Interview with Canon Julian Thornton-Duesbery and his sister Jean Thornton-Duesbery

Reggie Holme: I am sitting here in Liverpool with Canon Julian Thornton-Duesbery and his sister Jean Thornton-Duesbery.

Julian Thornton-Duesbery:
Our connection with the Isle of Man goes back about 100 years, rather more than 100 years.  My grandfather, who was a Yorkshireman and a soldier, serving in the Durham Light Infantry, went to the Isle of Man on garrison duty sometime in the 1860s.  He liked it there very much so when he retired from the army fairly young he took his Yorkshire wife and settled down in the Isle of Man.  My father, uncle and all our aunts were born and brought up there.  Although the family home broke up because my grandparents both died young, we kept the connection with the Isle of Man very strongly and my father was devoted to it.  We always went back for our summer holidays.  So really, all our lives, we have known it very well indeed.

In the part where Jean lives now I think probably 70 years ago I could have taken you through every gap in every hedge.

With this strong Manx connection my father, despite being an East End parson in London for a long time, the one ambition I think he really had in life, was to finally go back to live in the Isle of Man.  The one thing he always said he would have liked, as an earthly ambition, was to become Bishop of the Isle of Man.  In 1924 the See became vacant and he was appointed.  He went back to live in the Isle of Man permanently in 1925.  He again, like my grandfather, died very young -he was only 61.  He was only Bishop for 3 years, but during those 3 years our home was at Bishopscourt in the Isle of Man as he was Bishop of Sodor and Man.  Sodor is really the Hebrides.  It has not, in fact, been part of the Bishop’s jurisdiction since about 1265 when the Scots took it back.  It means the southern islands, Hebrides, as opposed to the northern islands, Orkney and Shetland, from the point of view of Scandinavians because, for all those many first centuries of the Diocese, it was ecclesiastically under the jurisdiction of Trondheim and only came under York very much later on.

Our family went to the Isle of Man in the 1860s, from Yorkshire.  They came particularly from all round Scarborough.  There is actually, hanging on the wall of my room here, a picture of one Thomas Hinderwell who wrote the history of Scarborough.  For a long time I had a rather nice portrait of him, another larger one, with his history of Scarborough under his arm.  When I retired from Oxford and came to live in Liverpool there wasn’t room for it in this flat so it is now hanging in a place of honour in the Scarborough Museum.  Really it began with the natural history collection made by Hinderwell some time at the end of the 18th century.  A year or two ago in a different museum in Scarborough we discovered an interesting reference to a Capt. Duesbery, obviously one of our ancestors, who was in charge of six guns in the moat of Scarborough Castle preparing to defend the Castle against Bonnie Prince Charlie and the ‘45. Luckily Prince Charlie didn’t arrive and so Capt. Duesbery’s guns were never fired.

We were brought up by our parents, who were superb people, very much in the whole Christian faith and tradition and, though I went through many periods of doubt and so on, I was always on the side of the angels at any rate in theory.  Even if in practice sometimes a little divided in my loyalties, let’s say, to put it mildly.  I think what I must say is that my father and mother laid in me a very real foundation of Christian faith, as it were they laid a fire and laid it extremely well.  It didn’t really get quite fully lit, I think, until rather later on but they certainly laid the fire. I personally can’t be grateful enough for the kind of upbringing I had from them and also from my school housemaster. He was a man of great faith and great vision and in many ways I think rather ahead of his time in the period of the First World War.  At that time anybody, a public school master who had any vestiges of moving towards any kind of socialism would have been, normally speaking, regarded as rather an odd sort of person.  Not that he was a socialist - he wasn’t, but his ideas in many ways about class loyalty and the unity and care for the nation running right through it were 20 years ahead of his time in many ways.  We didn’t appreciate it at the time, but I see it now and am very grateful for it.

I was at school at Rossall, which is on the Lancashire coast between Blackpool and Fleetwood.  I went there because the headmaster and his wife were great friends of my mother’s.  The headmaster’s wife and my mother had been brought up in the same village and were lifelong friends and my house master was in fact the headmaster’s brother-in-law, rather younger than his wife.

Jean Thornton-Duesbery:
I share with my brother tremendous gratitude for our home and for all the training, love and care of the early days.  I think almost especially I am so grateful to our parents for their great wisdom and understanding in handling me, because I was a rebel from the very beginning.  In later years my mother told me that when she tried to teach me the Old Testament stories I rebelled very much indeed.  I made such remarks as, ‘God could have made people perfectly good, why didn’t he?’  My mother felt that the best thing to do was to give up the Old Testament for the time being and concentrate entirely on the stories of Jesus and those I accepted.  The sacrifice of the animals upset me very much in the Old Testament.  I was always a great lover of animals.   In many other things also I felt I could only see an unkind God in my childish way.  Now I have grown to love very much of the Old Testament and to find it a tremendous strength and guidance, but not in those days.

Another moment when I was most grateful for their wisdom was when I went home when my father became Bishop.  I was at St Paul’s School in Hammersmith as a day girl and I left school at the age of 17 and went home.  Again I am afraid I was not at all a model Bishop’s daughter.  I did take Sunday school and a missionary band and I helped to a certain extent but I loved my dogs much more, keeping poultry, a pony, being out of doors.  I have always had a most passionate love for the Isle of Man and felt that I belonged there.   Of course when my father died we had to leave the island and we went to live in North Oxford, to be near Julian.  I am afraid at that point I said, ‘Well, right, I am no longer a Bishop’s daughter, I haven’t got to go on along those lines’.  It was then at that point that my mother and Julian had a little conspiracy and they took me to a certain houseparty that was organised by the Oxford Group, in 1928.  I am afraid I went for the fun of the thing.   I thought I would see a lot of people with religious mania and that would be great fun. It was great fun, but in a very different way to that which I had expected.  

We arrived late, we went by train across England.  The houseparty was rather near Bath at a place called Lempley Stoke.  When we arrived there everybody was just going in to dinner and my first reaction was, ‘My goodness, they look quite normal.’ Then at the very first meal, if I had but known it, was a very strange thing. I was put to sit next to Frank Buchman who was the founder of the Oxford Group.  Much to my relief he made no religious remarks to me of any kind at all, beyond at one point looking out of the window and saying, ‘Every prospect pleases and man is not vile so we are quite all right.’  Then we went in and had a meeting which again struck me as something new and original because we didn’t start with a hymn and a prayer, we started by saying what a good cup of coffee we had had after dinner.

As the evening went on a lot of young people spoke.  I was then about 20 and a lot of people my age spoke.  I began to realise that they had a quality of life which I really wanted deep in my heart and which I knew I hadn’t got. At that time I was rather waiting.  I was soon going off to train in midwifery at Queen Charlotte’s Hospital and this was a period of waiting really until I was able to go.

Well, that houseparty made all the difference to my life.  I was very much afraid because I am an emotional person and in missions in the parish I had at times given my life to God, but it never lasted.  I was very much afraid of doing it again because I thought this wouldn’t last either and if it didn’t every time I seemed rather further off. Looking back, now over 50 years in which it has lasted, I think the difference this time was that it was very positive.  I was made - at least I was advised I wasn’t made, nothing was forced upon me at all, quite the reverse.  I was taken very gently by the hand and shown that there are four great standards to measure life by, absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute unselfishness and absolute love. They told me that these were the standards of Christ himself. I was advised to try putting one at the head of a big sheet of paper and writing down underneath how I thought I didn’t conform to them.  I had a go at this and to my surprise I filled the papers.  Then I knelt down in my room - I remember very well - and I handed it all over to Christ at the foot of the Cross.  Again because I am a very simple ordinary person I burnt the paper as a sign that those things had been forgiven.  

When asked to say something at a meeting, I did not feel that I could say that I had given my life to God for ever and ever, because I was so unsure of myself.  I remember saying a very few halting words that I had learnt that Christ was the way of life - the words that helped me were a poem of two lines by Alice Meynell  ‘Thou art the way hads’t though been nothing but the goal I cannot say if thou woulds’t have ever met my soul.’ Christ was the way of life.  I said I am just trusting him.  I have given him myself today and tomorrow morning I will do the same and all being well the next day, but I don’t know.  From day to day, that’s what I want to do.

Julian was there at the houseparty.

Julian:  As far as I am concerned, we had better go back a bit, about 7 years. I went up to Oxford, to read Classics at Balliol in 1921.  I was put in touch with a number of good Christian people in the university who helped me a lot in various ways. I had been confirmed at school, it had meant something to me. Not a great deal but it had meant a fair amount and I carried on my religious practices quite regularly.  Towards the end of my first year at Oxford two important things happened, in the light of what occurred subsequently.

