Ronnie's new historical novel Luddite Spring serialised at:

http://www.openwriting.com/archives/luddite_spring/



Yorkshire Folk Tales:

http:yorkshiretales.com



Apologetic work:

www.yorkshiretales.com/allaboutmormonism

www.yorkshiretales.com

www.yorkshiretales.com/allaboutmormonism

http://www.openwriting.com/archives/luddite_spring/

A Little Book of Love

Dedicated to all whom I love,

 and whom I dare hope love me

There is a lot of love in the world – but still not enough! These stories are meant to encourage us to love a little more, to love more people, and to share the joy of love especially with those in whose life love has not yet been a blessing.  Love is the greatest of all Christmas gifts. 

These are true stories about love, and touch on love for those we have chosen to love, love for those we ought to love, love for our friends, love for helpless creature, love for those nature has fitted us to love, and love for those who have found place in our hearts not because they have any right to be there, but because of the largeness of our warm and tender hearts and the blessing of our all wise and loving God. 

The greatest characteristic of love is its constancy.  Love survives misfortune, unwise choices, human follies, and it bridges our own disappointment to keep its tireless span touching the far banks of life where those who dwell would otherwise be outcast and scorned. 

Robert Browning’s identification of love as that which ‘alters [not] when it alteration finds,’ is the hallmark by which the mettle of our own hearts is tested.  It is the standard by which Almighty God measures the worth of souls. 

And in the long journey of life, the only hope we have that our time has been well spent is in direct proportion to the love we have for others, whether they are great or small, worthy or unworthy,  or deserving or undeserving according to the way we judge them.

These stories illustrate ways in which love has been selflessly given by different people in different circumstances, but whose common gift to Life is their love.  “Go thou and do likewise.” 

 White Robed Angel

It was the beginning of November 1997 - The patients knew she was an angel – that white robed figure who slowly and silently moved through the dim night hours in Ward Eight of Huddersfield Royal Infirmary.  Some people do not believe in angels, and I understand why they do not.  But I do! 

Angels come in all shapes and sizes.  Their existence does not depend on whether people do or do not believe in them.  Most think of angels as diaphanous spirits floating down from heaven to minister to people in times of need, before returning to ethereal realms.  This angel was not visiting from heaven.  She was an earthling, who did not know it, but was on her way to paradise.

The angel’s name was Norma.  We had been married for almost thirteen years when she became ill.  Initially it seemed to be nothing more serious than a sore throat.  She took a turn for the worse, becoming hoarse, tired, and weak.  I drove her to the hospital, insisting that a doctor examine her.  The doctor ordered tests and x-rays. 

The test results and x-rays came back.  The young physician was taciturn, avoiding my gaze.  “I think we’ll keep her in,” he said.  “We need to do further tests.”  I wheeled her into the reception ward, hugged her long and hard, and left for home.  When I returned with her necessities, she was in bed in Ward Eight

She was gratified that something was being done and after some rest, she was more like the happy, laughing woman everyone knew.  I spent each day with her and she had many visitors.  Friends and neighbours flocked to see her, bringing her flowers, fruit, chocolates, and the mandatory energy drinks. 

Her happiest day was the Sunday when three of her four surviving children visited.  They spent the day talking, remembering, and laughing. She loved to laugh, but her greatest attribute was her impulse to loving service.  Although now enfeebled by disease, she obeyed the divine impulse to serve others, shuffling painfully through the ward, seeing to the needs of others. 

A young girl, struggling to come to terms with life, lay listless and morbid.  Tattooed, pierced, her arms bearing the scars of frequent self-mutilation, ostracised by her fellow-patients, brooding, and depressed.  Norma encouraged her to think positively about herself and the possibilities of her life.

In the bed across from Norma was an old lady.  Everything she ate came back.  Norma soothed and comforted, encouraging her to take a little nourishment to get strong enough to fight the illness that was sapping her vitality.

One elderly Indian woman spoke little English.  She had many visitors at one particular time of each day, but for long periods after that, she was alone and unable to join in conversations.  Norma, who spoke no Urdu or Gujerati, sat on her bed and painstakingly made contact.  She understood how important it was for people to have human company if they were going to feel good about themselves.

Many others, scattered throughout the large ward, were grateful recipients of Norma’s ministration.  She was often up in the night, comforting those who were feeling lost, or lonely, or who were anxious, or unable to sleep.  It was not easy for her to move around, because her illness sapped her strength, and made walking difficult. 

However, it did not stop her from visiting and helping.  The nurses and doctors praised her enterprise, appreciating the value of spiritual support in healing.

In the next bed was a woman in her thirties.  It was she, more than any other, who attracted Norma’s most profound compassion.  She was a tender little thing who apologised every time she opened her mouth.  She was so anxiety laden that it was painful to hear her.  If she dropped a crumb onto the bed covers, she apologised, looking as if some ogre was going to punish her.  She repeatedly complained that she was being a nuisance, and felt that she caused trouble for the staff.

One night, she called for a commode.  After using it, she began to cry that she was sorry, that she was sure she had made a mess.  Would they forgive her?  Norma assured her that everything was all right.  She spoke softly and encouragingly. 

The young woman came and sat on the edge of Norma’s bed.  Norma took her hands in her own, looked her in the eye and spoke softly but directly.  “You have a Father in Heaven who loves you.” 

These were the last words she heard.  She smiled, the only time Norma had seen her smile, and then died. 

How fitting that the last words she heard in mortality were words of love, assurance, and hope. 

The White Robed Angel had performed her ministry.  Three weeks later, she was herself called to a better place where, I do not doubt, she continues to minister to fragile souls who need to learn that through all the disappointments and anxieties of life, they have a Father in Heaven, and he loves them.

 True Love

It was an extraordinary story, but I was not surprised.  I called my old friend Mike Wright, having heard that he had had some serious health issues in the last couple of weeks, and those I had spoken to confirmed that he was lucky to be alive.

Mike and Millie have been sweethearts ever since the brash young tar was impressed by the dimples on the pretty face he found himself standing next to at a football match, and they have been together except when Mike was chopping through the high seas on the HMS Ladybird.

Four heart attacks in less than a week had Mike thinking seriously about his funeral service and Millie’s widowhood, the same dark thoughts that troubled Millie as she held Mikes hand in the dim quiet of the hospital ward knowing that she must be braver than she felt.  The last attack resulted in Mike struggling to hold onto life as his ambulance raced down the hard shoulder of the M62 to Leeds, blue lights flashing, the insistent siren demanding clearance, giving the lie to the nurse who told Mike there was no emergency but Mike knew better, seeing, as it were in vision, his funerary service, and Millie weeping inconsolably and alone.

The heart surgeons at Leeds Infirmary hit Mike with clot busting chemicals and took him down into the bowels of the hospital where they pull off their everyday miracles.  He saw his heart on the screen pounding reassuringly, saw the murky puff of radio-opaque dye squirted into his arteries, endured the surprise of the hot flush start at his head, rolling down his body, and exit through the soles of his feet as he wondered what the heck it was!

As the surgical team talked amongst itself, seemingly insouciant, a slender wire snaked its way through the hole they had punched into his femoral artery and wriggled into his heart, aiming for the stenotic section of cardiac artery plainly detailed by the fluid. 

4
A miracle of micro engineering called a stent sat at the end of the catheter and, when in position, the balloon inflated spreading the expanded metal keeping the cholesterol plaque apart and restoring circulation to the coronary arteries.  A check by the eminent surgeons and a second stent was shunted up behind the first to secure the site from closure, then, after a night in the Coronary Care Unit, Mike was on his way to recovery and eventually a more leisurely return trip by ambulance this time sans siren and lights to Huddersfield Royal Infirmary.

Millie entered the room with apprehension.  She did not know whether Mike was going to make it or not and after so many years even the fleeting thought that her best friend and husband might not survive pushed her heart up into her mouth causing her to tremble with fear.  She scanned the glimness, finding Mike in the futuristic gloom surrounded by tubes and machines that interpreted and reported his condition, peeping and chirruping like a battery of electronic birds to the accompaniment of a flashing demonstration by multitudes of micro-sized Christmas tree lights.

The nurse technician scrutinised the screens and illuminated displays, his face betraying his anxiety, as he perceived some behaviour in Mike’s heart that should not be.  Two nurses were holding Mike’s hands, one either side of the bed, as Millie fearfully drew near.  One reached for Millie’s hand, placing Mike’s hand in it as her counterpart laid Mike’s hand on the bed and left. 

At the very moment Mike and Millie touched hands, the scrutiniser gasped, exclaiming that the screens and indicators had suddenly shifted to register all his readings just as they should be. 

“Let go of his hand and let me check it when you are not touching him!” he said, his voice urgent. 

