Interview conducted by Reggie Holme
Jack Spooner: I am a chartered engineer and a Fellow of the Institution of Electrical Engineers. I was chairman of the Sheffield centre. When I was transferred to Sheffield, as senior area engineer, I made a decision that each morning I would spend a few minutes, immediately upon arriving at the office, to be quiet and ask God to show me what the priorities of the day were. My wife and I had already had a time of quiet as soon as I got up in the morning and had shared the thoughts that we had written in our notebooks. This we find is an essential before we start the day, so that we are of one mind and doing what we feel God wants of us.
These few minutes every morning - 5 minutes at the most - at the office have proved to be invaluable because it has led me to individuals of the staff mostly who probably were in need, very often in their private lives. It has helped to bring about relationships which in the ordinary conduct of business and the application of regulations, voluminous in the Post Office, would never have reached the level of the individual. I know this is often exactly the cause of irritation and grit in the works.
It was one of my hopes when I took over, to find out something about all the staff, and get to know them as individuals. It wasn’t an easy task because in addition to all the administrative work - it started with 600-odd staff, and when I retired finished up with 1400 operative staff on the engineering side - it was quite a job. Nevertheless, I did do it to a large extent. I got to know a lot of the staff and something of their homes and their families. I took an interest in them.
This was one of the factors which I think was behind a remarkable development, which I didn’t realise was going to be remarkable. We got the workmen together at one stage and suggesting a change in our methods of working. It meant that a job which had traditionally in the Post Office taken 4, 5 and sometimes 6 men to do, would be amalgamated throughout the whole of the British Isles. This would mean that instead of having three separate types of staff - one for internal, one for external overhead and the other for external underground - see if we couldn’t do the job equally as efficiently with less men but more essentially to get the job done quicker. To my delight, and no little surprise, the men I got together and discussed it with thought the idea had got a lot of merit. In fact, one or two of them said out loud that they had thought this was an obvious thing to do years ago and this chap was quite sure that he could do what the other two groups did without trouble.
Reggie Holme: How many men did you discuss this with?
Jack: On the first occasion, there would have been 8 or 9 there and then we left it for a bit because I didn’t wish to rush in. We had different headquarters. In addition to Sheffield there was Barnsley, Doncaster, Rotherham and other smaller areas, and Chesterfield of course. I thought I had better let them all feel that they were part of the idea so, when I could get out I did and saw a number of them. One of my difficulties was that it is not the same as having all your staff in a workshop. They were spread all over the countryside doing jobs. So, I had to go out usually early to be there at their starting time in the morning at their headquarters. Then I would have a chance to have a word. Everywhere this idea was floated it was received with considerable approval. In fact, my difficulty was to restrain them from rushing straight out and doing all three jobs, one man, at the same time.
Nevertheless, this is what did happen in the end. It proved the sort of thing which interested the chaps more. A man got a lot more satisfaction in being able to go out onto a particular job and see it through and see the customer pick up the telephone. Very often it used to be a case of necessity in those days because we had a priority list: women who were in trouble with families and so on It was always a delight to be able to say to the lady, ‘Now your phone is working, here it is’.
RAEH: Wouldn’t the workmen be worried that they were working themselves out of jobs, if one man could do what three or four had done there would be redundancies?
Jack: That problem never arose in any single case because there was so much other work. We had such a waiting list to get through and at this time there were more and more people wanting the telephone, as is still the case today. So, instead of anyone being redundant it was a case of them getting more job satisfaction through doing more work themselves. Throughout my whole experience, there was no case at all of a man working himself out of a job. Very much the opposite.
Again, on the positive side, I can say that a number of those chaps expressed to me the great satisfaction they got at the end of the day of going home and being able to tell their wives and their families that they had done this or that to completion, rather than that they had done a little bit of it and didn’t know when the job would be finished.
RAE Holme: How far has this idea carried?
JS: My director heard of the idea. I wrote a paper which introduced this. I didn’t introduce it as a particular novelty but we had noticed that the cost of doing the job had been reduced by 35%, on average, and I just mentioned this. My director saw this and saw the national significance of it. He brought it up at headquarters which - looking back - may have been a little unfortunate, because the headquarters of the union got hold of it and here they saw that their powers were apparently being undermined. There was a ‘hoo-ha’ and I suppose my name became mud in certain circles. Here was an extraordinary situation where the men doing the job wanted to go on doing it and I simply had – in fact, I was ordered - to restrain them from doing so much work. Nevertheless, that scheme has now been introduced nationally. The unions of course have got very a considerable increase in pay because of it and they call it their productivity, which I suppose in a way they have something to do with it, but this productivity reason was given for almost 100% increase in their pay.
I think the satisfaction I got personally was to see the satisfaction of those chaps. They had developed from ordinary workers, quite good fellows who did their little section of the job, very much like a man on a flow-line, doing his little nut and bolt, to now doing the whole job. Seeing their satisfaction and their interest, and the pleasantness that came where before there had been a coldness, was to me more than any reward any man could have wished for. I look back on those days as one of the highlights of my working career because of the pleasure it brought into so many fellows’ lives.
I had the advantage of being brought up in a home where my parents had a simple but effective Christian faith. They were not theologians, by a long way. They taught me that the Bible could be relied upon and that Jesus Christ had got an answer for everyone. I had not applied this practically but agreed that from what I had learned at home and how I had seen my parents rely on their faith, there was something in it.
When I met the Oxford Group, here was a body of people that first attracted me by the fact that they had obviously got something which I rather envied. It all depended on giving time to listen to God, writing down the thoughts that come and looking through those four absolute standards of absolute honesty, purity, unselfishness and love. So, when I realised that this was what my parents had in fact lived for, although I had not actually caught it from them, here was a chance for me to make a decision as to whether I would live by these standards. Quite consciously and deliberately I decided together with my wife that we would do this:- that we would base our home and whatever lay ahead on these standards and that we would trust God to guide us and provide for us. I can say after 45 years of married life that this has proved to be absolutely reliable.