One was that I was invited to go up to the Keswick Convention in the summer of 1922 with a party of other Oxford undergraduates, an invitation which I accepted. The Keswick Convention is an inter-denominational gathering, founded for the deepening of the spiritual life round about 1875, I am not sure the exact date.  I suppose it is probably not unconnected with the missions of Moody and Sankey, the evangelical movement and revival going on in North America and spreading across to England and the continent around that sort of time.  A few weeks before the end of that term I remember meeting with another old school and Oxford friend of mine one morning in Broad Street, outside Balliol.  He told me of a very harassing experience he had had the night before when he had met a dreadful man called Frank Buchman, against whom he wished to warn me very solemnly indeed, because he was a very terrible person whom I should carefully avoid.

So I replied that I had never heard of Frank Buchman but was careful to take this advice.  My interlocuter was in fact a person I respected, a very fine person, subsequently a quite leading MP and holder of office in Neville Chamberlain’s government.  In the end he gave his life very nobly, I think, during the Second World War - he was killed in Italy.

Well I duly went to the Oxford houseparty at the Keswick Convention.  A party of Oxford undergraduates were entertained there year after year, most generously, entirely free, as the guests of a marvellous old couple from Scotland, now by this time very old.  They weren’t there that year, I met them later on.  They had attended the first Keswick Convention on their honeymoon in 1875, or thereabouts, and their lives had been changed by it.  There I was with a number of people of my own age, sharing a bedroom with a couple of them one of whom became a very great friend of mine.  He later on was Dean of Bristol and died about 5 years ago, Douglas Harrison.

One night we came in to supper with Bishop Taylor Smith.  It was the custom at the Oxford houseparty to have evening prayers and generally got in one of the main speakers to talk to us after supper.  What he talked about I have not the faintest idea but he was a marvellous person.  Very disconcerting because he was enormously fat (that was not disconcerting that was rather comforting) but he had the habit of looking at you and saying ‘Now, what was your best thought today?’  What you had to do then was to produce the verse in your bible reading that morning which had meant most to you.  If you hadn’t read the bible or read it rather casually this could be rather disconcerting, as you can perhaps imagine.

Anyhow, he took prayers and at the end of it we all knelt down and were praying and, for the first time in my life I came out in the presence of other people, aloud, with various things that were wrong in my own life - I can’t remember exactly what they all were - and did make a surrender of myself to Christ in that respect.  This I think was when the fires laid by my father and mother had the match put to them and things were set on fire.  Our Oxford houseparty at Keswick meant, through Bishop Taylor Smith, what I always regard as the most decisive moment in my own conversion and life was entirely different.  Two or three days later one of the other members of this houseparty brought Dr Buchman in to supper and he took prayers.   I think it was one or two of the Americans in our party who brought him.  He wasn’t Dr then, his doctorate came later.  Remembering the awful warning which I had heard in Oxford only a few weeks before, I was extremely careful to keep right at the other end of the room and avoid anything to do with this man.  I probably warned other people against him too, I can’t quite remember.  I can’t remember anything much about him that particular night except my own anxiety to keep out of the way.

So this all ended and I went back to Oxford.  During the following year, my second year as an undergraduate, I forget really quite how but I heard a good deal more about Buchman.  I realised that the warning I had been given was incorrect, and that the truth about Buchman was in fact quite different.  I had entirely misjudged him and if I had said unpleasant things about him, which I probably had, they were wrong things that shouldn’t have been said.  When I was up at Keswick again the following year for another party of Oxford undergraduates there, I heard that Buchman was there.  I think I was sitting in St John’s Church quietly one morning, I can’t quite remember, anyhow the conviction came strongly to my mind that really I had been very wrong in the attitude I had taken to Buchman the year before and that as he was about in the place I ought in decency to go and apologise to him for this attitude and for anything I had said wrong.  I also had the feeling that there were things in my own life which were not by any means straight and upon which I felt he could probably help me, from what I had heard about him.

So I went round one evening to the hotel where he was staying and we had a considerable talk together, and he was a very great help to me.  At that time he was very cheerful and matter-of-fact, down-to-earth, practical, gave good sound pieces of practical advice about how to live a pure life.  I think we prayed together and then if I remember rightly he said ‘Let’s go round into the later part of the general meeting in the big tent’.  This was 1923, so he would have been at that time a man of about 44 or 45 I suppose.  I remember his celebrating his 50th birthday at Oxford a few years later.

At Balliol I took “Mods and Greats” and I was extremely fortunate in having at all three stages three or four of the best tutors in Oxford. [Julian got a Double First, and then a Triple First when he added Theology a year or two later]. As it so happened they were all extraordinarily good people in their own subjects.  I think I am right in saying that without exception, not quite, almost without exception, they did also happen to be people who were men of Christian faith.  One was Cyril Bailey who was a leading Anglo-Catholic, another Pickard Cambridge, my main tutor, who was a leading evangelical.  Those were the two Honour Mods. tutors of my first 18 months. My Greats tutors were perhaps not quite so markedly Christian but they were people of faith - John Macmurray and Charles Morris.  Then for Theology I was extraordinarily lucky because I was to have gone to DC Simpson of Keble, who did most of the Balliol Theology at that time, we had no Balliol theology tutor.  But Simpson got made a Professor just that long vacation so he was no longer able to take me.  Instead I was sent in next door to Kenneth Kirk, who was at that time Chaplain of Trinity, later Bishop of Oxford.  Theologically Kenneth Kirk and I were about as far apart as the sun and moon could be but he was a superb tutor.   He was extraordinarily kind to me and I owe a very great deal to him.  Later when he was a Bishop and I was a priest in the Oxford diocese he was extremely kind to me right to the end of his life.

I was ordained in 1926, and ordained onto the staff of Wycliff Hall where I had gone for my theological training on the more pastoral side.  Wycliff Hall is a theological college at Oxford, founded in 1877.  I was there under the principalship of George Francis Graham-Brown and ordained onto the staff there.  Then two years later in 1928 I was appointed Fellow and Chaplain of Corpus Christi College where I was for 5 years.  At Corpus I was a very bad chaplain, I think looking back.  I was appointed far too young, I hadn’t enough experience.  I don’t think I was at all the right person to do it but I am very grateful for having had the time there.  In the intervening years I kept up more or less but intermittently with Frank Buchman and his work.  What had impressed me as a young don in Oxford was that quite obviously people with whom Buchman had been in touch, though he wasn’t much at Oxford himself during those years, these people, undergraduates for the most part, and slightly older undergraduates, were quite obviously reaching, helping and changing the lives of a number of people whom I had no power to reach and touch.

Buchman had given them some good sound advice of reading their bibles for one thing, particularly their New Testaments, of making a very real time of quietly listening to God in the early morning, directing their minds towards God and letting God talk to them.  Buchman used to make a great point that prayer was intended to be a two-way matter.  It wasn’t just a matter of talking to God down the telephone, you had to let God talk to you.  He used the simple phrase ‘you have got two ears and one mouth, you ought to listen to God twice as much as you talk’. Not a bad principle for Christian life in fact.  By keeping together and talking to each other about these things, Buchman’s friends of whom I became one in due course, were able to make quite a lot of progress and had a considerable impact in the university.

About 1928 (I went to Corpus in 1928) or so I had the feeling that it would be right to allow this group of people, if they wished to do so, to come and meet in my rooms on Sunday nights and this they did.  It was a matter of some criticism in the college at the time, but this used to happen.  There were all kinds of stories going round about Buchman.    the light of later events one sees I think that some of these things had been planted in people’s minds.   He was supposed to be emotional, he was supposed to be mad about the idea of talking about sex, and that these meetings were really a kind of perverted sexual orgy of some kind.  This sort of idea went round.  Naturally senior and responsible people hearing this were worried and may have made their enquiries.  Certain very senior people in the University, including Sandy Lindsay, the Master of Balliol, and WB Selby, the Principal of Mansfield College - known because of his diminutive size and his superb eloquence as ‘the inspired mouse’ - these and other people made enquiries and wrote a letter to The Times saying that they had enquired into the matter (I think FR Barry wrote too) and that they had come to the conclusion that Buchman’s work was extremely sound and good and to be encouraged.

Certain rather amusing things happened.  Of course one did have a certain temptation to soft-pedal one’s connection with Buchman slightly in this kind of atmosphere.  I remember, it seems ridiculous now but it was a great issue with me at one stage:- was I prepared to take Buchman in as my guest to dine at High Table in Corpus?  It took me a long time to summon up my courage to do this but finally Buchman came and it so happened that I think there were only 2 guests there that night and the other guest who was dining with the President of the College was one of Buchman’s sharpest critics at Oxford.  As duty bound, and a matter of courtesy, I took my guest up to sit beside the President, as I was expected to, and therefore Buchman and his chief critic were face to face across the table.  It amused me highly that the President in fact talked to Buchman rather than to his own guest practically the whole dinner.  What about I can’t remember.