Millie laid Mike’s hand on the bed and he checked the screens again.  Mike’s heart beat a little faster but apart from that all his signs remained steady and first-rate.  Millie took his hand again and his heart slowed to normal limits, and everyone relaxed.  There was muttering and head scratching from the disbelieving care team at what they had witnessed.



The touch of the hand of Mike’s True Love had calmed his troubled heart.  He had lain passive and terrified among hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of equipment designed and built by human genius.  Nursing, medical and radiological experts who had jointly spent more than two hundred years developing their skills and cunning had treated him. 

He had received hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pounds worth of wonder drugs to calm him, break up the clots that had caused the death of parts of his heart muscle, medicines to stop the pain, calm his anxiety and prevent the formation of new clots, and while all these had been essential in bringing him back from the edge of the grave, it was a miracle that no individual brilliance can reproduce, no drug can imitate, and no machine can generate: a miracle only achievable by the touch of the hand of one who is truly loved and who truly loves.

Emma Rae McKay wrote to her husband, David: 

How much have I remembered you?

As much as night and day!

Not any thoughtful moment have you

Ever been away.

From sunlight to moonlight, and

From darkness to the dawn,

Your image and my love for you

Have always lingered on.

What more could I have done, dear one,

To show my feeling true?

What more is there in life, my love,

That I can offer you?

Maybe there is nothing more that anyone could offer – except, perhaps, life itself, through the touch of a healing hand when only True Love will make the miracle.  For the God of Miracles wrought the greatest miracle of all when He sent His only Son so that we should not die, because He is the God of True Love.

 Behold Thy Mother

I watched the mothers, some young, and some not so young, that had carried their fretful babies to the back of the auditorium at the stake conference. 

Though quite different women, each held their little ones close in roughly the same way, swaying gently, cooing into their ears, and enticing them to sleep. 

The scene before my eyes misted over and changed.  In my imagination I saw their babies grown to manhood and womanhood, and I knew what they would never know: that their mothers carried them, bore them, held them, sacrificed their time, comfort, and health to love them through bleak and cheerless days, troubled and tormented nights, and did whatever the moment demanded to make them well again and restore their sweet smiles of baby peace. 

Sadly, children grow up forgetful of every sweet or troubled moment spent on them by their loving mothers. 

Once assumed, motherhood can not be laid down.  It endures beyond the narrow confines of mortality into the broad and sweeping reaches of eternity, where the attributes of matriarchy are acknowledged as essential characteristics of deity.

The wages of motherhood are not paid in full during mortality.  A mother’s labour does not stop when her heart beats its last, and her breath slips from her with a sigh. 

Mothers know this, but undertake the role with love and thanksgiving, accepting that ingratitude will often reward their efforts to render help or advice.

Each memory of the earliest months and years are imprinted into the mother’s heart, and burned into her brain, but the child often forgets, acting as if those days had never been, and that makes for the worst kind of pain.

Mothers are not perfect.  There is no prior requirement for would-be mothers to be faultless or expert.  Even so, most strive for perfection, and many get close enough to pass with honours. 

Children of any age who harbour the expectation that their mother should be perfect are labouring under a delusion whose identical twin is the idea that life will be fair.  The best that can be said of any mother is that despite her imperfections, she tried always to do her best to raise her children well. 

This upward striving, often against her intrinsic nature, is the willing sacrifice of a mother’s loving heart, swiftly turned from her own interests when the badge of “Mother” is pinned to her breast.  She is always ‘mother’ although the direction and intensity of her role changes as her family grows.

Now a girl, little more than a child, nursing a newborn that demands all her devotion so that he can live, be healthy, increase in wisdom, and grow to adulthood. 

Now a mature woman with three or more little ones tugging at her skirts, juggling her time, coping with the many calls and tasks that fly at her with the velocity of an autumn wind, answering the call to motherhood without diluting the love, care, and tenderness she imparts to each of her charges. 

Now a matron, watching her teenaged children hover on the edge of maturity, but who still desperately need to hold onto her hand as they unfurl their wings, poised to try them in the wide blue arc of their unfolding lives.

Now a grandmother with smiling eyes, silver hair, and tears in her eyes cradling her grandchild and remembering those that, too often, have either forgotten her or else remember but do not take time to call her, send her a letter or a card, and who decline to make the best gift of all and visit her, even for a few moments. 

Then a great-grandmother remembering little with clarity, her wrinkled face reverting to angelic gentleness when she is visited by sweet children whose parent’s names she has forgotten. 

As Jesus hung on the Cross of Calvary, he made provision for his mother by commanding John the Beloved, Son, behold they mother.  In these few words, Jesus defines our responsibilities to our mothers.

How appropriate, that in the hour of his passion, as he made perfect Atonement, he recognised the part his mother had played in preparation for his becoming the Saviour of the World, and that he made provision for her to be comforted and cared for at the very moment of his death through the good offices of one whom he loved and trusted.

In the Fellowship of the Cross Jesus teaches us about mothers and the regard and esteem that he and his Father in Heaven have for them. 

Through this, we come to appreciate the truth about the exalted calling of motherhood, in fulfilment of which mothers go to the edge of the grave to bring their children into the world. 

What is equally true is that mothers never stop loving their children, even when their children are ungrateful, unkind, and, sometimes neglectful. 

When I was young, I was disappointed that my mother had not made me better than I was.  My feelings towards her changed when I realised that she had done her best, and I began to appreciate all that she had done for me, rather than count what I considered to be her failings.  Since then, I have felt much better, and so has my mother. 

Whatever our mothers may or may not have done for us, they gave us life, and nurtured us according to their imperfect best.  To each of us, especially we who have not managed to be sufficiently grateful, the Voice from the Cross commands,

“Behold thy mother!”.

 Breakdown in Barnsley

Norma and I were travelling home to Huddersfield after visiting June and Fred in London.  Our Lada Riva was laden with the goodies that characterised June and Fred’s regard for us and made our car sit down on its suspension. 

We had passed through north London, reached the M1, and driven about ten miles from beginning of Motorway, when the rear end started to roll gently, indicating a flattening tyre.  I pulled on to the hard shoulder, and changed the flat tyre for the spare. 

We drove at a good lick until we got about twenty miles south of Barnsley, when the same thing happened again.  The back end swung a little, and I knew that another tyre was losing air. 

We had used the spare, it was almost half past one in the morning, we didn’t belong to a rescue organisation, we had no mobile phone, the motorway was virtually deserted, so I decided that we would keep going and try to reach Huddersfield on the flat tyre.  That seemed like a reasonable thing to do, so we tried. 

About half a mile later and the tyre began to be shredded by rolling under the rim.  Then, as strips came loose, they flapped against the underside of the body every time they came around and threatened to make a hole in the bodywork. 

It was terrifying at first, but then as piece after piece was ripped from the tyre until it was all left lying on the motorway the knocking was replaced by the rumbling of the rim on the road. 

In the mirror I saw sparks from the rim, and eventually the rim went flatter than the missing tyre.  By this time I was more than a little afraid of setting fire to the vehicle if we continued, so I slowed and got off at the next exit. 

We crawled up the exit for South Barnsley, then at the roundabout turned right towards the town.  We didn’t make town.  The car was by this time unhappy, complaining with every revolution of the flattened rim. 

I pulled into a side street next to a red telephone kiosk and parked.  The telephone didn’t work!  I walked around the corner and a hundred or so yards away stood the warehouse of Gent’s clothing manufacturer. 

The place looked shut up and dark, but a lone light shone from a small hut used by the security man on the gate.  I went back to the car to get Norma rather than leave her alone in the dark in a crippled car. 

Together we walked to the security hut and the guard let us in.  I explained out plight and he, against company policy, let us use the telephone directory and his ‘phone to try to find a tyre repair service. 

Tyre repair?  Not in Barnsley, not at that time of night!  So I telephoned our bishop in Huddersfield, but he was a very heavy sleeper.  I was left with just one option and that was to call our friend Louise Scholes. 

Louise answered the ‘phone on the second ring, and after I told her of our predicament, she instantly agreed to come and rescue us. 

We thanked the lone sentinel for his kindness, and left him in the still dark night to keep his watch.  Linking arms, we walked back to our poor little car, feeling buoyed up by the cheerful response we had from Louise. 

The walk to our ravaged car took less than five minutes.  We sat inside, warmed by the balmy night air, and the restoration of hope. 

Fifteen minutes later, a cream coloured Mercedes estate wagon rolled around the corner.  We were rescued!  That makes the elapsed time from hanging up on the call to Louise’s arrival a staggering twenty minutes. 

I was no slouch when it was a matter of driving on the motorway, but it took me a good forty minutes to reach Barnsley from Huddersfield with all four tyres inflated, but Louise had cut my time in half. 

Not only had she shaved twenty minutes from my record, but also she had made sandwiches and a flask of hot drink before she hurtled to our rescue!  The woman was a wonder, and a blessed miracle. 