On the standard of honesty, I knew that there were some tools at my home that were not stolen but I knew they were never going to get back to where they should be kept. I knew I had to return them. This was risky because in those days any dishonesty in the civil service was punishable by instant dismissal. There was no flexibility. I knew that too because I had had to enforce it. At that time, we had a baby son. It was a risk. Logically, it appeared to me to be the most stupid step that a man could take, to jeopardise what appeared to be a secure future as a civil servant in order to live my moral standards. I didn’t do it immediately; I didn’t have the courage.
My wife was quite willing to take this risk though she fully understood what was at stake. With her help I prayed about it and eventually, in time - 2 or 3 weeks - I plucked up the courage to go in and see that manager and tell him. I went to him with some trepidation. He listened to my story quietly and I knew what he ought to say, according to the rule book. What he did say was, ‘Spooner, I don’t know why or how you have come to tell me this at this moment. You know as well as I do what the normal consequences are of dishonesty but you must have been sent. I have just learned this morning that my wife has an incurable disease and at the moment I am at my wits’ end to know which way to go. I have never had a faith, but you have come here with your story and I think you must have been sent.’ Instead of getting the sack, I received his thanks. The tools were returned but he himself became a freer man. He got transferred to another post on the south coast, almost at the same time and to the best of my knowledge that man found something which helped him over one of the biggest hurdles that had come in his life up to that stage.
Jack: Our son decided when he was at school that he would base his life on the same standards. He did this entirely on his own. Even when he was away from home. I won’t deny that it was a great delight to us to know that he felt that the sort of faith that we had been living or shall I say very often trying to live was worthwhile. We made many mistakes and I suppose will still do. But he felt that this was what he wanted and his wife wants it with him and our grandchildren are now learning the same standards. They are - I can say this with considerable enthusiasm - they are enjoying life to the full.
Hilda: Actually, I was brought up in a Christian home, as far as my mother was concerned. My father wouldn’t go to church because he felt they were hypocrites. Mother had a tremendous faith and whenever she was in any difficulty she always went to God and knelt down and asked for guidance. When I met the Oxford Group I realised that I had thought of the miracles happening in the time of Jesus and I think the Oxford Group helped me to realise that miracles could happen now. I think that was one of the marvellous things that I found:-. that I could find an answer to bad temper, for one thing. I had a bad temper. I listened to God and asked to be healed of this temper and I was. Actually, it has never bothered me since. Several other things I found a real answer to and when I went to tell mother about it she said, ‘Well, it is the same thing with a different name’, and she began to tell me about her grandparents, who used to go around in groups, the same house party style, and how they used to life-change people.
Then I went to Oxford on my own, to a house party and I never spoke to anybody at all. I came back absolutely convinced that if we lived this life it is the complete answer, the answer to fear, bitterness and hate. Soon after that the war broke out. My parents had a business and all the menfolk were called up for the forces so I went back into the business after being married 8 years and helped to run it with my sister during those 4 years. We had a very difficult time because nearly all the good produce went on the black market. It was a fruit and vegetable business, we only kept on the retail part of it. It had been a very big wholesale and retail business. We had a really good allocation of food at one point in 1940 for bananas, oranges, tomatoes and things that were very scarce. So, we had terrible queues and my sister never slept at night for these queues. We went to the police and they said ‘Well, we can’t do anything about it.’ There were people fighting for stuff and we were just there unprotected.
Then I remembered about guidance and in a very naïve way - I mean we didn’t know a lot about this way of living - we listened to God and the thought that came was to have some cards printed with ‘There is enough for everyone’s need but not for everyone’s greed. If everyone cares enough and everyone shares enough, everyone will have enough.’ And the thought was to put this up in the business in a very prominent position and that was all. And it seemed a bit irrelevant really, to all this crowd, but anyway we put it up. And it was amazing really how people read it and it really solved that crowd business.
Then we had other thoughts, to have cards for people. We had cards for regular customers, for evacuees and for newly-weds. We had different coloured cards and therefore people got their own ration. It meant a bit more background work but they got their own ration every week and we kept a check on it. It solved the problem.
But then something happened because we were getting our produce from Boston (Lincolnshire). They had some ducks there and it was about 35 miles away. A law was brought in that food could not be moved any more than 30 miles. We lost the complete supply after that. Then we had to have more guidance and it was interesting how we were led to the people who had got more than 5 acres of ground and had to grow food. We were able to supply all our customers adequately through following guidance.
Nowadays we use our home - this last week we have had at least 100 people. We had a day for India because, since our visit to India, we have thought about it a great deal, cared for it and felt responsible for the (MRA) centre at Panchgani and the other houses in Delhi and Bombay. We had a day last Wednesday for India when we talked about India, learnt of the miracles and told people the needs. We had at least 100 people through the house. We had coffee and we had 33 people to lunch, We also had sales of home produce, cakes, marmalade and things like that. It was a very happy day. People come because when we do it we inform people of the positive things that are happening in the world. We sometimes have one for Africa, sometimes for Tirley or the Westminster Theatre. It helps people to take the next step and know what is happening. These days I feel that people are getting so much of the negative side and not enough of the miracles that are happening.
People really do decide to be different. Sometimes we have a quiet time with them. Maisie Croft is a lady who learnt to have guidance through hearing a broadcast of the Housewives’ Declaration which we had about 3 years ago. We asked our local radio if they would let us go on air and tell the people of Sheffield about it.
There were 6 points in this Declaration. The first one ‘We are grateful that most of us in Britain have enough to eat and to keep us warm, and to those whose work makes this possible.’ The second is, ‘We will tackle today’s difficulties as a challenge and not depress others with our grumbling. We will care about the standard of living and true happiness of families across the world. Have we the right to get richer every year when so many are hungry? We accept that food will cost more everywhere. We are ready to spend less on luxuries. We will shop from need and not from greed or for hoarding and will rethink how much is enough for us. We will refuse to let the hurts and bitterness or entrenched attitudes of the past shape our future. We will accept honestly our own share of the blame for our present troubles. We will make new friends, including people of different backgrounds and races. We will put right disagreements with old friends and neighbours, starting from our side. We will think for ourselves about what is right and be ready to stand firm and speak out for it. We will take on the building of a different world for our children and grandchildren. We know this cannot begin without a change of basic human motives, which needs the power of God. It will mean the MRA of our country to free it from greed, hate and fear. We will start with changing ourselves and in our homes.’