I can’t remember quite when these Sunday night meetings began, but what used to happen was that on a Sunday night it was a kind of clearing house for those who were connected with the Oxford Group to bring along our friends to meet some of our other friends within the Oxford Group.  It was rather a kind of free-for-all. Somebody would take responsibility for leading this meeting in my rooms in the Fellows’ buildings.  People would talk about decisions they had made during the week.  They were free entirely to get up and say anything they liked, as rude or as anything else that they wished to. There were no holds barred about this and there was plenty of free and vigorous speaking on this occasion, particularly when a number of people came who were very keen motorcyclists from a motor club several of them attended.  They were extremely interesting people. They arrived, certainly on occasions, armed with large mugs of beer which they drank rather noisily, gulped down in the back row, and made rude remarks from time to time. I always liked it because the ruder they got the happier the rest of us were, because it is a well-known fact of human life and divine life that, if you really are challenged by something, your reaction is that you might accept it or if you don’t accept you will have to fight all the harder.  So when these friends from the motor club became linguistically violent, this was clear evidence that the hook was very firmly in their mouths and something of considerable importance was going to happen - which indeed it did. Two or three of them got very considerably changed as a result.

RAE Holme: I was one of those in the Oxford University Motorcycle Racing Club - we had just been in the Isle of Man in what was the last amateur TT race, because we had been found to be very rascally and dishonest.  Many of the competitors had not been amateurs at all but had been getting help from the Castrol oil company, KLG sparking plugs, and all sorts of things which disqualified them technically from being in an amateur TT race.  I myself had a works Rudge Ulster (?)  handed to me on a plate because I threatened to disgrace the firm of Rudge Whitfield by entering the old trails machine, on which I had incidentally won the Oxford-Cambridge trial.  We were very interested to know what had happened to the secretary of our club who was the son of a very distinguished Classical professor.  He was also a great figure at the League of Nations.  Was he at these meetings?   I have never been able to discover whether Stephen was in those meetings earlier on or what part he had.

Julian: I cannot I am afraid remember exactly the order of events of who was there before whom and whose lives were changed in what particular order.  Certainly one of the people concerned was Stephen Murray who was a prominent member of this club and who certainly did undergo a very considerable change in his life.

RAEH: What did we look like from the point of view of the chairman of the meeting?

Julian: Ooh, pretty ordinary I think really. In those days, if I remember rightly at this distance of time, I don’t think that undergraduates were marked by such sartorial peculiarities as they are today. I think people dressed pretty normally, whatever they were like, in very much the same kind of way. It was I suppose the period of Oxford ‘bags’, which were trousers which measured about 50” around each leg at the bottom.  They were not any particular mark of rebellion or anything - people wore them quite indifferently.

RAEH: I remember the effect of the meeting was like being shot at with machine guns from several sides. We ended up feeling rather like a sieve because there were good boys, so to speak, who spoke of their change and there were equally bad ones, or even worse than we were, who could out-trump us.  So we got it from all angles.  I can tell you in the back row you really felt shot up!

Julian:  You never quite knew who was going to turn up. There was one occasion when the Bishop of Leicester, I think it was, was preaching the University sermon in St Mary’s at 8 o’clock.  He had heard about these meetings and was very anxious to come and see what was going on and I think I am right in saying that it was a cousin of his whom he had never met, an undergraduate also later a Bishop, who was at that time leading the meeting that night. They met then for the first time. The Bishop came across from St Mary’s to the meeting in Corpus.  The meeting was half way through and the room was absolutely packed with people. It would hold 60, sitting on the floor.  If it got beyond 60 we had to move and go down to a room downstairs in case the floor gave way and the furnaces were below that. At the time I had living underneath me a young history don, a Cornishman, who was very nervous about these meetings not for any social reason but he had awful stories about people who had danced so violently at a rival meeting in Cornwall that the floor of the barn had given way.  He had visions of 60 undergraduates coming through on his head down below.  Actually he was rather alarmed.  I sympathised and understood.

Anyhow this Bishop arrived and looked into the room.  There was just room to get him into the door.  These were the days when Bishops still wore all the kind of paraphernalia of aprons and gaiters and that kind of thing.  He was in full proper episcopal dress.  It was characteristic of him, a man of immense modesty and charm and spiritual power altogether, that he took it all in in a second and just sat straight down on the floor exactly as he was by the door, gaiters, apron all the rest of it.  Cyril Bardsley - a very great person.

RAEH : In those days there seems to have been a reaping of a crop of undergraduates who went out into the world.  They met every day at St Mary’s church.  What was the secret behind this?  It was a very difficult thing to achieve to weld a force of people, to sort of grow them out of the soil, cultivate them and then so to speak market them on a world scale.

Julian:  Of course, one talks about Buchman, quite rightly, as having done a great job in connection with Oxford but Buchman himself would have been the first person to say that this was in fact the work of God, more particularly of God the Holy Spirit, who was very active in Oxford at that particular time.  Looking back now, I think I can see that that generation - the generation to which the motor club belonged, the people who came up about 1928,29,30 - were probably the first generation who were really coming up pretty well free from the reaction after the First World War. When I was up as an undergraduate we were still very much dominated by it.   I was too young to fight in the First World War but we were still very much dominated by all that.  Then Oxford went through a rather tough period after that.  Around about 1928,29,30 I think Oxford was beginning to recover something of itself and this worked out in various streams.  There was a strong religious movement at that time, not only with Buchman but other things happening too.  The coming of FR Barry to be Vicar of University Church was a very great stimulus to Christian life in Oxford. The coming of first of all Christopher Chavasse (?) and then later on Edward Mole to be Rector of St Aldate’s again had a great effect upon Oxford and Oxford life.  The other stream things e.g.the perennial idealism of young people showed itself in great sympathy with for example the Hunger Marchers from Jarrow.  This was just the beginning of the period of the Great Depression.  The October Club, which was a Communist Party thing in Oxford, was also founded about this time, getting its name from the October Revolution in Russia.  There was certainly a period about 1930 when not only I but other people of quite different outlooks were saying quite firmly that the two most vital things going on in Oxford at that particular moment were the October Club and the Oxford Group.  They were poles apart, though it was interesting how people might move from one to the other, quite rapidly and did. This was all going on in Oxford at the time.  There was a fertile soil for seed to be sown in and to grow, and the Spirit of God was very much operative and using people like Buchman in this connection.

As I think about it I see Buchman very much as a pioneer thinker, inspired I know by the spirit of God, to have ideas and put them into practice a long way ahead of a great many of his contemporaries.  Things which have become considerable forces in Christian life across the world since then were already blossoming in Buchman’s mind and were to become things much in the life and practice of the churches at a very much later stage.

For example, we hear a great deal these days about the church in the house, the small family group.  In many ways, talking now in 1979, this is in many places tending to be a much more vital centre of life than the more institutional life of the churches and chapels - this smaller, more intimate thing.  Of course there is nothing new in this, you can trace it back to the Wesleyan class meetings of the 18th century.  You can trace it back to the upper room in the Acts of the Apostles.  Buchman talked a lot about the church in the house and the small group was one thing which he very much was led to pioneer.  A thing which the church has later and in a bigger way begun to see and use.

Quite a lot was forming in his own mind because he was a person who was developing in his mind and his spiritual life and vision all through his life, right to the end.  He was never static - he saw too a great deal of what technically theologians and churchmen talk about nowadays as ‘interfaith dialogue’.  The relationships between the great faiths of the world - Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism and so on.  He had a realisation that whilst he himself was a very confirmed and convinced Christian and a firm believer in the uniqueness of the incarnation of Christ and of the resurrection and so on, yet the various religions had a lot to give to each other and to learn from each other.  This again is something in which he was a long way ahead.  William Temple, who was roughly his contemporary in age, was thinking a bit in the same kind of way.  It comes out in the Report of the Jerusalem Conference of 1928. (Temple became Archbishop of York and one of the great moments of Oxford life was William Temple’s mission to the University in 1930 which nobody who was there will ever forget for a moment.  It was an amazing experience to be present at such a moment.

Temple was a very great man, who incidentally I remember in quite a different connection.  Towards the end of the Second World War when Temple was Archbishop of Canterbury and was at Lambeth, I was very anxious along with Peter Howard to get permission to go to America in order to link up with Buchman and others who were on that side, and this would be 1944.  I remember going with Peter Howard to see William Temple at Lambeth in order to enlist his support because it was very hard to get permission to go abroad.  We failed in the end but we went to see William Temple to ask his help.  It was a highly adventurous journey because the flying bombs were just beginning and we were out of our taxi two or three times in the course of the journey from Central London to Lambeth that afternoon.  It was quite exciting.  When we got there, we found Temple sitting in his room in Lambeth, window facing out more or less south-east, quite unmoved by the bombs and so on, and he said, ‘I can see them coming if I sit here and if they are coming very close my staff tell me to get into that passage just round the corner.’ Completely unmoved, he was a man of very great physical courage.  I believe that when there was the so-called Baedeker raid on Canterbury he was there and that his staff practically had to hold him down by force because he was trying to see what he could do for people while the bombs were actually still falling.