After our 2 am repast, we transferred our belongings from the Lada to the Merc, and then put the flat tyred wheel in the back and she sped us through the night to our home, helped us carry our stuff into the house, and then she went back to Edgerton to the bed she had abandoned to help us. 

Early next morning, she called.  She had taken the flat tyre to the garage to be repaired and had picked it up and was ready to take me to my car and do whatever needed doing to get it home.  The car was still in the side street by the trashed telephone box sat on the rickety scissors jack. 

While fitting the wheel on, I noticed that the tarmac under the back of the car was soft and smelled of petrol.  Inspection revealed that the flapping pieces of tyre had broken the rust from the bottom of the petrol tank and all my precious fuel had escaped in the night. 

I had a fibreglass repair kit in my toolbox, cleaned off the tank, stuck a big patch of fibreglass wadding over the lacework, smeared it with the resin, and left it to set. 

Louise then drove me to a petrol station and we put a gallon in her tin, drove back to the Lada, tested the patch to make sure it had set, poured in the fuel, turned the key, and the good hearted engine roared into life.

I thanked Louise for her goodness, thoughtfulness, and selflessness, and she was gone as if shot from a gun.  She was no slouch.  I drove, much slower, back to the petrol station and filled the tank before driving home, safe and sound, having been rescued by the angel in the flying Mercedes Benz. 

I have often thought of Louise when I have been asked to help others but experienced some hesitation, and then felt ashamed at my reluctance, and, in the same spirit that Louise showed to us, cheerfully said, “I’ll be right there!” 

It always feels good, and I know it always will. 

Even now as my body is not as reliable as it once was, and as my strength fails, and when movement is increasingly painful, I hope that I can always summon the strength and spirit to follow the example that was set before to me by a lady snug and warm in bed many miles away, who did not hesitate to respond to my plea for assistance, and who transformed what should have been a simple rescue mission into a function, complete with catering and a next-day follow-up. 

The amazing thing is that she took time to cut the crusts from the bread and to wrap the sandwiches in beautiful damask serviettes!  That extra touch, together with the crystal goblets from which we drank our hot chocolate at 2 30 am in a side street on the outskirts of Barnsley add that touch of self that transmute our acts of service into acts of giving of ourselves, which is the very heart of selfless succour, and not only helps the predicaments to which they are addressed, but change lives as they do so. 

The Little Fisherman

During military service, I served a year on Cyprus, ‘The Jewel of the Mediterranean,’ where the friendliness and generosity of the Cypriots impressed me.  Yet I was to meet a man whose friendliness and generosity impressed me more than any other man I had met before or since.

His name was Andreas, though he was seldom called that.  He was small; no more than four feet six inches tall, and his head was disproportionately large.  Therefore, his friends called him Fezzaz, meaning ‘big head.’  Remarkably, he did not seem to mind, perhaps because he knew who and what he was and was completely at ease with himself.

We met in a café overlooking the beach in the poorer part of Larnaca.  Andreas was sitting with some friends who were giving him a hard time, making him the butt of their jokes while he played the part of a fool, responding to their jests and cruel taunts without rancour or anger.

Eventually, his companions tired of their game and left.  He then moved to my table and uninvited sat down and began to talk to me.  His doing so was not motivated by a desire to convince me that he was not the buffoon he had given the impression of being for the sport of his friends.

He told me that he was a psari – a fisherman.  With his small boat and a net, he wrested an uncomfortable and uncertain living out of the waters off Larnaca, a small town on the south coast of the historic island.  He expressed himself in remarkably good English with charming and poetic fluidity, rescuing me from the necessity of having to speak in my version of Greek. 

His talk and manner revealed that here was a man strangely wise and profoundly serious, markedly different from the Fezzaz who had, but moments ago, played court jester to lesser men.

He led the conversation with gentle ease and demonstrated an exceptional grasp of human nature and world affairs.  During our tête-à-tête, he reminded me that it was Easter Saturday and that midnight would bring the anniversary of the Resurrection of the Christos, the Saviour Jesus Christ. 

“Will you be going to church tonight?” he asked gently intoning the words.  I replied that I had not thought of going. 

 “You will come with me.”  It was not a question, nor yet a command, but it was irresistible.  He rose to leave and I followed him.

Shortly before midnight, we joined with the hundreds in the procession in the dark streets of Larnaca.  Each carrying the symbols of Easter: a lighted candle, a hard-boiled egg, and a piece of bread. 

The candle represented Jesus Christ as the Light of the World, the egg the symbol of new life in his Resurrection, and the lump of bread was the symbol of Him as the Bread of Life. 

We moved along with the crowds over rain bright cobblestones into the candlelit church from the narrow street.  In silence we stood as the Pappas intoned the devotional, our thoughts directed backwards to events that transpired not too far away due east of where we stood and which had transformed human history. 

Although my Greek was less than perfect, I understood some of the bearded, dark-robed priest’s word, and what I could not grasp I felt.  It was good to be in that place.

The devotions over, he led and again I followed to his dwelling.  His home consisted of one room ten feet by ten feet that served as dining room, living room, and bedroom.  An adjoining passageway with a door to the outside served as a kitchen and washing place. 

There were two beds, in one of which Andreas’ wife slept, waking as we entered.  He spoke to her in his soft voice.  Leaving her bed, she crossed to the small bed and woke their two sleeping children, who immediately arose and went into the big bed, falling back to asleep almost instantly.

The candle was extinguished leaving us in the dark to undress and go to bed.  I climbed into the children’s still warm bed, falling almost at once to sleep, but not before musing on the events that had led me to this setting. 

I understood that I had entered a different world and was now in the presence of angels.

Bright sunshine poured in through the small high window and warmed us awake late on Easter morning.  We rose, dressed, took turns to wash at the cold-water sink, and then sat at the rickety table to share breakfast of goat’s milk cheese, black bread, and restful, undemanding camaraderie.

Breakfast done, his family lined up outside the street door.  We shook hands, embraced, said brief but heartfelt goodbyes in Greek and English, and then I walked away from a friend who had penetrated deep into my heart.  I never saw or heard from him again.

I did not learn his last name, and I could never find my way back to his welcoming door in the warren of small streets that filled the spaces between the buildings near the shoreline of that ancient town.  Yet, I shall always hold his memory dear and remember the valuable lessons that he taught me.

He taught me that it is possible to reach out to strangers and make friends of them. 

He taught me that you do not have to be rich to have enough to share. 

He taught me that no man need be ashamed of his poverty or lowly circumstances if he enjoys the richness of a soul that is trusting and generous. 

He taught me that the greatest gift is love and validated that truth by his life.

Andreas, whether he is called by his name, meaning leader of men, or by the uncomplimentary Fezzaz, is truly a child of God. 

Though small among men and lacking in physical beauty, he is possessed of a grace that exalts him.  He was apparently without fault, seemingly perfect, though he would be quick to deny it.

Here is a man who uncomplainingly accepts the derision of others, and exhibits the characteristics of Him whose Resurrection Morning celebration he bid me attend. 

It is said that Christ walks among men in disguise.  Having met and walked with Andreas, I believe that may be so.

God Be With You ‘Til We Meet Again

God be with you ‘til we meet again;

By His counsels guide, uphold you,

With His sheep securely fold you;

God be with you till we meet again.

Till we meet, till we meet,

Till we meet at Jesus’ feet;

Till we meet, till we meet,

God be with you till we meet again.

Written by Jeremiah Rankin in 1880 on what Rankin describes as “the etymology of ‘good-bye,’ the hymn has become a traditional favourite with Christian congregations of all denominations. 

Although intended as a dismissal hymn, it has become the standard ‘departure anthem,’ and is often sung at farewells, even when it is doubtful if those departing and their friends will ever meet again in mortality. 

God be with you till we meet again;

‘Neath His wings protecting hide you;

Daily manna still provide you;

God be with you till we meet again.

When I was a Latter-day Saint Missionary in 1956, I had word that my father, Tommy Scott, was dangerously ill.  The mission president, Clifton GM Kerr of the British Mission, said I should go home and see him.  I entrained at Cheltenham, and then had to change trains at Sheffield. 

As I waited on the station platform for the train to Leeds, I was approached by a young man who was with a large group on the adjoining platform, evidently seeing some friends off.

God be with you till we meet again;

With the oil of joy anoint you;

Sacred ministries appoint you;

God be with you till we meet again.

“Are you an American?” he asked.  I understood his question because I was wearing a dark blue American ROTC Air Force raincoat that had been gifted to my by a fellow missionary, and, of course, I wore the requisite missionary hat, a Homburg. 

This was in the days before missionaries wore identification badges, and it was this combination that had identified me as, potentially, an American.

God be with you till we meet again;

When life’s perils thick confound you;

Put His arms unfailing round you;

God be with you till we meet again.