Five of us went and we took one of the questions each. The producer wasn’t very helpful when we got there, he said, ‘Oh, just talk.’ But on the way out he thanked us for the broadcast but he said, ‘It was still just talk’.
The following day I had a phonecall from a lady who said, ‘I have tried this listening to God which you spoke about on Radio Sheffield yesterday. My thought is to go from house to house and ask for and collect a cup of rice from each house and send it to Bangladesh where there is this terrible famine.’ I thought this was a bit way out, but I encouraged her to ring up the community relations officer in Sheffield. He also encouraged her. She started and had 100% response in collecting the rice. Others then joined her. She also met the High Commissioner of Bangladesh, who came from London to welcome her. A local church loaned her a room where shoppers could leave rice and the whole collection started. She collected 4.5 tons. This lady and her husband obtained tea chests free, a lorry and a driver, and took them to Liverpool, where they were given a space on a ship. Eventually they saw colour photographs from Bangladesh of the Bangladesh Girl Guides distributing the rice from the very tea chests she had filled, to the starving people of Chittagong
Jack: This story is about one birthday of Dr Frank Buchman, initiator of MRA, when my wife and I were in London. We had been there for a week before this birthday helping with a film called The Crowning Experience which had been produced by MRA. We were due to go home on this particular Saturday, the day before Frank’s birthday. We were in the Westminster Theatre for what was to have been our final meeting of the week, when a note was passed to me asking if I would go out to the foyer and meet someone very urgently. To say the least it was a very inconvenient moment because I was seated in the most difficult spot to get out, but nevertheless I went out. There I found a young man who introduced himself as a Post Office engineer and announced that Dr Buchman was to have a phonecall from his MRA friends in America on the following day, the Sunday afternoon, as a birthday gift and that he wished the call to be amplified to all his 250 guests who were coming to the birthday party at 45 Berkeley Square. I was being asked, as it was known that I was an executive of the PO Telecommunications, whether I would arrange this amplification. My immediate reply to this young man, which he fully understood, was, ‘It is impossible. Not only is it impossible, but it is also highly irregular.’ One of the facets of the international, certainly transatlantic, telephone calls which were at that time in their infancy, was that it was so important that they didn’t go wrong (or if it did go wrong that the blame must be with the other country - in other words Britain was never to blame for anything that went wrong). So, knowing this, and the fact that normal telephone calls, when they were amplified, took about 3 months to organise and set up, I naturally said, ‘This is hopelessly impossible’.
This took place around about 11 am. This young man, the PO engineer, said, ‘Well now shall we be quiet and just listen to the inner voice and see if there is anything else we could do?’ My own thought was that it was even a waste of time to have a quiet time about it, but we did. I thought, ‘Well there is 1 hour to go before the local telephone area office closes on a Saturday, but we might at least take the preliminary precautions of officially letting it be known what we may be doing.’ This young man agreed that we should do something. Incidentally the equipment which we needed for an arrangement like this, amplifying an incoming call, was very complex and needed very sophisticated electronic equipment which, of course, we didn't have and it was a Saturday morning.
However, I took the first step of ringing up the man in charge (every area office in those days had one head of division on duty on a Saturday morning until noon, and then the office closed until Monday morning) and it turned out to be a non-engineering head of division. I told him who I was and what we had in mind, and his reply was, ‘Surely you must be crazy?’ and he said, ‘Well, you are a senior man to me but if you wish to go ahead with it, provided I am not involved when it goes wrong, you go ahead.’ I replied that I was sorry but it could not be quite like that. I told him he would be in it right up to the neck because the first thing that would be said was, ‘What did the local area office do?’ To his credit, this man took a very big risk, and said, ‘I will say I have not disagreed. You go ahead.’
With that I hung up and by this time it was 11.30. There is a little street behind Leicester Square in London where one could buy junk equipment mainly from American army stores, which could be possibly used for this. We jumped in a taxi and rushed off to this place. With no means of testing the equipment at all we spent 7/6d on all sorts of likely looking bits of electronic equipment - for those who understand such things there were chokes, transformers, capacitors and resisters. So, with our pockets bulging we came back, myself feeling that I had entered upon the last phase of my official career because this could not possibly work. On arriving at the Theatre, the first thing we needed was to make sure that we could get a suitable amplifier and other equipment, which was already there. But we were told by the people in charge of this equipment that we couldn’t possibly have it because Dr Buchman had asked for a meeting in the Theatre on the Sunday morning of his birthday and all this equipment was required then.
Now this international telephone call was coming through at 3 pm, so that really for me settled it. We couldn’t possibly set it up after lunchtime on Sunday ready for a 3 pm call. It would have necessitated disemboweling two telephones in order to put in our own nondescript equipment to cut out the possibility of the call howling and other things. I was just about to throw in my hand and say we had wasted 7/6d and a lot of time and we had a further time of quiet and my thought was, ‘This is already crazy, from a technical point of view, but if God means this to go through this will be the miracle of all times, electronically.’
So, I agreed to carry on, leave it till lunchtime the next day and in the meantime to get what equipment we could across to 45 Berkeley Square, Dr Buchman’s London home, where we could do such things as setting up our signaling system. Because the equipment we had to have could not be in the ballroom where the party was to be held, we were given a bedroom immediately above the ballroom. We were also given a long length of clothes line which we paid out from the bedroom window down into the ballroom window, across the front of the Berkeley Square side of the house. We had three such ropes - one with a blue ribbon, one with a red and one with a white. The idea was that if and when we got the amplifier and other equipment one of us would be in the ballroom next to Dr Buchman with the telephone and the others would be upstairs in this bedroom. When I pulled on the white rope that meant they were to turn up the amplification (we call it the wick) and if I pulled the red one that was to shut off immediately because presumably there would be a terrific howl which would be beyond the threshold of feeling of people’s ears, very painful.