Anyhow what I was really going to say was that he was in very great sympathy with the work which Buchman was doing and realised that this was something of God which was happening, as indeed his successor Cosmo Lang did too.  I remember Temple doing a great deal, though it was in the end unsuccessful, to try and get us permission to go off to America.  He wrote with his own hand a long letter to the Foreign Secretary of the time saying it was important we should go and did all he could to help us to go.

RAEH: At the same time many people were far from sympathetic. One of your books was to controvert one of these men I suppose, Tom Driberg, who launched a considerable attack I understand from 1928 on, didn’t he, as a newspaper man?

Julian: What was not yet known as Moral Re-Armament, the Oxford Group, did of course have a good many enemies in many places. And sometimes this was just due to misunderstanding and misinformation, quite honest misunderstanding and in that case perfectly understandable.  Other cases, I am afraid that the misunderstandings and misinformation were the result of deliberate propaganda on the part of people who probably had been in one way or another challenged in their own personal lives by the Oxford Group.  They reacted not by accepting the standards of Christ but by violent criticism.  I suppose the most outstanding of those was Mr Tom Driberg, who was an undergraduate at Oxford shortly after the First World War, later an MP, and who was an implacable enemy of Buchman for many years for reasons which some of us knew something about at the time and which became quite obvious in the book, Driberg’s autobiography, published after his death.  Naturally he couldn’t accept the kind of standards that Buchman stood for. He also wrote earlier a book against MRA called ‘The Mystery of MRA’, a book which I think was intended as a source of misinformation to go round the world, and was only too successful in many ways in doing so.  The book which I wrote, ‘The Open Secret of MRA’ was in some sense not exactly a reply to that book because they were published at the same time. It was rather a reply to some lectures which Driberg had given in Scandinavia upon the subject a bit earlier. The books in fact came out at the same time and we reviewed each other’s books - I forget now for whom. I never met him personally.

RAE Holme: Interesting that one way or another Driberg’s book was found all over the place, in embassies and in all the libraries of Fleet Street.  His articles attacking the OG got into the clippings services of every newspaper library of Fleet Street and formed the basis that any journalist would naturally refer to for background.  It was a very widespread net of hostility and misinformation.  I was interested in the excellent documentation of the book you wrote, even though Driberg in my view, being a crafty news man, had got the better title psychologically.

Julian:  Of course there is a close connection between the words ‘mystery’ and ‘open secret’, closer than you might think unless you happen to be a student of the Greek New Testament. You see the word ‘mystery’ is of course a Greek word.  Properly speaking, it means something about which you kept your mouth shut, and in front of which you kept your eyes shut.  There was a primitive barbarian custom, which had certain parallels in Oxford, which was not keeping your mouth shut - not in the sense of talking about things you ought not to talk about but seeing how much liquor you could get down your throat without closing your mouth.  It is closely paralleled to a practice known in Oxford colleges as ‘flooring a sconce’ which was a penalty in older days - I don’t know whether it still happens - inflicted for misbehaviour or supposed misbehaviour at table.  It was very much at the discretion of the senior scholar present and how often the penalties were inflicted would very often depend upon how thirsty the senior scholar was that night because if the man could not manage to get the sconce down the first go, the beer was then passed to the senior scholar, who then had the rest of it.  This was very popular.

St Paul took the Greek word for keeping your mouth shut and used it quite frequently.  St Paul’s use of the word is exactly ‘open secret’ because what St Paul says over and over again is that God had kept a secret for a very long time - what he intended to do in Jesus Christ.  God had kept this secret but now, in the first century AD, as we think of it, God had revealed his secret and it was now something which everybody could look at and which Paul and others, Frank Buchman in later times, made it their great business to proclaim from the housetops.

Now let us go back in thinking to the actual movements in Oxford and what came out of it all.  By about 1932, the force of men and women in Oxford who had been in touch with the Oxford Group was a very considerable one and began to move out from Oxford into other parts of the United Kingdom.  I always feel myself that one small, but quite crucial movement of this kind, was a party of us going down to a Congregationalist church in South London.  It was the home church of my friend Roland Wilson, who later on became for many years Secretary of The Oxford Group.  Quite a force of us went down at that particular time and I think that was the sort of start of things moving round the country quite considerably.  By this time a very large number of clergy and ministers had become aware that something significant was happening in Oxford and were interested about it and began to come to the houseparty conferences organised in Oxford and elsewhere.  All this had a very considerable effect upon the church of the country during the middle 1930s .

Then there came a really very drastic move out where Buchman began to take parties of people to different parts of the world - back to his own United States of America, to Canada, to South Africa and elsewhere.  His vision of personal change moving on into national, racial, international change, was really beginning to come true.  I can’t talk myself very much from personal experience of what happened across the world during those following years because in 1933 I personally moved out from Oxford to become Headmaster of St George’s School, Jerusalem and was there then for 7 years until after the outbreak of war when I came back to Oxford permanently.  Certainly I found that the things I had been taught in Oxford, which I had learnt through the Oxford Group, were of very great value and helped to me particularly in dealing with the many Moslem friends whom I made in Palestine during those years.  I learnt much of the way in which there could be a very real fellowship and understanding between people of different faiths if they were honest with each other and were prepared to approach problems, really listening for what was the right kind of answer to them. I found this a very great help in dealing with boys in the school of which I was headmaster.

One interesting experience was that for internal reasons I suddenly found myself teaching a class of mixed Moslems, Jews and Christians, aged about 15, the history of the Crusades, about which I knew absolutely nothing.  It was a most fascinating experience that term altogether, as anybody can imagine.  Think what the background of the Crusades is.  Whether they learnt much I am not quite sure.  I learnt an awful lot.  The great point about it was that they were all chaps who had been in school for some time and we trusted each other.  We could talk pretty frankly about our own convictions and didn’t need to be afraid about pulling punches.  Hard words but no hard feelings at all and it was a gathering of friends.  That kind of approach to people of other nationalities and faiths is something for which I am extremely grateful, much of which I learnt in the Oxford Group.  To look not for the points of disagreement but for the points of agreement and readiness to go forward together from this to explore further things.

What I have also found very much myself in meeting with people of other faiths is that the last thing they want one to do is to play down one’s own Christian convictions.  They want one to express these fully and strongly.  Obviously with a proper sense of respect and common courtesy to other religions, not being rude about them but they want one to say very firmly, ‘now I as a Christian hold this that and the other, what do you feel as a Moslem and a Hindu?’  I have learnt a great deal from my Moslem and Hindu friends in this kind of way.

When I went out to Jerusalem my mother and sister came out with me, my father having died in the meantime and my sister employed her midwifery training to looking after the health of small boys.

Jean: Yes, that seemed to be the need of the moment there.  I was a little bit nervous about this at the beginning but I had had certain experience of other nursing and of First Aid.  As the need was there in the school I had to go to work.  Over this matter, living with those of other faiths, I too felt that what I had learnt through the Oxford Group was such an immense help.

For instance, one day I went back into my little sickroom which I had for any of the boys who were boarders and who were ill and I had four boys in.  One of them said to me, ‘Miss Duesbery while you have been out of the room Aboudi has been very naughty’.  I looked over into the corner of the room and there in his bed, sitting upright and looking like a thunderstorm was a small boy of about 5 or 6 years old, a little Moslem boy.  He looked thoroughly angry and sullen.  So I said, ‘Well, what  has he been doing?’ ‘Oh he has been saying, “You are Christians. I - I am a Moslem.”’ Well I thought quickly and threw myself back on God over it and said, ‘Now what am I to say?’ Then it came to me and I said, ‘Well, he is quite right, isn’t he?’ ignoring rather the tone of voice in which it had been said.  I said, ‘You see, he is a Moslem and we are Christians.’ The other three boys happened to be Christians, Arab and Greek.  I said, ‘Yes, we are Christians, he is a Moslem but the thing that really matters to us here and now is that we are the children of one father.’ At that this little boy jumped up on the bed, because he was only really a baby, about 5.  He bounced up and down and said, ‘Yes, yes, that’s right. Miss Duesbery’s right.’  Then without a shade of change he just turned so happily and pointed to a picture of the Good Shepherd above the bed and he said, ‘And look fellows (all in Arabic, of course) this is Jesus and these big sheep are the big people and the lambs are the little people, the children.  You see this little lamb that Jesus has in his arms, it isn’t afraid because he has it in his heart.’  I thought it was one of the most wonderful interpretations of the Christian message from that little Moslem boy that I had ever heard.  Yet there was no conflict for him.  He felt we were the children of one father.  This approach I had learnt very largely through the Oxford Group.