“No,” I said.  He smiled and turned to walk back to his friends.  As he had recognised something in me, so I had recognised something in him.

“But, I am a Mormon Missionary!”  He swivelled on his heels smiling wider and said, “So am I!” 

We fastened our hands together like long lost brothers. 

He explained that a family of Mormons from the Sheffield Branch were emigrating to Salt Lake City – Zion – and that he and his missionary companion and some local members were seeing them off on their way to Southampton where they were to take the Queen Elizabeth and steam to New York, before completing their journey westwards to Utah by train. 

God be with you till we meet again;

Of His promises remind you;

For life’s upper garner bind you;

God be with you till we meet again.

At his invitation I joined the crowd on the platform in time to sing the Anthem.  I did not tell them I was travelling to my ailing father’s bedside.  Why spoil their happy-sad occasion with my own sadness?

God be with you till we meet again;

Sicknesses and sorrows taking,

Never leaving or forsaking;

God be with you till we meet again.

It was an emotional experience, singing farewell and Godspeed to people I did not know, but whose hearts and faith I understood, as well as I understood the forces that impelled them to gather to Zion to live among the Saints. 

God be with you till we meet again;

Keep love’s banner floating o’er you,

Strike death’s threatening wave before you;

God be with you till we meet again.

The Holy Spirit was poured out in abundance on our little groups of friends and well-wishers, and hearts were touched by a profound pathos as beloved friends quit the place where they had not only come to, but had also grown in their vibrant faith, and were now responding to the compulsion they felt in their breasts for the Spirit of the Gathering of Israel. 

Tears freely flowed.  Eyes reddened, hearts pounded and heaved with the pain of farewell.  It was almost too much to bear. 

God be with you till we meet again;

Ended when for you earth’s story,

Israel’s chariot sweep to glory;

God be with you till we meet again.

Emitting great billows of swirling steam that enveloped itself and the platform party, the train hissed, skidded its wheels, and pulled out into the night and adventure. 

The train passed out of sight, and we began to dissolve and make our separate ways to wherever our needs required us to be.  I shook the hands of my new found brothers and sisters, and then as they abandoned the platform I turned to wait alone in the quiet dark for the train that would take me home to where my Dad, Tommy Scott, lay dying. 

It was a sad journey.  Dad and I had not been close since he married my mother when I was three or four years old, but time smooths the wrinkles from our past if we are wise enough to let them, and I had learned that while he could not be a father to me, he had been a good husband to my mother, and for that reason alone I respected him. 

The train came and I boarded.  We journeyed through the dark and wet of a Yorkshire winter’s night, rumbling northwards in a dimly lit train that reeked of steam, burning coal, and old times. 

Conscious of my errand I was about to give way to sadness and grief, when the words of the hymn, “God Be With You 'Til We Meet Again” came into my mind like a mighty choir and lifted my soul. 

It was a slow and impatient journey, and by the time I walked through the door, Dad was gone. 

I missed saying “Goodbye” to him; yet in that sweetness that rounds the sharp edges of our lives, I felt that our goodbye had been taken care of on Sheffield railway station when I stood among strangers who were not strangers, and sang with strangled throat to all who leave and travel into the darkness, leaving us to journey on alone.

“God be with you till we meet again.”

Till we meet, till we meet,

Till we meet at Jesus’ feet;

Till we meet, till we meet,

God be with you till we meet again.

Thank you, Lord!

When Matt Was Three

When Matt was three, I was concerned that he was not progressing normally.  So, I bought the book, So You Want to Raise a Boy!  I learned that he was normal for his age.  I stopped worrying.  The book said that the age of three was a golden year for boys.

When Matt was three, He climbed into my bed every morning and asked me about everything under the sun.  Looking around the room his busy eyes fastened on the lamp bulb and he asked how they were made.  He asked how everything he could see or think of was made.  Each day we spent a morning hour in bed with his questions.  His appetite for learning was insatiable.

When Matt was three, he didn’t go up to bed at bedtime because he hated being alone.  I understood, and let him sleep on the fur rug in the warmth of the gas fire in our living room, behind our fancy goods shop on Lockwood Road.  When I went up to bed, I carried him and put him to bed, tucked him in, and kissed him goodnight. 

When Matt was three, I asked him what he would like for dinner.  His reply was disarming: I want to eat in a man’s house!  He was not keen on my cooking and wanted to go to a restaurant.  So, we drove the Jaguar to the Highball Chinese Restaurant at Longroyd Bridge, where he devoured plates of chicken, chips, peas, and gravy, and smiled at me across the table as if to say, This is the life, Dad!

When Matt was three, he often looked after the shop for me when I went to the grocery store further down Lockwood Road to buy Maltesers for breakfast. 

Both Matt and I were convinced that candy made a better breakfast than cereal.  Once, I talked to the shopkeeper a little longer than usual, and was surprised to see Matt march in and announce, There are some Urdu talkers in the shop!  We went home and served our Pakistani customers.

When Matt was three, he went to Sunday School, where he asked intelligent questions about theology.  His mind was quick and analytical, and he forgot nothing. 

His understanding of who God and Jesus were, amazed seasoned preachers.  He stood on a chair and talked about the Gospel to a group of impressed missionaries, fielding their questions with a profundity that was persuasive, coupled with his unquestioning faith.

When Matt was three, he had the most beautiful eyes ever seen on a boy.  His long curling dark eyelashes were the envy of the sisters. 

When asked to look at his eyes, he rolled them to the side of his face and looked so cute that all who witnessed it would melt into a chorus of soft cooing aahs. 

When Matt was three, he had a wide vocabulary, in which there were no baby words.  He was encouraged to use correct words and phrases since he first attempted speech. 

He impressed people unused to articulate conversation from a toddler.  His favourite phrase was expanded polystyrene. 

When Matt was three, his mother and I divorced, and I was granted custody.  He saw his mother only one more time before she disappeared from his life for more than thirty years until I found her for him. 

A social worker called around every couple of months to see how this single father was looking after his cherubic boy.  He was obviously satisfied with the results because he only made three visits.

When Matt was three, Bishop McEwen presented me with a rose in church on Mother’s Day, dedicating it to ‘one of the best mothers in the ward.’ 

It was easy to be mother to a lad who called me Mummy-Daddy.

When Matt was three, he sat in the drivers’ seat of our minivan and steered us home as I pushed, when we ran out of petrol.

When Matt was three, he had bronchitis and pneumonia.  I sat at his bedside for five nights, watching him, helping him to breathe, and praying for his recovery.

When Matt was three, he was twice as delightful as when he was two.  Nevertheless, he had not peaked. 

The years passed and Matt grew.  His intelligence was widely known.  He read books about cats, learning almost everything about them, together with their mysterious history.

When Matt was three, it was evident to everyone that met him that he was an unusual boy.  Ladies adored him, while the range of his knowledge, and the power with which he expressed himself impressed everyone.

When Matt was three, he asked about the stars.  During the year he was nine, he sat in class rapt in thought.  His teacher, noticing his lack of attention, asked what he was thinking about. 

“Supernovas, sir.” he replied without affectation. 

“Aha.  Now I’ve got him!” thought the teacher. 

He said, “come out here, Matt, and tell the class about supernovas.  And, to my astonishment,” explained Mr Bermingham, “he did just that!”

Now he is a man.  He celebrated his thirty-fifth birthday a few days before I wrote this appreciation of him. 

I still see the boy in the man, and rejoice that the tenderness and open simplicity that were his in childhood are still there.  He maintains his ability to marvel and wonder at each new thing, and takes sunshine wherever he goes. 

He was the easiest child for a man to bring up alone, bearing each of childhood’s ills uncomplainingly.  He cut his teeth silently, until his wisdom teeth erupted at thirty-something.  He had all four removed in Leeds General Infirmary, and came home to be nursed until he was well enough to return to Bradford.

I watched him, as I had done in old times, his head on the pillow in the darkness, his jaw badly swollen from dental surgery, but he seemed at peace in sleep. 

As I looked at my son through the dusk with ageing eyes, the years fell away and I saw again my angel boy as in that golden year when Matt was three, and my heart overflowed with love. 

 God Bless This Little Bird

It is easy to believe nowadays that children are being raised without religion and that as a consequence they are not alive to the sufferings of others and may be even be lacking compassion.  That this is not always so was made clear to me in precise detail one spring day as I walked my dogs through the field that had been built over the route of the old spur to Hillhouse railway sidings.

It was my regular course, twice a day, and it was not often that I came across anything unusual, apart from meeting old ladies with their dogs of the same vintage as themselves who insisted on telling me the life stories of their precious tykes notwithstanding they had done so in the same place and at the same time the previous day.  I was patient, enjoying the precision of the repeated tales, redolent of little children insisting on absolute conformity to an oft told nursery rhyme or færy tale with nerve shattering attention to detail. 