We did all this and got it going. We started about 6 am on the Sunday and forewent breakfast. We thought we would get a lunch before the great event but as things happened they told us we could have the amplifier at 12.00, so that meant missing lunch. We got the amplifier, fitted it up and then were unable to do a trial run which was absolutely essential because for various reasons we couldn’t get the right power connection and various other technical things. As it got to 2.00, to our horror - or at least to my horror in particular because my colleague was upstairs and he didn’t see this - the party started foregathering in the ballroom and shortly after 2 there were 50 or more people there already.
Then to add to my troubles, Dr Buchman entertained Frank Salisbury the painter, and was talking to him. I wished to get near to him with the phone and just explain one or two things that would be a bit unusual from his point of view looking at the telephone, because it was all in bits and on my lap but I couldn’t do it. The time rolled on and it got to 5 to 3. We had run no tests and I was at that moment drenched in perspiration, having had no food at all the whole day and altogether very sorry for myself and for my career. Anyway at a few seconds to 3 the good old Post Office came up trumps. The phone rang, the international operator in Faraday House said, ‘Is that Grosvenor 3443?’ I said, ‘It is.’ ‘Will you accept a call from America?’ I said, ‘We will.’ There were a few clicks which I am sure did not take place in Britain and then the voice from the other side said, ‘Is that Dr Buchman?’ So, I pulled furiously on the white rope, only to my chagrin I must have pulled so hard it came off my colleague’s hand upstairs but he knew enough to turn up the wick.
Then the sound came through. To my utter amazement and complete disbelief everyone heard it, my colleague upstairs, not now having any signal to turn up the wick further used his discretion and did turn it up further, probably a bit too much but nevertheless everybody heard it.
There is a little sideline to this story which for me will live in my memory forever. Dr Buchman’s wonderful caring for ‘insignificant people’, if I can be in that category. I was merely just there to fix up the telephone. I had not been introduced to Frank on this occasion, although I had met him before. He was busy with Frank Salisbury, as I said, right up to 3 o’clock. I was busy after the call was over and I breathed the greatest sigh of relief that I have ever done. I was starting to put together the disemboweled telephone when a lady’s voice over my shoulder said, ‘Dr Buchman would like you to go and join them at the dinner table,’ to which I replied immediately and said, ‘Well thank him very much but it is quite impossible. I must decline. I am filthy, drenched in perspiration and furthermore I can’t leave this phone in this condition and there are two more of us upstairs.’ The lady went away and a few minutes later she came back, and said, ‘Well I told Dr Buchman and he said that’s all right - bring your two friends as well.’ So, I said, ‘Well, that’s very kind but it’ll take me about an hour to do this.’ Oh, she said, ‘No, immediately! They are waiting!’
As I have already said I was drenched in perspiration, I found out later so were my two colleagues upstairs and none of us had eaten all day. It looked to me quite impossible to go and join such an august assembly in this state. The lady then said, ‘If I were you I would go quickly and get a wash, leave what you are doing. I am sure it will be all right.’ So, we rushed to a suitable place to wash, which happened to be in the basement of the building. I had the quickest wash in my life and we all 3 rushed up to the dining room. To our chagrin we found that they were all waiting for us. It was a large party, quite a big table, and 3 places had been made. We learned afterwards it had been a minor complication for those organising the dinner to find 3 spaces but there they were and I was led to a seat next to a very fine-looking gentleman who started talking immediately and introduced himself as the Turkish Ambassador. This of course to me felt, ‘Really, this is not the place where we should be in this condition!’
At the time when we were fitting up the equipment in the ballroom we had been loaned two very large loudspeakers which were capable of filling the Albert Hall, had it been necessary. A lady unknown to me came and put her little cassette recorder right in front of the loudspeaker, to which I said without thinking very much, ‘Lady, you will get your head blown off if you leave that there.’ This lady turned round to another friend, whom I did know - Phyllis Konstam the actress - and she said, ‘This young man says I am going to have my head blown off’ and with a certain amount of laughter they left it where it was and I went on with my preoccupation of ending my career.
After this, I thought no more about it but when I sat down at the dinner table who should be sitting opposite me but this very lady. I said, after a little conversation, ‘Would you mind telling me who the lady is who is sitting opposite?’ The Ambassador replied that it was the Queen of Romania, whereupon my perspiration returned!
There is a sequel to this little story - first of course I am still here. I did finish my career on the Post Office. My colleagues, when told of this incident, flatly refused to believe it because it literally was, technically speaking, the impossible. But the other sequel took place some years later. I was with my wife at Caux, in Switzerland, and I was working in the kitchen which many of us were prone to do because there were no paid staff in the place. I was working at a table doing something with vegetables when who should come in and sit just for a talk was this same lady, the Queen of Romania. She sat down and started chatting. I had some ladies of different nationalities around me at the time whom I didn’t know and she didn’t know. Then she looked at me intently and paused for quite an appreciable time, obviously thinking, and quite suddenly she said, ‘My head was to be blown off, wasn’t it?’ And she had remembered that incident all those years later. 10 or 11 years later.
Hilda: Dr Henderson [the chief medical adviser to the Sec. of State for Education] had given this address to headteachers in Cambridge . He said that teachers should accept that young people today did have intercourse before marriage as a kind of training ground for the life they were going to grow up into and the teachers were not to frown upon it and should accept it. I felt that was absolutely wrong so I wrote to Boyle (Minister of Education) and I got a letter back which was 3 or 4 pages. He said that we had to move with the times and he quoted several philosophers and really said nothing. I didn’t do any more with him but I wrote to the Daily Express who, to their credit, had seen that this was a retrograde step and one Sunday in the Sunday Express there was a picture of Boyle sitting on the fence, he would neither do one thing or the other. Then I wrote to the Daily Express saying I rather agreed with them that you either had to be on one side of the fence or the other and could they do anything about it? I told them in my letter that I had written to the Minister of Education and had this long rambling letter back.