Julian:  I would want to start from the point that Christ did conceive his mission to be a universal one, that he was sent to everybody.  This does really run right through the New Testament.  You get it for example with the people at Pentecost.  We do hear all that long list of names.  St Paul in the opening chapter of Romans, which I suppose is his first theological work, does speak about God always having had a witness wherever he has been.  Paul said the same thing in his sermon at Athens.  In his letter to the Colossians in chapter 1 he makes very strong statements about the universality of Christ.  All these people felt they were preparing for a cosmic Christ who had a message for the world and was of great significance for the world. The same sort of thing comes out in the opening verses of St John’s gospel, which are very important in this connection.  

(and a long piece elaborating about this... which I have not typed out)

Our business is to talk to people in language they can understand and start from the place where they are.  This isn’t new but it is so much the thing which Frank Buchman did insist upon.  Go back to where people are and start there.  It is no good - I forget Frank’s picturesque phrase - his equivalent of casting your pearls before swine ... that’s right: putting the hay where the mules can get it.  This has a great application to Christian things because time and time again, and this was true before Buchman’s time also, you have to approach people at the point of their need and at the point where they are prepared to listen.  Where you have something to give them and where, which is perhaps even more important, you go to them with the sense of having something to receive from them.  This is, time and time again, the way in which people are won.  You win people’s confidence by asking them to do things for you.

One has seen over and over again all sorts of ways in which people can be included, by asking them to do something for you.  They then feel themselves ready to do more on the next step.  I am sure that this is part of going to people and ‘proclaiming in their own language’ the wonderful works of God.  I am sure this is the kind of thing we have got to do.  You can’t go rushing people in this kind of way.  I know my own temptation is to go too slow and not nearly courageous enough.  I am conscious of this and I know it is wrong in me.  I am not quick enough and drastic enough, not challenging enough but I am sure that the opposite effect is equally wrong, people who try and ram it all down your throat, may extort some kind of verbal profession of some kind but it doesn’t last.

Where you really do go to people is that you go to them with the proclamation of what you already know.  You are going to talk to somebody and you are going to talk about something that is already here.

There is a good story about a man who was a patient in some mission hospital in South India somewhere and went off back to some extremely backward, out of the way village.  Years and years later the first Christian arrived in this place, and started talking about Jesus and telling stories about him.  ‘Oh well we know all about him, he is here!’ said the villagers.  ‘He lives here, come and meet him.  He is up there in that hut, that’s where he lives’.  They took him back to this chap who had been at the hospital, whose life had been changed there and who had lived there in such a way that they all knew Christ in that kind of way. In that particular case they hadn’t even had the advantage of having a bible!

I think this kind of thing is the sort of thing which we are rediscovering.  These are things which a lot of people are writing about and saying.  There is this rediscovery of the new language in which you have got to talk to people.  A new language is desperately needed.

I got a much clearer sense about this in India and found there that so many of the Hindu and Moslem people that one met didn’t want you to water down your message.  They wanted you to say you were a Christian, say what you believed, but to do so with proper sense of respect.  Not ‘We are the people and wisdom will die with us’ - not all that but ‘We have found so and so and so and so, it has been a help to us, we say that this is Christ doing this to us and for us and in us, and we find it very helpful, you may find it the same.’  I am sure that this is the kind of approach - a sort of Christian modesty.

Christ always approached people as people and not as ‘souls’, so to speak on the coconut shies to be knocked down and collected.  I am sure this is the kind of way we have got to approach people in these days.  It seems to me this is what MRA can do.

There has been so much in the past of a sort of Christian imperialism where you come as the superior religion, to lord it over everybody else.  We probably do believe it is the best religion because we profess it and Christ means that to us but Christ himself after all, when he really wanted to teach his disciples how to behave, washed their feet.  He said emphatically ‘You are not to go about posing as benefactors and lording it over people.  You are to approach them with humility’.  Over and over again this point is made and I am sure this is true.  I always thought in my ignorance as a young man that I was nice and free from racial and colour prejudice till I went to Palestine and I jolly soon found I wasn’t.  I very soon realised out there that there was any amount of racial superiority in me which is still there but I hope that I am a bit more conscious of it than I was, and that I have had it dealt with to some extent.  

It dies very hard and this kind of superiority is one of the particular besetting sins of the clergy.  Over and over and over again it is coming back to the narrow English parish life.  Constantly you find the thing that really upsets the laity is that their parish priests will behave like tin gods. The laymen are partly to blame themselves because they will insist on building large pedestals and putting little tin gods on top and treating their priests like that.  It is for the priest to start getting down off there as quickly as possible.  I am sure that what is true there in the narrower field of the parish at home is equally true when the church moves out into wider world things and dealing with other religions.  Approach them with what they have to give you as well as with what you have to give them.

Christ for example was prepared to take things from the hands of tax-gatherers and prostitutes and so on.  Why shouldn’t we take things from the hands of thoroughly good and godly Moslems and Hindus?  I am sure there is an awful lot along those lines.  It is one of the points where, as I see it, God has raised up MRA to be a sort of pioneer and spearhead of his way of approaching people in the modern world.

RAEH: It can also be a danger in MRA itself of feeling it is a sort of elite force of tough spiritual commandos who are like the SAS, super troops who spearhead everything. Again one has to watch that one isn’t feeling like elite troops and handing it out to the lesser ones.

Julian: As I see it this is something where in MRA we have often been responsible for misunderstanding and for giving much offence.  We have made a lot of mistakes in the past and we have made mistakes particularly I think in dealing with the churches and with individual clergymen.  It is very understandable, particularly with younger and less-experienced people who have been to some MRA thing and come into a new experience of life which they somehow hadn’t found at their home church. They go back and go and see the vicar and say to him, ‘Now I have really got it, and now I will tell you.’  Not unnaturally, a man of about 50 unless he has got a good deal of grace would find this very hard to accept.  He may be gracious enough to do so, but it isn’t very easy.  Quite a lot of the misunderstanding from the church has been caused by attitudes of that kind, for which truly it is our fault.

RAEH: Do you think that the Dean and Chapter of Liverpool Cathedral have recovered from the occasion on which Loudon Hamilton and I were invited to talk to them and I as a brash pagan said, ‘How many of you have been to a petting party?’ I was still alive at the end of the proceedings.

Julian: Well the Dean and Chapter of that time are now dead, I think all of them!

Jean: Our mother, who had a very close personal relationship with Our Lord and to whom her bible meant so very much, she herself when she first met the Oxford Group really through my brother and through me, saw how much it had given to us. But this one thing she fought against - she used to say ‘I think it is rather ridiculous when everybody gets their little guidance books out and starts writing in them’. Then one day she was reading in her bible and she was reading from the prophet Habakkuk, which made all the difference to her: ‘The Lord’s answer to Habakkuk. He said’ I will climb my watch tower and wait to see what the Lord will tell me to say, and what answer he will send to my complaint. The Lord gave me this answer - write down clearly on clay tablets what I reveal to you so that it can be read at a glance. Put it in writing, because it is not yet time for it to come true, but the time is coming quickly and what I show you will come true. It may seem slow in coming, but wait for it. It will certainly take place and it will not be delayed.’

And from that day, when our mother wrote those words, she always kept her little quiet-time book and I have some of them at home now that were kept up to the time of her very last illness.

Julian: People naturally wonder about seeking God’s will and getting God’s guidance and they realise that this is a very important matter.  I would like to say this first - that I do believe very strongly that if you really have sincerely tried to look for guidance, even if you may think afterwards that you may have made a mistake about it, nonetheless God honours your sincerity.  He doesn’t allow the effects of the mistake to be too bad, either for yourself or for other people.

The main point I really want to make is that this is not something which you can just, as it were, pick up the telephone and ring up Tim, or get the latest Test Match score or anything of that sort, or looking at Ceefax or something. God’s guidance will be given to you at the time you need it.  It may come to you with great rapidity and in moments of crisis.  If you are living near enough to God you will know what to do but upon matters affecting things like careers and moving into a fresh job, getting married I suppose (though I have never tried that!) there are very often quite considerable periods of time when you have got to go along quite a long way and God sorts things out for you.  You don’t always see immediately what you have got to do.  For me personally the way God sorts things out of that kind of situation is largely by showing me what my real motives are, and making it clear to me why I want or don’t want to do a thing.  Once I have really seen that, I am generally fairly sure what I ought to do.