The smell that morning was sweet, the luscious greensward having been mown at daybreak by the council’s multi-gang mower that raced across the meadow with the intrepidity and élan of a frustrated Emerson Fitipaldi, and the sun was a foot or two above the tall treetops.  My dogs, Shep and Ella, ranged at will, as was their wont, returning for a body check and lick every couple of minutes or so. 

And then I saw it.  From a distance it looked like a clump of mulch, but it was bigger than the mulch piles for the grass had been cut several times that year and left little now apart from its scent to tell that the mower man had passed that way.  Its detail was spectacular.  I had found a grave – almost. 

A little dead bird had been laid on the ground by the side of the worn track that most pedestrians followed.  Heaped over it was a pile of grass cuttings.  A few daisies and buttercups had been plucked from the grass and set out at the cardinal points of the compass.  Atop the mound lay a rustic cross made of twigs from the nearby hawthorn hedge, and at the head of this mandelic assembly, held down by a couple of pebbles, was a scrap of paper on which, in a girlish hand, was written:

God bless this little bird

Words cannot express the impact that had on my heart as I took in the arrangement and read the sincere expression of the faith of a little child.  Tears coursed down my cheeks as I caught the sense of love and compassion that had led to this circumstance.  I prayed for the bird to be blessed and also that the child would always find such love in her heart whatever the years might bring and that this little bird would not be the last unfortunate fortunate enough to be blessed at her hands. 

My pooches could not understand why I was not advancing, and came to ask as I knelt by the graveside.  Perhaps I am just a foolish romantic, but I know my dogs and they knew me, and I got face licked both sides simultaneously as they sympathised with whatever it was that had brought my tears.  Then, as dogs are accustomed to do, they romped off to resume their joyous wanderings, leaving me to fix the image in my mind and in my heart.

That was some years ago, but I have never forgotten it.  Nor has time dimmed my admiration for the hands of a child whose loving heart compelled her to construct a magnificent memorial to one of those who He sees fall when our attentions are focused on less important matters.

I pray that my Father in Heaven will let me always have the heart of such a child, with such solicitude for the meanest of God’s creatures, for, if we have concern for the smallest of His creatures, we will surely take care of grander issues just as well, and the world will be the better for that.

I knew that I had come across the work of a child who had an understanding heart.  Something that King Solomon had to ask for, she was already blessed with – and it showed, for not only did she pay her reverential respect for a little bird, but also she greatly blessed me that day, and never knew it.

Silent Move the Feet of Angels Bright

Since I learned what she had done, my mind has been occupied with images of her creeping furtively from her door under cover of darkness, passing through my neighbour’s garden, into my garden, and then clambering up the three-foot brick wall under my bay window to peep through the lace curtains of the room in which I slept.  I never saw or heard her and I did not know she had been until she shared her secret with Gay and, after more two years, Gay mentioned it in conversation, believing that I had known all along.

Many months after Norma died, although I tried to bring back some semblance of normality into my life, I no longer went upstairs to sleep in our bed but slept on the rosy couch we had bought from Neil and Wendy McEwen, and covered myself with a quilt.  In the cold winter months, I put on the maroon blackberry-knit cardigan that Norma made for me, and kept the gas fire on a low setting all through the night to save money on running the central heating.  Then, if I had trouble getting to sleep, I left the television on and that finally soothed me to sleep just as the radio had done when I was a lonely child in my attic bedroom in Fitzwilliam Street.

We had been very happy there, and I loved the house and its warm memories of Norma that spread through it recalling her joyful qualities and infusing me with an indescribable cosiness, even as I missed her company. 

Apart from my good neighbours the Kohlis and the Iqbals, my good friends Silva and John Scott, and Frank Westerby, my insurance man, no one came across my threshold, including those that might be expected to have taken an interest in my well being.  Yet, woven through the peaceful contentment and comfort that I felt stirring through the sights and sounds of my memories was as inexplicable sense of something intangible but superlatively real for which I had no explanation until I learned her secret.

After Norma’s funeral, I had gone down to Telford and stayed with Jo, Nick, and their little family.  They made me very welcome, and without their love and support, and that of Karen’s family, I do not know how I would have coped with life. 

Our marriage was a marriage made in heaven and attended by angels.  Norma grumbled about my driving and occasionally felt that I spent too long at the computer.  I disagreed about my driving, but conceded that I did at times overdo the writing.  Apart from that, there was never the slightest contention between us, and we enjoyed the best relationship of all the married couples we knew, and would not have changed places with any of them, including those of our children.

Our date night was Tuesday, and most often, we snuggled down on the settee with a box of chocolates and some dandelion and burdock to watch an old movie.  We laughed, lived, loved, and laughed some more, and this was the tenor of our days with no grey clouds on the horizon of the course of our life together, and never a squall, let alone a storm. 

We enjoyed visiting family, loved being with them and their children, but we were always happy to get back home and relax into our mellowing, ripening, sometimes lackadaisical, but always comfortable, lifestyle.  Being home together was the highest joy of our blessed existence.

All of that came to a halt when Norma died and went to her reward and well-earned rest, freed from the pain, discomfort, and indignity she suffered during the three weeks before the cancer took her breath away. 

My consolation was the unique love that Luke developed for me.  Words can never express what I felt from him and feel for him.  It is a love beyond the capacity of our earthly understanding, but has its counterpart in heaven where true love is the common language. 

Yet, in my lonely times, an indefinable presence comforted me.  Even though I was not aware of it, I enjoyed its unseen blessings and sensed its pure love, as if from the hand of an angel.

What I did not know and was not to find out for almost three years was that a sweet and lovely girl, Samara Iqbal, used to tiptoe out of her home late at night to visit my house to see if I was all right.  She did not knock at my door, but climbed up on the low wall that surrounded my front garden and peered in through the lace curtains to see if I was all right. 

Sometimes, she confided in Gay, she uneasily watched, as I did not appear to breathe, until she saw some slight movement from me that assured her that I was still breathing.  Then, once she was satisfied that I was alive and well, she returned home where she prayed to Allah for me.

Although I was deeply touched by finding out about her nocturnal errand, I was not surprised.  Since she was just a toddler, Samara had always been a kind and loving girl, eager to please, and with a generous heart concerned more for the welfare of others than for herself.  In many ways, she had been a daughter to me, and still is. 

I remember the times she appeared at my door either with a plate of her family’s celebration meal, or with a summons to go to help fix something, help with correspondence, or eat one of Shahidah’s sumptuous Asian meals with the family. 

Every visit was attended by an invitation to eat something, and it was very hard to refuse the patient persistent pleading of Shahidah and her eldest daughter, Samara. 

There is comfort in knowing that as I slept in my lonely house, a bright young angel took care to watch and see that all was well with me and, while I am not surprised, my life is brighter, my heart lighter and more joyful for having found out that it was so.  Well did William Blake write:

           …  Silent move

The feet of angels bright;

Unseen they pour blessing,

And joy without ceasing.

And no angel moved more silently, or poured out more blessing and joy than the unseen Samara keeping her selfless watch of love in the dark hours of cold nights over the unconscious form of a grieving widower who felt that life would never again be pleasant.  I thank Allah for sending His angel, Samara. 

Saying ‘Goodbye’ to Ma

As we sat on the sofa across the room from Ma, I knew that this could be our final few moments together during mortality.  She is a frail, silver-haired old lady of eighty-five, just out of hospital after a fall that she doesn’t remember and enjoying being back in her own bungalow.  Her black cat seems just as pleased to see her as she is to see him. 

While she was in hospital for a week, Rene and Arthur set about clearing most of the accumulated junk from her home.  She did not miss any of it because she still had plenty left.  Her walls are almost covered with photographs and mementos of the past fifty years or so, some of the pictures are of neighbours’ children whose names she can no longer remember but who, nevertheless, bring a smile to her as she looks at them. 

The District Nurse calls in three times a week to bandage her ulcerated leg and exchange news and views.  Her Home Help visits each morning and gets her ready for the day, somehow producing a breakfast from her untidy kitchen.  Then Rene calls by each day and fixes her dinner and Arthur gets her ready for bed every night, although after her encounter with the hospital someone will be calling in to do that for her, to make sure she actually gets into bed and doesn’t stay all night in her easy chair.

I look at her and mark how she has shrunk over the years from towering above me in the scant memories of my toddler days, to the little woman I now behold.  What happens to us during the course of life that brings even giants down to size, I mused.  It was time to go.  I reached and patted Gay’s hand, knowing that she would find it as hard as I would to say farewell to Ma.  Gay has a tender soul and is easily moved to tears at the thought of another’s distress.

Ma and I have never been emotionally close.  During early and late childhood she was always a distant figure, almost always present, but remote.  There was never the interaction that I see and envy with other mothers and their beloved children and, since I had a stepfather who was even more aloof, I had always felt the deprivation keenly.  Ma had always been a stranger.