The next morning in my quiet time I had the thought, ‘Dare to be a Daniel, dare to stand alone, dare to have a purpose true, and dare to make it known’. Almost before we had breakfast there was a knock at the door. It was the local woman's' editor of the Daily Express and she put her foot in the door. I said, ‘Well, yes I had written the letter, yes I had had a letter from Mr. Boyle but I said to her that, if she came back in half an hour, I would think about whether I would give them an interview.’ I wanted to check with somebody before I did it because it would be a national thing and I felt I might let the side down or something. I checked with Roly Wilson, the Secretary of the Oxford Group in London and he said, ‘Yes, that’s your conviction, you do it.’ So, the Express came in and I told them about it. They wanted to see his letter to me. I wasn’t quite certain whether to let them have it or not. David Peters was also in London giving me information and a few ideas. David Peters is one of the directors of Leadbeaters and Peters, Sheffield opticians, worked as a miner during the war and has worked fulltime with MRA. He is a Sheffield man.
The Express took down this information and they took the letter. Then actually the Minister must have heard that I had given the letter to the paper because the Ministry rang me up in the middle of the afternoon and said, ‘I understand you said you had a letter from the Minister.’ And I said, ‘Yes’. The Ministry said to me, ‘Well you could say you didn’t have such a letter and we will support you.’ I said, ‘Well I am trying to live a life of absolute honesty and I certainly will not say that.’ They rung off straight away. They were really trying to help me to be dishonest. They didn’t want to get themselves into a mess. They realised this letter was ...
The next morning the letter was printed in full in the Daily Express. It was a nothing really. And there was a great big full page and it said, ‘Sheffield housewife...’ something or other .. and then it said, ‘Boyle’s law on chastity’. At that time, I didn’t know what Boyle’s law was, do you?
Jack: You get it in physics. It is the relationship between pressure, volume and temperature.
Hilda: Everybody apparently should know what Boyle’s law is but I didn’t. There was the Conservative agent who was a Capt. Beardshaw. Things were pretty bad in Sheffield at that time, we (MRA) were getting a lot of attacks, and Capt Beardshaw stood up for us and put a wonderful letter in. He said that he fully supported 100% what I was saying. It meant a lot. After that, the Daily Mail rang up and the BBC, and it was one of those days - a terrible day! I had no team here to check anything with excepting the head Postmaster who came.
Jack: I was actually going on to television in connection with another thing and he came up to talk to me about it, something to do with the post office.
Hilda: I had guidance with this postmaster who had just come on a visit. He felt I should go ahead with it, so we did. We listened to God as to whether I should take on this - they wanted to interview me on the BBC Radio North. So, I rang the man and he said, ‘Well you know what I am going to do with you, don’t you?’ I said, ‘No? I thought you were going to talk about Dr Henderson and his advice to the teachers..’ He said, ‘Well I am, but I am going to pull you to pieces.’ So, he came here and brought all his equipment and everything. The thought I had before I went into that room was ‘Don’t argue’. It was a bit like, you know almost something that hit you, and I realised when I was here that if I had started arguing I would have got completely lost. But I didn’t and afterwards Roger (our son) came in, he was doing a locum somewhere. He spoke to the radio man about his own convictions. When he went out the radio man, Bill Anderson, said, ‘It has been a wonderful evening. It has given me something to think about. My mother was illegitimate, my grandmother was.’ We asked about his two daughters, then aged 7 and 5, and he said, ‘Oh I will think about that when I come to it.’ He rang up after the broadcast and he said, ‘It wasn’t so bad, was it?’ He was quite interested and offered to do more again if he could.
Jack: One interesting little thing - when that woman editor came at 8 am I had already gone to the office. Although this woman was on the doorstep just after 8, the letter that Hilda posted wasn’t put into the postbox until mid-day the day before. Now the post in those days was a little bit better than it is today and this letter must have been at the London sorting office at midnight. They must have read it, someone connected with the Express and told this woman in Sheffield to get here early.
Hilda: Also, I was rung up in the middle of the night by the Daily Mail - 2 am one morning.
Jack: I answered it and they said at 2 am ‘Is that the Spooner home?’ I said ‘Yes’. They said, ‘This is the Daily Mail.’ I said, ‘Good Lord’. He said, ‘Why weren’t we given the scoop about Dr Henderson?’
Hilda: And they also said, ‘Your son - I would like to know what your son said.’ I think I was a bit worried then because I didn’t want to bring Roger into it. But I realised then what he had said, and which was printed, it said that children were asked to make decisions without being given standards or being given knowledge, the right kind of knowledge. It was ok in the end but for a time I didn’t realise they were taking everything I said down! It was quite an experience, and then after that of course I had 300 letters from different people in the country and only 2 of them were negative. It was obviously something that people were feeling, and were interested in.
Jack: In the last year or two we have had 12 or 13 excellent interviews on the local radio, all visitors who come from overseas in connection with MRA. Dr Charis Waddy had a long interview in connection with her book, The Moslem Mind. When she came here to launch this book in this part of the country, we had a party here in this house for her mainly university students. None of us thought - well we thought if she sold one book that would be the limit, because it is quite an expensive book - and of the 13 books she brought she sold every one and we had to send back for another 5. This was an indication of the interest. The BBC local radio gave her an excellent interview. The interviewer must have read that book very carefully because he noted things from it which I had not noticed. At the end, the interviewer complimented her on the fact that he had now understood the problem so much better, and that there was so much good in the Moslem way of life.
We also have the good fortune to have been in India. How we came to go there is an interesting story. Briefly, I had retired and felt that probably our days ahead were ones where we would be less active and enjoy retirement. I had been telephone manager here in Sheffield and had a most interesting life because during my time in the chair we had the biggest telephone transfer ever in the history of the British post office - that is the comment of headquarters. Just to make life even more interesting that year we had the World Cup, in 1966.
