that someone had been listening in, someone had reported back.
At night when the old mill creaked, I’d look out across the fields where the moon lit up the snow to the glow on the horizon where the Polish night labourers were digging up potatoes under portable strip lighting. Once a pair of red eyes – fox, rabbit, weasel – flashed back at me and then were gone.
On those sleepless nights, if my brother was taking the night watch I’d roam my father’s study, looking for photographs. The tall bookshelves were piled three or four deep with dusty books; the cheap shelving sagged alarmingly under their weight. After I’d spent a few hours rummaging, my hands would be coated in a layer of grey dust.
One night I found three rows of colour-coded Brethren ministries hidden on a low shelf beneath a set of Toni Morrison’s novels, some volumes of poetry, and a hardback copy of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, its spine broken by the number of index-card notes my father had tucked inside. It struck me that in this chaos of books and papers, the ministries were the only books he’d arranged in any order. He hadn’t been able to throw them away, or even box them up and store them in the attic; he’d just buried them under other books. He had used them, I remembered, to plan his preachin
gs back in the sixties, in the days when he worked hard to practise his JT Junior voice.
I spotted an old volume of JT Junior’s letters on that bottom shelf, letters the Man of God had written through the sixties to Brethren round the world. I remembered the New York vernacular JT Junior used, his deliberately provocative and brash tone, and my father’s look of intense concentration, the way he always seemed to speed up when JT Junior’s recorded voice was playing on a tape in the car. JT Junior’s private letter-writing voice was just as aggressive as his spoken one. At two in the morning he seemed to be shouting in my father’s darkened study just as loudly as his recorded voice had once boomed out in the car. It still made me flinch.
In the letters JT Junior had written in 1962 he was furious that British Brethren were being so slow to get their houses clean. How could Brethren still be living in the same house with aged aunts who were not in fellowship, he ranted, or teenagers who wouldn’t break bread? It was insufferable. The local compliance officers he’d appointed were not being nearly tough enough.
In July 1963 he was preaching in Bournemouth, hammering home his new edicts about ‘natural relations’. Brethren, he insisted, needed to cauterise their family feelings. He ranted about ‘circumcision’. He wanted Brethren to cut off their family members as if they were bits of surplus unclean flesh. It was time to put the Lord before family relations, he wrote, time to get those houses really clean. But what he really seemed to be saying was that he wanted all those thousands of Brethren to put him before everyone else.
‘Have you cut off the flesh?’ he asked. ‘Have you still the flesh in the house? Have you cut off your relatives if they are out of fellowship? That is the suffering point …’15
In the Days of Rain Page 14