I called her Ma because it was hard for me to call her Mam, as Yorkshire folk usually refer to their maternal parent.  That was too close and personal for what there was between us.  She did not seem to have the same difficulty being close to Rene, eighteen months my senior, or Arthur, nine years my junior, for which I am pleased.

As I steeled myself for what was to come, I silently reviewed the past sixty-five years during which I have been Louie’s son and wished it could have been different.  But the reality was that it hadn’t been and now it was too late.  Some years past, I had come to realise that Ma had probably given the best that was in her to give, and that her superficiality was really a true reflection of her.  It was around this time that I stopped blaming her for her shortcomings as a mother, and begun to understand her as a frail human being who had had some hard knocks during her youthful years, leaving her with two babies by the time she was twenty, and little more than a child herself.  And now it was time to leave.

When we first knew that we would move to the United States of America to settle, I primed Ma ready for this day.  I told her that she could fly out to see us, and that she should start saving her air fare.  I don’t know how much she has saved, but I do know that she has started.  My hope is that, while I do not for one moment believe she will ever board an aeroplane to Arizona, she will always have the hope she will, and that that hope will keep her alive long enough for her to be happy. 

I felt myself rising from the settee, then got hold of Gay’s wrists, and helped her get to her feet.  Ma was smiling although she knew what was coming.  Her skin was the best I had seen it for years, due to the constant washing she had endured in Hospital.  Rene says that she is still as bad tempered as she was years ago when she would argue that black was white.  Rene and Arthur still argue over trivial, non-consequential things.  When they start, I leave.  Ma never shows her bad temper to me.  Rene says it’s because I am the blue-eyed boy.  I find that amusing and puzzling.  I don’t remember it like that.  But Ma has recreated her history along lines that approximate a more perfect family life.

Some of the things she has told Gay about our early history are complete fabrications.  Even allowing for my failing memory, some of those things never happened.  Ma’s power of expression is limited.  I have never known her read a book, and the only time she reads newspapers is to check the TV programme listings.  She bumps along the bottom of the cultural pond using fewer than a 250-word vocabulary to express her distaste, her sorrow, and her elations.  Her highest point of expression that acts as her superlative and that she applies to everyone and everything she deigns to praise is, ‘great.’  She uses few other adjectives.

I envy those who remember conversations with their mothers as occasions when wisdom and good advice were transmitted.  I have no such conversations to remember and report.  The longest conversation I recall with her was one on the back steps of 121 Fitzwilliam Street.  I asked her where babies came from.  I was about twelve or thirteen and I had no clue. 

She had carried out a large basket of washing to hang on the clothesline in our backyard.  Her response was directed at me as she mounted the steps to re-enter the house.  “You know!” she pronounced grimly.  “I don’t.” I retorted, hurt at her dismissal of my earnest question.  Her answer was even more shocking and final.  “But you’ve got a pretty shrewd idea!” she volleyed, stepping past me and through the door, slamming it hard behind her. 

The exchange was at an end and the subject was never broached again.  I completed what education I received about human reproduction during a week’s camp with the Boy Scouts, most of whom were far more advanced than I was in these matters.

I knew that I would leave her with little more remembrances than her face as it changed from a relatively young woman into an angelic looking creature who still had the biting tongue of her earlier years. 

Now it was time.  All the times we had had and all the times we missed were brought together into a sharp and painful point focused on this moment.  I kissed her, patted her head in silent blessing, and through choking tears said “Goodbye, and God bless, Ma.”  Then we stepped out into the sunlight of our last June day in England, and out of my memories with a tightly closed throat.  For all that had passed, for all we had missed, and for all our failures, it was harder than I could ever have imagined saying ‘goodbye’ to Ma.

Copyright (C) Ronnie Bray 2012 - 2014

A Way With Words

By Ronnie Bray


Most of us take talking for granted. It is something we picked up at our mothers’ knees [and other low joints], but unless speech is a requirement of our occupation, we don’t give it much thought. We run along with how we do it without analysis, and it seems to work. That could be why we sit up and take notice when someone uses speech in an exceptionally odd way.

The first time I was forced to pay attention to something said in a spectacular fashion was many years when I was reading the Readers Digest. I chanced upon an article about street-based Indian letter writers. These fellows, I suppose the correct term is ‘Wallas,’ sit in the streets of India’s major cities and with a typewriter balanced on their knees, produce official looking letters for their customers.

The article cited a customer who was having difficulties with another and needed a letter couched in legal terminology that would elicit a suitable financial response from his antagonist. Obligingly, the typewriter-walla wrote the letter spelling out the details of the complaint, adding the threat, “If you do not immediately comply with our just demands, we shall take steps that will cause you the utmost damned astonishment!” How effective this threat of condign legal consequences was, or was not, the article failed to say.

Perhaps more fitting in a piece about a way with words is an example I heard during military service when two soldiers sought compassionate leave on account of their having become new fathers.

The British Army has a peculiar code that must be rigorously observed in all such requests. Although even the most rigorous procedural code is not beyond reconstruction and misapplication by those practised in the manipulative arts.

The two soldiers lined up outside the door of the Commanding Officer’s office were under the guidance of the Company Sergeant Major, and were given instruction as to the manner of their ingress, laying out their petition, and the manner of their egress, after the fashion of the British Army at its best when intimidating its own soldiers.

Thus spake the CSM: "You men, one at a time, when I point to you and say ‘QUICK MARCH,’ will snap to attention and march into the CO’s office, up to the desk, where I shall say ‘HALT!’ whereupon you will halt and stand perfectly still until you are asked by the CO what your reason for being in there is." Is that understood?”

As one man, both answered in chorus, “YES SIR!”

Then, it was time. Pointing with his regimental stick at the nose of the first soldier, the CSM barked, “QUICK MARCH!” The soldier snapped to attention, and when the Orderly Sergeant, another key player in the pantomime, opened the door wide, the soldier smartly marched in and halted on the CSM’s command an inch before he would have collided with the ‘Table, Wooden, Officers for the use of.’ The Army has it’s ways!

The soldier, a private, had been well educated, and had only just failed to pass the War Office Selection Board’s test for taking a commission. He looked every inch a soldier of the Queen, which, in fact, he was, which is probably why he looked as if he was.

The CO looked up from his apparently fascinating notepad and asked politely what the soldier wanted. This opened the floodgates, because the private was more than a little prepared to enter his request.

“Sir,” he began, according to the accepted formula. “I request compassionate leave to go and see my wife and new born son, in accordance with Queens Rules and Regulations, 1955 edition, section 14, article 9, paragraph iii a, and in accordance with the Manual of Army Discipline, 1947, covering compassionate requests as found at Section 8, clause 5, paragraph 3, lines 14 to 19, SIR!”

It could be that someone in the office smiled. We shall never know, because the British Army’s commissioned officers and NCOs are taught from an early age how to smile without it showing on their faces. There was a pause. During this silence, all that was happening was face control.

The private was satisfied that he had made his case cogently, citing the proper sources, and so was confident of success. The seven-day pass was as good as in his pocket.

The CO eventually broke the silence. “Permission denied. That is all!”

The crestfallen soldier was marched out back in the hallways and the other man was marched in. The CO had returned to whatever it was he found fascinating on his notepad. When the CSM screeched ‘HALT!’ the CO looked up at the solder and asked him the nature of his request.

The man shuffled his feet a little, earning him a scathing glower from the CSM who was well practised at glowering. Looking uncomfortable, he opened his mouth to speak, but no sound came forth from his buccal orifice. The CO, a helpful sort of man, tried to help him overcome his discomfort.

“Out with it man. What is it you want?”
“Well, sir, I … ” his voice trailed off into silence.
“What is it you want?”
“It’s my wife, sir.”
“What about your wife? Is she ill?”
“No sir.”
“Well, man, what is it?”
“She’s just had a … ”
“Had a what? A fall? A disappointment? What?”
“Sir it’s a … she has had … I’m now a … ”
“Soldier, are you trying to say that your wife has had a baby and you are now a new father?”
“Yes, sir. That’s it, sir. She’s had a little baby boy, sir, and I was wondering … ”
“And you were wondering if you could go and see her. Is that it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Of course you can, my man. Congratulations. Sergeant Major, make out a pass for this man for fourteen days compassionate leave at once.”
“Oh, sir, thank you, sir.” Gushed the new father.

He was quick-marched back out into the hallway to await his pass. And was parked by the CSM next to the failed applicant.

“How did you get on,” asked the almost officer. “Did you get a seven days pass?”
“No.”
“Me neither,” said the first man. “What did he say?”
“He congratulated me on the birth of my son and gave me fourteen days leave!”
“What! He gave me nothing! ‘Permission denied!’”
“That’s because of your problem.”
“My problem?”
“Yes.”
“What, exactly IS my problem.”
“Your problem, mate, is that you just don’t know how to talk!”