Instead of retiring, we had a request come unexpectedly through the post, putting to us whether we would be willing to consider closing up our house for an indefinite period and going with the cast of over 100 mainly teenage young people who had been going round Europe with a MRA musical, Anything to Declare? We had never been in that part of Asia at all, but we sat down and were quiet for quite a time. Both felt separately that this was God calling us to do something unexpected and beyond our competence. We packed up and we went. When we got to Bombay where the temperature was over 100F and very humid, I felt that 24 hours would see me on the plane back home.
But again, it was wonderful how things worked out. One of the first things we did was to go round and look up Indian friends who had visited this home over the years before. We had taken a list of them out with us. One of them happened to be a Jain, originally from Gujarat, and the son had been studying at college with our son. He invited us to meet his parents, in this very strict Jain home. It was quite a challenge to us to see how they respected what they believed in. We went for a meal there, which was an education, because my wife was the only woman to sit at the table. All the other women, bless their hearts, who had made the meal had to sit quietly at the end of the room. We had this marvellous meal, having started with them insisting that we washed our hands more thoroughly than I was accustomed to washing them. Then afterwards they took us to their Jain temple where a special service was on. It was interesting to note that the idol which they were particularly interested in and which certainly had the most offerings around it was the idol of successful industry and commerce.
Hilda: The Panchgani effort, the MRA centre there and what it stands for was the key thing. After seeing the farm ... The land had never grown anything for 50 years before the MRA centre was created there and the experts from Pune university came up and said that nothing would grow there. With the sacrificial help of people from New Zealand, Australia, Britain, and the other people working there, it now grows everything. Now the students from Pune university go up to have some of their training there.
It actually came into being, this Asian MRA conference centre, after Rajmohan Gandhi and many friends from all over the world had a ‘March on Wheels’ through India, because they felt that they wanted to build an honest and clean India and built this centre. We were privileged to be there at the second year, after its inauguration. It was a wonderful experience because, with that farm, I could see that so much of the famine in India could be solved if that were replicated because there is much land that is not cultivated. Another thing that has happened since is that they have a rat-proof barn there, which again is one of the great needs of India because rats eat such a lot of their food.
Jack: The total cost of this very enormous enterprise has been borne largely by the Indians but people particularly in Europe and Australia have made considerable contributions. To get there it meant us using literally the whole of the ‘free money’ that we had for our retirement, for our transport and our time there. It is not the first time that we have moved in faith and proved it works. If I can go back to our very early days when we first met the Oxford Group in 1936, or a bit later than that, we had heard about faith from the church but never looked upon it as a very practical thing. Soon after we were married and our son had just been born, we had in fact got £55 in total in the bank and that really was all we had of savings.
There was a need then to send a miner to the Ruhr, and there were not many of us in that part of Britain, around Lincolnshire and the North Notts coalfield. It needed £50 to get this man, who was willing to go, onto the plane. We had a stop to think about it and both of us separately felt that this was a challenge for us to believe in faith. We drew £50 out and the miner went to the Ruhr to take part in the MRA campaign there. A week later, without any pre-knowledge of this, a letter came through the door and we still have it. It said, ‘You do not know me but you knew my sister, Florence Higley, who was the head of the welfare services in Grimsby. She was killed in the raids and she did not leave a will but she did say that if anything ever happened to her she would like £50 to go to the Spooners.’ There was a cheque for £50. That was our first venture, financially, in faith and here was another occasion when we felt if this is the way God wants us to spend our money, in the interest of creating a better world, we will do it.
Just after I retired I looked around for another job and was fortunate enough to be interviewed by the Libyan Embassy. This was before the Gadaffi coup and I was offered a job to re-organise the telephone line plant of Libya, which would have been a job right after my own heart. The pay was going to be very considerable, a lot more than what I had had before I retired. Tax free, all expenses paid, 3 months a year paid holiday. In addition, it was going to be a most interesting job which I had a lot of training in and felt I could do to the best of my ability. Just at that very moment this letter about India came through the post, while we were considering whether it was right to accept the Libyan job. I would say this, with some considerable gratitude - if I had not had that time with Hilda to stop and think I would have sent a letter off by return to the Libyan Embassy to say ‘Yes, I accept’ because it was so good. I couldn’t think of anything that would stop me. We just delayed a little to think more about it and then this letter came inviting us to India.
I feel that the main thing that God took us through there was not to show the Indian people how clever the British are, but to learn from them and to work with them to make their own situation better. One of the things we did there was to decide that we would help financially, with the development of their new centre. We had put the whole of our cash into going so Hilda felt that we should commit ourselves to raising the money for 20 seats. The whole cost of the next development (the Theatre) had been divided into the seats that would go into the main conference hall. It worked out at that time that each seat would be valued at £280. To be quite honest I thought it was utterly crazy of her and I told her so, but we then sat down and had more guidance and I felt, ‘Well if this is the Almighty giving us a whisper, so be it.’
Hilda: One thing I have learned about decisions of that kind though, is to commit yourself with other people because I tried to argue with God and said ‘10 seats’, but the 20 was there. Then one morning I thought I would get up and go to the early meeting at 7.30 and that I would tell them that I was committing myself to this. So, I did and then that sort of sealed the decision. I thought I might get some money by having some coffee mornings in India, but there were so many other needs that I couldn’t. Then I thought when we got to Australia that I might have something to raise a bit of money with but in Australia we were raising money for winter clothing for the “Anything To Declare” group who had been in India and were now coming to a colder climate.
The first thing that happened for money raising was when Roger and Monica (our son and daughter-in-law) had a sort of “Bring-and-Buy” sale and raised £80 which they sent to me in India. I felt that should be the beginning of the commitment. Until we got home it really was because there were so many other things to raise money for.
Then we wrote a lot of letters to different friends and we visited people and told them what we felt about India, particularly what we felt about Panchgani and what it was doing for Asia. It really was healing bitterness and hate between nations and between people. It was also helping people to take responsibility themselves, helping the Indian people to take responsibility for their own country. We raised the money for 7 seats. Then I had to have a serious operation and went into hospital (Jack - we very nearly lost her then). When I came out I was terribly weak and couldn’t even lift the telephone. It lasted for some time then I began to get a bit back, I had made a lot of jam and marmalade and sold it for the fund. I thought I couldn’t write letters or make marmalade and only had 7 seats and had promised 20, and I felt a bit low.