I remember just at the end of my student time at Oxford, I was offered a particular job which I very much wanted to take.  The Principal of my theological college was equally clear that I ought not to take it or that I ought to do something else.  I had a dreadful time for about a week about all this, or perhaps even slightly more.  I thrashed this thing to and fro’, I prayed about it, I tried to listen to God about it, but it really would not get clear.  It was becoming rather important because I had got a very important exam coming in a few weeks’ time and this was stopping me working. Finally, I went along and was talking to my Principal one evening.  We prayed together and then I went out and walked up Woodstock Road.  I was crawling along the Woodstock Road feeling most depressed and upset about all this and could not see what I ought to do.  I remember exactly where the thing happened.  I was just passing St Philip & St James Church and I just had a flash of insight, ‘The reason you want to take that job is a wrong reason’.  I saw why it was wrong.  I turned straight back.  I had been walking at the rate of about one mile an hour and walked back as fast as I could to my rooms, wrote the letter, posted it off and refused the job.  I have never had the smallest doubt ever since that it was entirely the right decision.  

God is very patient and he does have to give one time.  Then very often I find that one needs the help and wisdom too of other friends who are similarly believing in the guidance of God and believe that God does guide you.  They need to be there to sort out all these things involved.  There are practical things very often - some of the things may have to do with practical things like pounds, shillings and pence, and job prospects, all this kind of thing - that kind of advice comes into it.

I think the deeper spiritual issues of pride and fear particularly about things, why you want or why you don’t want to take a particular decision and so on, those are more important and you often need the help of friends about that.

I think it is also very important to bear in mind, and this is also important when your friends honour you by asking your advice, to insist at the same time, ‘Well in the last resort it has got to be your decision and you personally have got to take responsibility for this.  We will help you all we can to sort out and see what it is, but finally in the last resort this is between you and God and you have got to decide what to do and do it.  This I think is vitally important.  One’s reference to the bible not, as I see it in the form of opening the book and putting a pencil down with your eyes shut on a verse in the Psalms, but a more informed and understanding study of the bible. The more you study it the more likely you are to see what is involved and things like summaries of bible teaching like the 4 absolute standards can help one again to see what is involved in all this. 
    
I was Head of St Peter’s College, Oxford for 13 years, the second time.  Putting it slightly paradoxically, I think my most important function really was just to be about in the quadrangle, by which of course I mean to be really accessible to people to come and talk to me about anything at any time. This applied both to students and to my colleagues. They didn’t always come.

There was a young man who said God
Must find it exceedingly odd
The tree which I see 
Can simply not be
When I am not out in the quad.

Dear Sir, It is not at all odd.  I am always about in the quad and the tree which you see will continue to be, since observed by, yours faithfully, God.

These things really have to do with the philosophy of Bishop Barclay and in a more extreme form .............................ism which I suppose is really the theory that you are the only thing which exists. A philosophy which people practice quite a lot but not actually put into those particular words.

RAEH: My picture of the head of a college would be someone who had a massive amount of paperwork and had his head down over a desk grinding away a lot of the time.

Julian: It is of course quite true, there is a lot of paperwork to do.  I personally had a very good secretary, which helped me very much over all that .  It made all the difference that she had a good memory but the really vitally important thing is your relationship with people.  This is what is so lacking very often in modern university life - people have got so much more into a kind of 9-5 mentality, that you go home at the end of it.  I  was blessed with tutors, when I was an undergraduate myself, who didn’t live like that but who cared for the college and cared for you 24 hours a day.  It didn’t make them love their wives any less, but probably rather more, but it did mean that you were being properly cared for.  These things about generation gaps and so on, they all come very much out of this, a lack of personal caring, that you think of education as something that you put across people, that you give them a lot of facts.  It is very important and it is extremely important that people should be taught to work and work hard, and intellectual standards ought to be extremely rigorous.  Of this I am quite clear but what matters in the last resort is that people should feel you care for them and you can only do this by doing it.  There is no other word for it.  It takes time and it takes thought but it is so supremely worthwhile.

Time and time again you find that differences between people get resolved if there is somebody who cares enough for the protagonists in the row concerned to care for them both and talk to them both and if and when the right moment arrives, to talk to them both together.  So frequently they need this kind of thing and it wants somebody to be there to give time for this sort of thing to happen.  I am sure this is what the best teachers always did.  I am sure Socrates did it, for one! I am sure Christ did it, unquestionably.  There are lovely little humorous touches in the gospels about this sort of thing.  We are told that Christ nicknames the two sons of Zebedee, James and John, Boanerges, which is an odd word which is supposed to mean ‘sons of thunder’.  Well I am pretty sure that this was really Christ’s way of laughing a couple of bad-tempered young men out of their bad temper and showing them how silly they were.

You can do such a lot when you help people to laugh at themselves. You mustn’t laugh at them yourself but, if people can be taught to laugh at themselves, they are nine-tenths of the way towards salvation.  In all sorts of ways this can happen.  I found this with my Arab boys in Palestine.  Arabs have a great sense of humour, if you can approach it in the right way.  It is very British, as a matter of fact - they are very like us in this respect. You can find very often great points on this but they have got to know subconsciously that you care for them, otherwise the situation is hopeless.  That is what lay at the back of the remark that Frank Buchman once made to me, ‘He said “Don’t you like those people?  It never occurs to me not to love people”.’

So much of education today suffers from facelessness and we do so much that is unfair on people, particularly scientists suffer from this.   We keep demanding that they should produce paper after paper, if they are going to get on, get promoted, get chairs and this kind of thing.   The result is that we keep them so tied down to their research they haven’t any time to care for their pupils as people and the whole thing suffers terribly as a result.  It is very important for the research to be done or the teaching will be bad but somehow people have got the find the balance between these two things which is very much lacking at the present time.

About the most important thing the head of a college has to do is to preside at meetings of the governing body and this certainly does call for caring for people and guidance from on high.  I recollect my last governing body just before I left St Peter’s.  After the end of term we were all very tired, a dreadful hot thundery, hot, humid day, Oxford at its worst.  Everybody in an extremely bad temper including me.   We were discussing new buildings for the College, which involved operations with our Methodist neighbours next door, with whom we had had excellent relationships and great friendships for many years.  Upon this particular point we were at loggerheads and it did seem as though we were on a collision course that was going to throw away all the good relationships of the past years.  I had the thought as I sat presiding at the meeting to ask the College to let me have one more shot, personally, to see whether I could sort things out and find a solution with the neighbours.  I put this to the College and they agreed that I should go and talk to the people next door about it all.

I had gone before the solution was finally worked out, but during the actual meeting that I had with them then, we were able to get the thing moving along the right course.  Finally a solution was worked out which I think actually greatly improved our building plans and which entirely satisfied our neighbours next door.  The result to look at now is extremely nice.

The point of issue about it all was the matter of ancient lights.  What we wanted to do was going to make the Methodist church darker in certain ways and they, not unnaturally, objected to this.  If I remember rightly the final solution was that we modified our plans.  The modification improved our things and we also paid for the Methodist to make another window in their church or something of the kind -  a fair and proper arrangement.  If you have enjoyed light coming through your window for some particular period of years, it may be 20, then that cannot be interfered with by anybody else without rendering them liable to legal process.  If you want to do this you have then got to reach some agreement with your neighbours because ancient lights were violated otherwise.

Jean:  At the age of 20, I made a new decision to give my life day by day to Christ, a very tentative decision because I had made such decisions before and they didn’t seem to last, but I faced frankly and plainly, the 4 standards and where I was failing on those and handed those over to Christ.  Then also I made restitution in the way that I had lived my latter school days on two very big lies at school.  I wrote to my past headmistress to tell her of these and of my new-found faith. I think that sealed the contract because God seemed to accept that daily giving.  

It wasn’t so very long after that decision that my new-found faith had to be put to the test when I went off to train at Queen Charlotte’s Hospital, as a midwife.  In those days training was pretty tough and you worked from 7 in the morning till 8 at night. You had one day off in 10 and you got very tired.  It was very difficult to keep any times of quiet.  I am afraid I often failed, because I wouldn’t like anybody to think - as I look back over 50 years of this life now - that my life was one steady spiritual ascent.  It was anything but.  I often liken it to a graph drawn on a paper.  You draw the line showing spiritual progress and I am afraid mine had tremendous drops - then rises again - then another drop - then a rise - but I think the difference for me was that the graph never went off the paper.  I seemed held by God even when I seemed to let go of him, through the training and through my district work.

In those days babies were born at home, it was the early 1930s, a time of terrible depression and unemployment.  I had patients in London in 1931 actually starving.  I think of one seeking to feed a newborn 2-day-old baby, who had had nothing to eat for the two days.  I went through the house, there was nothing.  One had these things and I am very grateful looking back for what happened afterwards that I had had these experiences in life and known what it was to be able to feel and to tell people that there was somebody who cared.

I think of one girl on the ward one night who had heard that day that she couldn’t feed her baby.  She was in floods of tears.  She said ‘My husband is out of work (she was 19).  I have nothing. When we go home the baby will die.  I can’t buy food for it.  I have no money.’  Very simply and very hesitantly , because I was only just a year or so older than her, I told her that I believed there was somebody who cared and that if we asked him he would care for her and her baby.  There in the ward, the other mothers asleep, the two of us prayed, two very ignorant girls.  The next day her husband brought her a present - two eggs in a paper bag.  He had been given a job back in his old firm that next morning.  Now we know prayer is not always answered like that but it was God’s goodness as I say to two very ignorant girls, but who were both going out into a little sea of trust, and trusting him.