Copyright 2012 – Ronnie Bray

Ronnie Bray ~ Oral History BYU British LDS Project

THE CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF LATTER-DAY SAINTS

HISTORICAL DEPARTMENT

THE JAMES MOYLE ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM

AND BYU BRITISH LDS ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

INTERVIEWEE:  RONNIE BRAY

INTERVIEWER:  RICHARD L. JENSEN

DATE: 21^st JULY 1987

J:         This is an oral history interview with Ronnie Bray.  I’m Richard L. Jensen.  The interview is for the Brigham Young University British Latter-day Saints Oral History Project, we’re in the Huddersfield chapel, and this is July 21, 1987.  

Brother Bray, let’s start the interview off by asking if you would tell about your family background --- the kind of family you grew up in, what your parents were like, and what some of your early memories were of growing up in Huddersfield.

B:        Okay.  It’s very much a mixed bag, both my family and also the kind of backgrounds they came from and the experience we had as a family.  I thought it was pretty normal, until I joined the Church, and you’ll probably see why. 

My mother, Louie, was the second daughter [she was the first, Nora, her sister, was younger] of Harold Bennett, who came from Derby and was an engineer, and Margaret Ann Myers, who came from Staffordshire, the Potteries, and she was a cook in service.  Those were in the days when there were lots of big houses just down the road [Edgerton] from here [Birchencliffe, Huddersfield].  There still are now, but they’re all split up into bed-sits (low cost single-room all-purpose accommodation) and flats.  My grandmother was a cook in service there as a youngish woman and was true to the Victorian idea of a cook who ruled below stairs with an iron hand, something which she never lost all the days of her life. 

My mother, when she was seventeen, got involved with my father.  He was the son of Oliver Bray, who was a character.  He was a master shoemaker, also a poet, and he was also a comedian who from time to time worked on the music halls and the stages around the area.  Evidently he was a short, rather portly chap who wore a stovepipe hat and one of these long-tail coats.

J:          As his daily costume?

B:        Yes.  I believe that was also the common dress of the (LDS) missionaries of that era.  Descriptions of my grandfather I hear put me in mind of Brigham Young, but his way of life was quite different, as he was given to drinking.  His wife, which is my grandmother, Lena Willis, came from the east coast of Yorkshire, around Scarborough, where the Willises are a very large family. 

I don’t quite know how they met yet, but they were married just down the road a little ways, at the church, which is Christ’s Church, Woodhouse, which is about a mile away.  They got married there, and they had been able to gather about nine or ten children.  One of them, Irene [Irené], was actually my grandfather’s daughter but not my grandmother’s.  She was born to the woman who lived next door, and when the woman was with child, she was going to cut its throat with a carving knife, but she didn’t quite manage it, because my grandmother took the child off her and brought her up as her own child. 

My Grandfather Bray used to disappear every so often --- these are all stories I’ve heard.  I never met him, to my knowledge, so these are all apocryphal stories --- and he would disappear and probably go up to Manchester.  There is some family connection, because a lot of his family were born there.  His father, George Bray, was born there.  Then they say Christmas Day was the day he used to choose most frequently for his returns.  He used to walk in large as life, while they were sat down at the turkey or whatever, and say, in a rather grand voice, “I’ll have the parson’s nose.”  You know, it’s just a little bit we pick up and throw away now.  I think Grandmother was the power base, the binding force in the family. 

My father, George, was a rather unstable character, a bit like myself in many ways, in that his employment never lasted for long, and he was always looking for fresh fields.  He always had the feeling that his fortune lay in Manchester, and so over the years he frequently went to Manchester to set up home and, finding just as much discomfort in Manchester as anywhere else, he used to say, “I want to go back,” after a year or two. 

It was an ill-starred union, my mother and father.  Mother was pregnant — in fact, my sister was born about six months before my father decided that he’d marry her, because he wasn’t sure whether she was his or somebody else’s.  But in telling me years afterwards about it, he said he thought,  “Well, I may as well go and get it over with.”  So he went up to the house, knocked on the door, and Grandma came to the door and saw him standing there.  She started to belt him with her handbag and gave him a good beating, saying,  “What have you done to my baby?”  My grandma ran a lodging house, at No. 121 Fitzwilliam Street in Huddersfield, which is the place where I was born, and one of the lodgers there stopped her from killing him with this heavy handbag.  (chuckling)  She used to keep her cash in there.  Then they got in and talked about it and they decided to get married. 

So they got married and they lived in Grandma’s house, my Nanny, as they used to call her.  I was born to them, and when my mother was twenty, she’d got two of us.  

I remember very little of those days.  What I do remember is that when I must have been about two years old, as near as I can calculate, we moved – and that’s my mother and father and my sister Irené and myself – down to a council house in Abbey Road [Fartown, Huddersfield], which is the next road to where I live now.  It’s just over the field.  We lived there and I have three memories of that place, only three. 

One is that I was down at the bottom of the garden and it had what we call a paling fence, and I had got my foot caught between the slats and couldn’t get it out.  I was extremely distressed, and I remember crying.  The house seemed to be miles and miles away.  No one came.  Eventually I think my mother came down and got my foot out. 

My next memory is that I can remember my mother being forced out the door by my father, who was a very brutal man.  She had the ironing board up in front of her, like a shield, to protect herself.  I remember that, that he sort of batted her out of the house that way. 

The only other memory I’ve got of that place is we were sat at the table having dinner, I was sat about here, and my father was sat at the head of the table, right next to me there.  He said, “Eat your peas,” I said, “I am,” and he knocked me straight off the chair.  Little things like that stick in your mind, I guess. 

The next thing that I remember was we were back up at Grandmother’s house and lived in the basement.  It was like a half basement.  The scullery and kitchen were in the cellar of the house, it was a biggish house.  We’d got my sister up on sort of a desk, which was under the window, and we were lifting her vest up.  Her body was very badly bruised, as my father had kicked her up the stairs – not down them, but up them.  He was a drunkard.  When he was sober, he was worse then placid.  You know, he was almost withdrawn when he was sober.  But when he drank, he became really awful and very violent, but only towards the defenceless.  He never picked on a man, and he never picked on a woman that was bigger than him.  He wasn’t very nice. 

So we stayed with my grandma, and I can’t remember how many years after, but it wasn’t long – I know I was still a child – I remember getting a stepfather.  His name was Thomas Scott.  He was from Consett in County Durham.  He was a man who must have been twenty or maybe thirty years older than my mother.  All his family were grown up and either married or about to be married.  So there was a very large age gap.  But we all still lived there.  There was another child born, my half-brother, Arthur, Arthur Scott. 

The set-up at home was very strange.  The house was on three floors.

J:          This was still your grandmother’s house?

B:        Yes, still Grandmother’s house.  This was the sort of major theatre of my early life.  Up to being seventeen I stayed there.  We lived and we ate in the basement, all the food was cooked there, and there was a kind of sitting-room-cum-dining-room.  The lodgers used to sit down there round a big old Yorkshire range fire, which was rather nice.  I can remember they used to cook on the fire with these big cast-iron pots.  

Then on the first floor the front room, which was at the front, was called the front room.  That was my first ever understanding of the “inner sanctum” or the “holy of holies.”  That was the holy of holies, and that was Grandmother’s room.  Now it was not my grandparents’ room but Grandmother’s room.  It was the only room in the house that was locked, and she had the key for that.  Inside there you couldn’t believe.  It had a carpet on the floor, for instance, the only room in the house that had a carpet, and this was one of these fringed Persian carpets.  It was really beautiful.  And it had a three-piece suite.  They were the only comfortable chairs in the house.  The rest of us sat for the rest of our lives on hard kitchen chairs, which we kind of accepted.  She also had a player piano, a Pianola, which was rather beautiful and which I always coveted, but never got to touch.  And she also had a gramophone and a radio.  That was the only gramophone in the house, and it never played, and the only radio in the house, and that never went on.  But it was beautiful.  The room had a light fitting, which was wooden and had three lights on it.  And there were curtains at the window.  You know, it was really a room. 

That was where Grandma went to get away from the rest of us, and when we were permitted to go in there, which was like the high priest in the temple, once a year about, we were duly reverent.  We really knew we were not only in the presence of someone, but we were in a special place, and we behaved accordingly. 

The back room was converted to a little flatlet, and the lodger who had stopped my grandmother killing my father, or at least giving him a severe beating, lived in there with his wife Evelyn.  He was a painter and decorator, Harry Manton, and they had a boy, Brian, who was born there and grew up to be about twelve or thirteen in that house.  Evelyn was a strange woman.  She was psychotic, but fairly well controlled.  But she was paranoid schizophrenic, and so she was a little bit brittle at times, but not a great deal of trouble to anyone, really, except my grandmother, who didn’t like anybody anyway.  If you’re not going to like anybody, probably the best person not to like is a paranoid schizophrenic, because you know you’re halfway there for a start. 