The thought came very clear, ‘You do your best. I will do the rest.’ It heartened me quite a bit. That same day there was one friend came in the afternoon and said, ‘You know I can’t get Panchgani off my mind. I have been thinking about it for the last three or four days and I feel I should give a seat. £280.’ The same night the phone went and it was a young man who said, ‘I am very grateful - I am 40 today - for my family and all the gifts I have been given and I feel I should give a seat for Panchgani.’ The same night, about 11 o’clock, there was a phonecall from Cornwall and it was a man we had already written to, a farmer, who had said he couldn’t possibly give a seat because the church needed a new organ and he needed a new kitchen and all these kind of things. He said, ‘But I can’t get that letter off my mind. For a week I have not been able to sleep because of your Panchgani. I have decided and there is a cheque in the post for you tomorrow morning.’ So that day I got 3 seats, which brought my total up to 10. It was so faith-feeding that I never was bothered about it anymore. I got a lot better, started making marmalade again and we had a garden party.
Jack: Up to date she has made over 4.25 tons of marmalade and jam and sold it for Panchgani and other causes like the Westminster Theatre. Although financially that is only a small part of it, this has been a wonderful vehicle by which to interest people. This week we had a “Bring-and-Buy” here for Panchgani and raised over £300 in the day. We have taken on yet 2 more seats. We duly arrived at the 20 seats - it was very funny, or rather should I say I think the Almighty has a wonderful sense of humour, because we got to 19.5 seats, and we could not get somehow the last bit, that last £140. We prayed, and prayed, and the money didn’t come. Then a letter came from the treasurer of the fund that was looking after the Panchgani money in this country, Burford Weeks. He said, ‘I am awfully sorry to tell you that my arithmetic is not up to Post Office standards. I have been looking through the books and I find you have given £140 more than you thought you had in the past. Your 20 is up!’
RAEH: This business of money must have meant a lot to you because you began, Jack, very poor in life didn’t you - 2d a week was all you had when you were at school.
Jack: Yes, my father was an installer of heavy machinery and he was one of the very first to suffer in the Great Depression between the wars. He was in fact out of work 7 years. During that time, we lost everything, financially. There was a thing called the means test which one hears talked about theoretically but we suffered from it. It simply meant that you could not get any help at all unless you had got literally nothing. You had to have not a penny in the bank and no furniture worth selling and so on. I was about 12 when this period started. I had had an interesting time during the First World War, living in a big house where my aunt had been the housekeeper. Now we had come back to live in a little slum house. We had one toilet between three houses. I remember when I first went to school it was 2d a week. I shall always remember that very first 2d. I had not had money like this ever before, and I bought four ha ’pennyworth of sweets and got into serious trouble, naturally.
Even before that during the First War I had gone to a school in Lincoln where at the age of 5 and 6, believe it or not, they actually taught us algebra. There was a master there who was crackers about it. Bless his heart and full marks to him! Therefore, I knew a smattering of algebra and how to solve a simple quadratic equation at the age of about 9. When we went over to live in this big house during the war, we were afraid of the bombs from the zeppelin. My mother felt I should go to the village school. At the village school the headmaster knew no algebra at all and when he found out that I knew a bit he put me on a box in front of the blackboard. He held the cane - I don’t think it was meant for me - and I was then told to teach these 10-14 year old boys and girls all about algebra. I can well remember my very first day squawking ‘x = a + b’, and there was a minor riot.... what did x mean, and what did ‘a’ and ‘b’ mean and so on. I suppose I was able to tell them a little - whether it helped them I will never know. This was totally honorary. I didn’t even receive an extra sweet for my efforts!
From then we went on. I had to leave school because my father couldn’t maintain me. I got a job in an architect’s office. He offered to pay me 2/6d a week provided I did the menial jobs. In return he would teach me a bit about architecture. I left there at the end of a year for financial reasons and at the age of 17 I went into the foundry as a mechanical engineering apprentice. During that time all the labour they used were nearly all apprentices. The men who had to be paid a proper man’s wages were very few during the War and they were using cheap labour. The whole story of that time is fascinating. The last year I was there, between the ages of 19 and 20, I was asked with one other apprentice to make two working models of what was then a very original steam engine called the uniflow engine. These models were for the great Wembley exhibition that was to be held in about two years’ time. One of those models is now in the Science Museum at South Kensington in the main hall. The other one went to South Africa to their (Robey’s) office in Johannesburg. I got 7/6d a week, quite an increase from 2/6d, but by the time I was 19 it had gone up to 13/6d in actual take-home pay. The different laws had come in about insurance and so on.
Then thanks to an undercover Marxist I became a civil servant. In those days if it got whispered that you were a Marxist you were out and were blacked with all the employers. This fellow to keep up his cover - a very likeable man in many respects - was a Sunday school superintendent but he was a committed Marxist. I did not understand it except that he was adept at doing anything to do with running sweepstakes and certainly raising education. That didn’t bother me as a young teenager but when this situation arose I wouldn’t put my shilling on the Lincolnshire handicap, he sneered. ‘You ought to be a so-and-so civil servant’ and I replied, ‘I so-and-so would be if I knew how’. He then said, not thinking he was going to help me, he referred to a fellow who he said had a long tongue sticking out of his window, ‘trying to mop up flies like you’. Little did he know I took the afternoon off, went up and didn’t exactly walk into the job. I found out there were 600-odd on the waiting list for any vacancy that came on the Post Office. To be quite honest I thought the PO engineers were the men who washed the windows of the Post Offices. I knew little about the telephone side!
Eventually, 3 months before my 21st birthday, I was duly enrolled first as youth in training and when I became 21 I was re-graded as a labourer. That’s how I started in the Post Office telephones. Those early days were fantastic really when you look back because the instruments we were dealing with were some of the original Graham Bell telephones, made personally by him, and that is how I cut my teeth in the PO.