That stayed with me through my training and later I went as a staff nurse in the Salvation Army Hospital in the Lower Clapton Road and worked with that wonderful body of people, the Salvationists.  I used to laugh because there was only myself and one other girl who was going out as a Methodist missionary who were not actually Salvationists.  They used to laugh and tease us and say, ‘Here come the 2 heathen’ in the morning when we came into breakfast but they never treated us like that.  We were one in our work there, and they were wonderful months that I spent there.

Then I travelled to what was Palestine in those days with my brother, who went out as a headmaster.  The idea was that I should learn Arabic and practice midwifery in the mission field, but I was rather needed in the school because it was quite largely a boarding school and there was nobody to care for the boys when they were ill or when they came in with injuries from the playing field, which were very rough.  So I took on that job and spent 6 years there in Jerusalem.

Then back to the Isle of Man. I hadn’t been well - in fact I had been pretty ill and one consultant out there in Jerusalem had said that I should never really do any strenuous or public work again.  For a year (the war had just started) I was fairly quiet in the Isle of Man.  I had my very beloved mother with me to care for, a house, a garden, grew vegetables, had poultry, did the things for the war.  We had Red Cross classes in our cottage and then I was asked to start Girl Guides.

I had forgotten all about the fact that I had been a Guide - probably the world’s worst when I was at school myself.  Despite all that, because the girls wanted it, it was wartime and it seemed to fit the need, I started.  That was the beginning again of work for other people.  I had my Guide company for nearly 30 years.  

Then two small girls too young for Guides came and stood under the fuschia arch that is outside my cottage.  They came and stood there every day until I agreed to start Brownies, I started Brownies. Then of course the Guides grew up and I started Rangers.  Then the boys came and Cubs were started. I had help in these different branches but I was largely responsible.  Then one day older boys came - you must remember it was wartime.  They said ‘You are doing this for the girls. What about us?’ So I laughed and I said, ‘Now can you picture me with a pole leading you over the moors and up the hills?’  Well, no they couldn’t, but one of them wisely remarked, ‘But you might run it until we get somebody better!’ and with that I started a Scout troop.  Fortunately for them, and possibly for me too, a local doctor took on the troop fairly soon after that.

My interest in Guiding has always remained and although I now work only in the background I am still there.  Through that I was asked to be a member of the Isle of Man Education Authority, because of my interest in young people, and the fact that the Isle of Man is formed partly today (the constitution has altered during the years that I have known it) of members of Tynwald, of government, but also all the areas of the island, the constituencies as they might be called in England. We call them Sheedings - an old Norse word for divisions of the island. Each Sheeding has so many members both in government and on the education authority.  I was elected as one of these non-government members of the authority.  I served for 10 years and at the end I was chairman of it.  In those days they had a non-government chairman.  I was chairman of various committees and then of the whole. Then I came out of it.

I had a very happy social life with my friends, I was enjoying a quiet and peaceable life and I thought that would probably be till the end of my days because I was by this time approaching the age of 60 and a general election was to take place in the Isle of Man. I came over to England to pay some visits.  I was in London one night and we went out to the Red Cross Club to dinner with a friend.  The porter came in and said I was needed on the telephone.  I was very surprised.  It was a call from the Isle of Man.  The constituents, the electorate in my part of the island, were not satisfied with the candidates who were standing and would I stand?  Now this may sound very extraordinary, but the members of government in the Isle of Man are mainly independents, therefore anybody, provided they can get the proper backing, can stand.

Of course I replied, ‘No not under any circumstances at all.  I am not politically minded, I know nothing about it, I am not suited, I haven’t studied it’ and so on and so forth.  However, the voice at the other end was very persuasive and said, ‘Well will you at least consider it?’ Now because my life had been directed in this way that I did feel God had a plan for our lives, for each life, I thought, well, yes - this is a thing which has come from right outside, perhaps I should at least consider it.  So I said, ‘Oh yes, I will consider it.’ but I went on with my visits around England and the election campaign went on in the Isle of Man.

Then I went to stay with my brother in Oxford, and he took me to see a revue that was put on at that time by the people of MRA.  It was called ‘It’s Our Country, Jack!’ I think you may know from the title something of what that might be about.  It really was a sort of challenge, through lots of humour and dancing and fun, but also a very real challenge as to whether we, the spectators, were serving our country to the full. As I came out into the night I remember thinking, ‘Dear me, is this God speaking to me and saying that I am to serve my island in a new way?’

I came back to the Isle of Man and then the pressure was put on a hundredfold. At last, almost in desperation, I said, ‘Well at any rate I will stand in this election.  I shan’t get in, I won’t be elected but at least you will all be satisfied.’  With that began a most hectic few weeks because we were very near the election.  As you can imagine, I had to address meetings, I knew very little.  I had done this public work in education and I could of course talk fairly knowledgeably about that but there were so many areas of life about which I knew nothing.  Trying to follow my standard of absolute honesty, I did what I have heard since no politician should ever say, and that is to say, in answer to a question, ‘I don’t know’.  I did have the sense to add, ‘Of course if you elect me I will find out for you.’  I also said to them, ‘If you elect me you will have to give me time to learn my job.’  Well, with this, strange to say, I was elected and unseated one of the sitting members because our Sheeding has two members. The other was the Speaker.

Of course it is very exciting on the night when you are elected.  All the congratulations and the fun and the excitement.  The next morning I woke up to the cold dawn of reason and I was terrified.  I thought ‘What have I done? I have let myself in to something of which I know nothing.’  I had never even been to a sitting of the House.  I felt I was mad.  I used to wake in the morning before I had got a grip of my subconscious in a sort of terror because after the actual swearing in of the members there came the Christmas recess and I had plenty of time to think about things without being actually in action.  Then after Christmas right into it all.  

I kept pretty quiet at first, but of course there came the time when I had to make a maiden speech and I was very frightened.  I remember one of my first really major speeches.  It was against the unlimited opening of betting shops at all hours of the day pretty well.  I had done my homework very thoroughly.  I had been to Westminster and consulted there the man who advised the Westminster politicians.  I had worked.  I had all my facts and papers in front of me.  Next to me sat an elderly man, a Labour member.  He was setting his papers too and he said to me, ‘How do you feel?’ and I said, ‘Oh Edward, I am terrified.’  Without looking up he just said to me, ‘Then you are thinking of yourself and not of the good of the island.’  That stayed with me through all my political life and was an enormous help. The good of the island and not me.

I also had a little prayer - I am a very simple person, before I got to my feet I would often just say to God, ‘Hold thou my hand’, and then I would get to my feet.  Once on my feet I was all right and I felt that I could thoroughly enjoy the heckling, the jokes and a good fight for what I felt to be right.

After 5 years there was another general election.  As we were coming up to it I went into a little shop in my Sheeding and the lady behind the counter said to me, ‘Miss Duesbery, are you standing again?’  I said, ‘Oh I am not sure, really.’  I can see her now.  She pulled herself up behind the counter amongst all her tins of salmon and spaghetti and all the other things that lined the walls of the shop and she said to me, ‘Miss Duesbery, when we elected you we said we had got to give you time to learn your job.  We have given you 5 years and now we expect to see results!’ and I felt that too was God’s word to me that I was to go on.  So I stood again and I was elected, returned with a very much bigger majority.

Then I was joined by two other women members but for my first 5 years I had been the only woman in the House.  There had not been a woman for 10 years before I was elected.  There had been 2 before me but they had both been married women who followed their husbands into the House .  One was a widow, the other, her husband resigned and she was elected.  I was the first single woman.  Now came very many more responsibilities: for my first year back I was appointed chairman of the Assessment Board.  I laughed over this because I am very bad at finance but you know again, it is how God leads one.  That year, because after one year I was to become chairman of the Board of Education, which is really Minister of Education, only in our small sphere of the Isle of Man we call it chairman of the Board.  Here I had of course to deal with very big financial problems and that year as chairman of the Assessment Board gave me a great insight into the finances of the island and prepared me for what was to come.  

Then I had 4 years, before my eventual retirement, as chairman of the Isle of Man Board of Education and there - how good God is!  I, a single woman, had 10,000 children to care for. 10,000 children in our schools.  The numbers have risen very much of recent years from 8,000 to 10,000 with immigration into the island.  So I had great problems, extending schools, old schools, building new schools and all the extra manpower and extra equipment.  How tremendously valuable I found my training of the old Oxford Group days and of MRA.