I finished a few years ago, having opened the first fully electronic exchange in the provinces. During my time as telephone manager this great transfer - this was not electronic. This was the ordinary transfer from the old-fashioned but nevertheless marvellous system which had been opened in Sheffield in 1927 and the switches were built like battleships, more or less to last forever. This went on and on but it had not been designed, they had not foreseen the enormous growth when the boom came after the years of Depression. It was hopelessly outdated and, because of that, Sheffield was behind the times with Subscriber Trunk Dialling, with trunk mechanisation, with international subscriber dialling and altogether it was antique. The PO had to decide to do an enormous quadruple transfer. We transferred the old telephone exchange to a brand new one in Eldon House, which cost £4M with the equipment. On the one day, on this famous day which I shall never forget, there was one instant when we opened this exchange for ordinary subscribers. We opened STD, we opened trunk mechanisation and we introduced what was known as area dialling where people could dial direct from their phones to the neighbouring small towns like Barnsley, Rotherham, Doncaster and so on. And it all happened at the same instant.
This was before the PO was nationalised and we had a Postmaster General there - it was Mr. Tony Benn. It was his job to sponsor these big things, come down and show his face. As this was such an exceptional occasion he, together with the Treasury, authorised the first and only banquet that up that time had ever been authorised by the PO in connection with any telecommunications operation. We had always been looked upon as a kind of poor relation of the postal side, although this was far from the facts because we were the only side which was making a profit.
This banquet was duly arranged. I was instructed to be the host and we had the Lord Mayor, the Master Cutler, the Bishop, the Chief Constable. We had leading people from industry and commerce, senior PO people from HQ. Tony Benn was due to come but at the last minute Cabinet matters kept him back so one of his deputies came. We had round about 150 at that banquet. We had a special stainless steel switch made, appropriately enough, which the Lord Mayor operated - and it was here, not very far from where we were sitting at that banquet where stainless steel was first invented. We had closed-circuit television. I arranged it so that all the staff in the different offices and exchanges could have a TV set to see what was going on.
I didn’t think they would be that terribly interested because we had been working so hard for so many years for this great moment that people were a little bit stalled, and very tired. However, apparently it was a great success. Actually, it wasn’t just a Sheffield transfer, it was an international one, because every zone centre throughout GB at that very moment of the changeover had to change all their operating procedures for the new system and it also of course affected places like Paris, Bonn and other places. If anything had gone wrong it would have been an international fiasco. I certainly would have been in the hot seat if anything had gone wrong. This was a sizzler!
Just to add to my load, this was the year, 1966, when the World Cup Final was going to be played in Sheffield, on Sheffield Wednesday’s ground, between England and West Germany. My director rang me up and said, ‘Spooner, the West German Postmaster General is coming with his retinue, and you are in the hot seat again to entertain him. Make sure you do it well.’ So, Hilda and I had some quiet and we decided that we would have the top suite of the nearby Forte hotel, which was a very good one.
The question of the menu came up. Hilda said, ‘If he is coming to Yorkshire, let’s give him Yorkshire pudding and roast beef.’ I told the manager of the hotel this and he was tickled pink. ‘I have entertained royalty and so on but we have never had Yorkshire pud and roast beef before!’ The day came and the German Postmaster General sat along the table from me, with his PPS in between us, because he didn’t speak very good English. As we got going the Yorkshire pud came on and I ought to say in all honesty that most Yorkshire housewives wouldn’t recognise it as Yorkshire pud, but that’s what they called it - it looked the same and it was round and yellow, and there was so much talk going on between the Germans that I thought I had dropped a brick.
Eventually the PPS turned to me and said, ‘The Postmaster General is most intrigued with this. Pudding? What is it, to have with beef? I explained we were in Yorkshire and this was Yorkshire pudding, traditional. A lot more talk went on and then the PPS said, ‘He would like to see the chef’. I beckoned to the under-manager who was hovering near the door and poor fellow thought the chef was going to be shot. However, the chef came up looking like an overwrapped tomato, duly bowed and it was translated to him that the PMG was absolutely thrilled with this dish and could he have the recipe? The poor man bowed out even redder than ever, if possible, and in due course the recipe appeared. On our way out of the luncheon, at the end of the event, the under-manager took me on one side and told me that I had really put the cat among the pigeons - did I know that the chef had never made a Yorkshire pud in his life. ‘We get them in a tin. You will be interested to know they are imported from Europe, probably Germany.’ He said the recipe had come from a very outdated volume of Mrs. Beeton which they had happened to find down in the kitchen. I gathered that there were international repercussions to the credit of Britain, in addition to the W Germans losing the final of the football. At least we gave them Yorkshire pud which they never forgot.
For the first time in the whole of my professional life, in that year running up to this moment, I did lose some sleep chewing over in my mind what could go wrong and the fact that our good old British contractors had let us down time after time. But again, we had the most wonderful team and I took them into my confidence right at the beginning. I told them that I was entirely in their hands, all the heads of divisions and all the experts. We had a weekly meeting. I had time in the morning, each morning. I am sure that God showed me certain steps to take which I wouldn’t have taken from a purely logical standpoint, which not only helped the job along but made friendships and built bridges between staff which I didn’t realise were needed. There was always an attitude of criticism between certain divisions of our setup and this creation of friendship was one of the major things which helped that job go smoothly.
I had to accept a faith very consciously. With my background of poverty, from which I had grown up, I had a great fear of ever going back to that again. One of the things in my early days before I met the Oxford Group was that I must succeed at all costs and have material security. In fact, it got me so bad that at one time I had a bit of a nervous breakdown, just at the beginning of my time in the PO because it had worried me so much. Then I learned, following the story I told you about the £50 we got when we gave it to this miner’s trip to the Ruhr, I decided that I really would trust God. Hilda of course was with me wholeheartedly in this, and I did things which - through guidance - I would never otherwise have done from a logical standpoint. The majority of the times God led me in the right direction and I think the success of this international transfer to the new system is due to that. I don’t know who got knighted through it, there were quite a few thrown around.
With special thanks to Ginny Wigan for her transcription, and Lyria Normington for her editing and correction.
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