Again, it is so much a question of dealing with people.  I had a large Board of about 36 people which I had to chair and which had to make the final decisions to do with education.  I had my Director and all my clerical staff.  Because of my training and experience in MRA I found it such a tremendous help when things went wrong to go to the person and talk it out with them, also to take the decisions into my quiet-time.  I had learnt to do that during my first 5 years because many of the parliamentary bills were, to me and my untrained mind, very difficult to understand.  Of course I would go to a lawyer and get proper expert advice as well but in the ultimate when the decision had to be made, I was able to take my bills and spread them before God in my quiet-time, and also my speeches.  Then I asked God, ‘Is this what you want?  Is there anything should be taken out of it that is not right?  Is there anything that should be added to it?’ All this I found a tremendous help.

So, coming up to my 70th year, I felt that I should retire.  I am thankful to say that my electorate didn’t want it.  They begged me to stand again but I felt I was slowing down and that it was better that I should retire.  So when I came actually to retire, I made a new giving of myself to God for the new chapter of life.  One was closing but another one was opening.  I used the words in a hymn written by a one-time captain of a slave ship, John Newton, the hymn ‘How sweet the name of Jesus sounds’, and in the last verse he said, ‘Till death I would thy love proclaim with every fleeting breath’.  I used those two lines in giving myself to God again.  Then you know, as is often the way, when we make a promise to God like that, He gives us a test to know if we really mean it.  An invitation came to me to go up to London from the Isle of Man to speak at the Queen Elizabeth Hall at a big meeting, being arranged through MRA, for Women’s Year.  I didn’t want to go.  I am a very bad sailor, it was early in the year, I didn’t like the thought of the journey and I didn’t feel I could afford to go by air.  Then, in my quiet, it was as though the still small voice in my heart said to me, ‘You said to me “Till death I would thy love proclaim with every fleeting breath”.  Now you won’t even go to London to do it!’  So I said to him that I would.

A very wonderful thing happened. I was talking to a little group of Methodist friends about this decision and telling them a little bit about what I thought of saying and asking them whether they thought it was the right sort of thing.  I told them about the little bit of struggle I had had about going.  Quietly one of the ladies came up to me and said, ‘I have a little moneybox I put my savings in.  This morning I opened it, and I found I had got more than I had expected.  I had £50 and I thought, ‘Good I haven’t bought a coat for a long time.  I will buy a new coat.  Then a voice seemed to say to me, “No not a coat”.  I put the money back into the box.  Now this afternoon I have met you and heard about this meeting and about telling of the love of Jesus.  I want you to have the £50 so that you can go by air.  I don’t think it is fit for you at this time of year to go by sea.’  I felt God’s love and care through that lady, that he was caring for my physical needs while I was thinking and trying to do his will.  So I went.

From then on it has been most exciting because instead of my life shutting down and becoming narrower and smaller as a retired and elderly lady, now 72 - instead of that the winter before last I had an invitation to go to Zimbabwe-Rhodesia and down into South Africa, visiting there groups of MRA people.  I had a chance to be twice on TV and twice on sound radio, to talk at all sorts of meetings, ladies’ club at Pretoria, meeting of coloured ladies down near the Cape, all sorts of opportunities.  Then last summer my old Guiding love was satisfied again because I was asked to go with Scouts and Guides from the Isle of Man who were going to camp in Sweden, with Swedish Scouts and Guides and would I go as the guest?  So I had that wonderful opportunity.  I am ashamed to say I wasn’t under canvas.  I have been under canvas many years but this time, owing to my age I suppose and with due respect for that, I was given a little cottage on the campsite. I had wonderful times with the young people.  They took me sailing - I went sailing!  I marked my 71st birthday in camp with a wonderful cake made of a carrot standing on end and 4 meatballs round it, presented to me as a birthday cake while they sang to me.  We had wonderful tea parties in which we talked about things that really mattered.  Then I had the opportunity to speak too on the BBC programme of ‘Songs of Praise’ as one of those choosing a hymn and 3 minutes to speak of God.  I was told that has a viewing audience of 9 million people.  To think of having the chance to speak of God’s love to 9 million people - beyond anything I would ever have dreamed of, that God could take such an ordinary everyday person as me.  Now I have the invitation to go again to the US next year, with MRA.  I feel so thankful and humbled before God that he could so take such an extremely ordinary person and carry her out far beyond anything she could ever have dreamt about or even imagined.

I was also a Magistrate for over 20 years - the first 15 of them I did a great deal of work on the Juvenile Bench because of my work for young people.  Then the final 5 years of course I was doing petty sessions and being a senior Magistrate I very often had to take the chair.  In the Isle of Man the ruling is that there must always be 3 Magistrates on the bench - one of whom must be a woman.  I used to try, when the accused people came before us, to feel that God was, as it were, behind me and looking through my mind at the person.  I somehow had that little picture that he was behind and that I was trying to see the person with his eyes.  

I had one case rather towards the end of my time that moved me very much.  A woman came before me.  She had stolen a very large amount of money.  I felt that we had to send her to prison.  When I pronounced the sentence because I was in the chair, she fainted, tumbled down in the court.  I felt very bad.  I saw the probation officer afterwards and I said, ‘Will you very particularly look after Mrs X in the prison?  Will you do what you can for her and when she comes out, if she has difficulty in getting a job, will you tell her that I will do anything I can to help her?’ Some days later I met the probation officer in the street and she said to me, ‘You were absolutely right in sending Mrs X to prison.  She had had a very hard time at home and she is very much better in health now.  She has had proper rest, and she is better in every way.’  

Several months passed and I was on my way to a school, as Chairman of the Board of Education.  I was attending a Christmas sale of work and a very smartly-dressed lady came up to me and said, ‘Oh Miss Duesbery you don’t recognise me’ and I didn’t.  I said, ‘No I am afraid I don’t’. She said ‘I am Mrs X’ and I realised that it was this lady whom I had had to send to prison.  Now I don’t know whether she meant it in a sort of sarcastic kind of way, ‘You don’t recognise me...’ or what, but I just felt so overwhelmed by the thought of seeing her and because I did care so much what happened to her, that I said, ‘Oh Mrs X, I am so glad to see you. Will you tell me how you are making out?’  She changed absolutely and said, ‘Well I haven’t got a job at present but I am better and things are better at home.’  We talked and I said to her, ‘Will you realise that I wasn’t sitting up there on the bench judging you in any distant sort of way.  You know if circumstances had been different you might have been sitting on the bench and I standing in front of it.’  I also said, ‘Will you realise that I do care tremendously what happens to you, and if I can do anything to help you now to get a job, will you let me know and I will do anything I can?’

Well I happened to mention this to some of the other Magistrates who merely said, ‘Oh she will be back.’ but I am thankful to say she has not been back.  Then only a few days after that talk with her at the sale of work I had a letter from her saying, ‘You have been so kind to me, I want you to know that I have got a job.  I am going to work in such and such a shop.’.  I was able to write back to her and say how glad I was and that I was sure she was going to make good and do well.  She has done.  I think again, I feel so helped by the training and experience that I have had in MRA, and the emphasis on really caring for people.

From this case it mustn’t be understood that we were weak as a Bench.  I always felt myself very strongly that proper sentences had to be imposed and that justice must be done, because our first duty was to the public who were appointed as Justices of the Peace, to preserve the peace for the general public.  

This need not exclude care for the accused person as well.  I think of a case of a girl taking drugs, who was sent to prison - not by me or by any Bench I was serving on.  I was at the time Chairman of the Board of Education and some of my Board were very anxious that we stop the grant which she was about to receive to go to a university in England.  I opposed this very strongly, though I supported the prison sentence. I felt that should we as an Education Board impose a further sentence on that girl it would be absolutely wrong.  We had no right to do such a thing.  The sentence was given, the girl must serve her sentence, but then we as the Board of Education must give her a grant and back her to the full, take interest in her university life and show her that we expected her to do well, both for her own sake and for the honour of her family and of the island.  

I felt this in all dealings on the Juvenile Bench.  When sometimes young people came before us who were cheeky, who showed no respect, who obviously didn’t care what we said.   If we fined them £5, the father would just throw the note down on the table and say ‘Here you are’ - what good was that to anybody? And I learnt from a very excellent headmaster of one of our schools, a greatly beloved person who did a wonderful work as an educationalist but was also on the Bench.  He said to me, ‘I think we just will not have this sort of thing. When they come before us in this mood they should go away to the detention centre for a day or two until they calm down and can appear before us again, stand straight and pay proper respect and receive whatever the punishment is that they should have, if they are proved guilty.  I learned from him - I thought he was completely correct - and we did just that.  I feel sure myself that we were right and that those young people not only benefited from it but had a proper respect for the law.  Also that we were doing our duty to the public for whom we were Justices of the Peace.

With special thanks to Ginny Wigan for her transcription, and Lyria Normington for her editing and correction.