The sleeping arrangements were that on the first floor my stepfather, my mother, and Arthur, my half-brother had one room.  They were all in that one.  Then the next room, which was a big room, had about three or four lodgers in there.  Then there was a little front bedroom and my grandma had a bed in there and also my sister had a bed in there.  Then there were two attics, one large and one small.  In the larger attic were about four beds, with four lodgers in there, and in the next bedroom, the small attic, I had a bed in there and my grandfather had a bed in there.  So the family was spread right throughout the house. 

We never did anything as a family.  Now we didn’t know this at the time, you see.  It was only when I became a member of the Church that I learned something about family life and I saw a lot of things that were really different.  I never felt that I was part of anything.  I felt excluded, rather than being a part of anything and never had conversations with my parents or my grandparents.  There was no conversation.  We were given orders.

J:          You didn’t talk even with your grandfather, with whom you shared a room?

B:        Now he was the only one, from time to time, but we did not converse in the bedroom.  My grandfather apparently –and this is the story in the family – during one of my grandmother’s confinements – she had two girls, my Auntie Nora and my mother, and my mother was the youngest, I think, though I’m not quite sure – that my grandfather strayed, that he had a mesalliance with someone.  I really don’t know the details, but he was never forgiven for it.  So he was banished to an attic bedroom and his status in the home was that he was barely tolerated by Grandmother.  She never let him forget.  She never spoke respectfully to him.  She never spoke lovingly to him.  All her words to him were harsh.  To a child growing up, that just seemed normal, because life seemed a bit harsh at times. 

So there was no family constellation.  Your place in the family wasn’t clear.  You weren’t a child and there were your parents.  You were just in a boarding house, and, of course, the lodgers being present often played a far more important part in your life, because they were often kinder to you than your own family were.

But my grandfather I considered to be a very wise man.  He knew a lot – or at least he seemed to when I was little – and he would always take time to answer my questions.  So I warmed very greatly towards my grandfather.  I felt sorry for him, too, because he really was a small, very meek man, and his meekness was in direct proportion to my grandmother’s ferocity.  She was a tartar and a tyrant, and I use those words given their full weight.  She really ruled.  Her word was law, and no one ever argued with her, because she was an amazing woman.  Her vocabulary was amazing and she had a logic which was all her own, but which was crushing.  (chuckling)

Now, at this distance from it, I can see that it would have been easy to crush us, but when you’re young and you’re sort of being held back by it – and everybody in the family was just the same.  Even the lodgers were terrified of her, all except the one that eventually married my sister.  He’s he only one that would talk to her, so that she could understand him, but nicely.

So I found a great deal of sympathy for my grandfather.  I felt he was just a poor thing.  But he was constantly criticised.  If he did anything, it was criticised, and if he didn’t do anything, it was criticised.

The thing I hated most about my childhood was injustice, because the place was just full of it.  There was no justice.  My grandmother had this sort of system where she used to beat you up, give you a good hiding, and then she’d tell you what it was for.  The sad fact is that nine times out of ten you were not the culprit, but that didn’t matter.  She had decided you were and she was judge, jury, and executioner.  But she used to do it the other way around.  She used to do the execution first.  And I really hated the injustice.  Children say, “It’s not fair,” and I know life’s not meant to be fair and nobody promises you fairness, but I think there ought to be some basic justice about it.  I really felt a sense of grievance.

Most of my early life is very negative, really.  It’s a history of disappointments.  Of course I didn’t see my father for a long time, my natural father.  He remarried.  Then he emerged when I would be probably something like eight or nine.  He used to sort of keep coming and going.  I remember he came up to the house one day and made arrangements to take me out the following day.  I was very young at this time, about five or six.  I never saw him but was told he was coming.  I was bitterly disappointed.

He didn’t want to take my sister out, again because he was convinced that she wasn’t his.  The divorce had been a very, very bitter affair, and he stood up in open court and denied that she was his.  I remember to this day my mother not forgiving him for that, although my sister has got it from my mother.  She hasn’t worked it out for herself.  But you can understand how she feels about it.

I was excited about meeting him, not having a father . . . My stepfather was there, but my stepfather never took to me.  He seemed to take to my sister okay, but there was something about me that I suppose made me hard to get close to.  I had all kinds of problems, and I guess it must have showed.  So he couldn’t warm to me.  So I felt a little bit kept out of things there.  But I remember being so excited because my daddy was coming to see me.  I got all spruced up and waited out by the back door for him.  There was a passageway between our house and the next, as they were terraced houses.  I kept going through that passageway and looking up and down the street.  I wasn’t even sure what he looked like.  I was all afternoon out there and he never came.  But that was the kind of thing that used to happen a lot.

The war was on at this time and, I must say, for all that we had rationing, we never went short of anything.  Here in this country we did not suffer as a result of the war, as far as rations were concerned.  We had less than we were used to, but we’d got plenty.  I think anybody that didn’t get enough to eat had probably lost their ration book, but that was okay.

So I grew up in that situation, and I was christened Church of England, at the Holy Trinity Church, which was just a stone’s throw away from the house there, but never went to church there.  We used to play in the graveyard and thought it was very daring.  (chuckling)  I remember some of the experiences we used to have there.  The gardener used to hide and frighten us to death.  At least I think it was the gardener, down amongst the graves.

I went to Methodist Sunday School, which was just down the road from us.  That was Brunswick Street Methodist Church, and I went there for years and years.  It seems like I always went there.  I used to enjoy it, but more than the Sunday School I used to enjoy when I got to go to Sunday service in the chapel, because I thought the chapel was beautiful.  It was a typical Methodist chapel.  The woodwork was beautiful, you know, and the balcony around it and the pulpit and the organ.  There was just something about the drama and the whole place that appealed to me.  I felt good when I was in there.  Especially when there was singing and the singing was beautiful, I liked that.

In the house that I lived in, incidentally, there was no music at all.  There were two pianos.  One was my stepfather’s and one was my grandmother’s.  And I loved music.  In fact, I used to get half a crown a week, which was 12 ½ p, and I decided I would take piano lessons, because we’d got two pianos.  I don’t know if I’d ever have achieved it, but in my mind I thought it must be beautiful to be a concert pianist.  I just loved piano music.  So I went to a piano teacher, Miss Moss, which was quite near to the school that I went to, which was Spring Grove, and I enlisted for piano lessons.  It cost me half a crown a week, which was my pocket money.  I thought, “Great.  Someday I shall play at the Albert Hall,” or whatever.  It was a great dream.

So I had a piano lesson and went home with my book and sat it on the piano, which was in the room that the Mantons had, opened the book out, and practised my pieces.  I went back the following week for a piano lesson, paid my half a crown, went back home, and when I came back home to practice, the piano had been locked.  Nobody had said anything, but the piano was locked.

I was the sort of child that I would not dare ask why, you see.  I don’t suppose we ever asked anything, really.  Whatever happened in life we accepted.  It was a bit like the Muslim fatalism.  It it’s the will of Allah, you just resign yourself to it.  The fact that the piano was locked after all these years, when nobody ever played it, I just resigned myself to it.  I can still play the eight lessons I had!

The next door neighbour heard about it.  They were from the Channel Islands, the Barretts, and they came over just before the German invasion.  They had a piano and they let me in to use theirs, but it wasn’t always convenient.  They were nice and elderly and very kind, but it wasn’t always convenient and I couldn’t get the practice that I needed.

So after about eight lessons, I gave up the piano.  I thought, “Now what am I going to do?”  I didn’t really know.  I thought about being a film star, because that seemed important.  But music has always played a terrific part in my life, and it came about in a very strange way.  I slept in a little attic with my granddad, and in the summer months I would go to bed and of course it would still be light and, because of the heat, I would go to bed and of course it would still be light and, because of the heat, I would have the window open.  Just over the road from us was Green Head Park, and they had a bandstand in Green Head Park.  I can remember lying in my bed and listening to the brass band playing beautiful music.  I didn’t know where it was coming from.  It was just there, and it was so beautiful.

It used to touch me, used to thrill me, even as a child and it used to lift me.  For a little while, it was as if it took me out of the life that I had, the awfulness and the nastiness that was always constantly around me, the bickering and the carping, the criticism and all that kind of thing.  That all disappeared.  It melted away and the music just lifted me to another dimension.  It gave me feelings I’d never felt before, which was beautiful.  Even now, I hear pieces, and I don’t know the names of them, that I heard as a child, through the summers.  That was a marvellous experience.

And I think when I went to the Methodist church services and the choir sang and the organ played, I got that feeling again.  There was something beautiful about it, and I enjoyed it.

I had a very questioning mind.  I used to question everything.  I was probably a little cheeky and rebellious, too.  By the time I was fourteen and had been going to Sunday School more years than I remember --- I couldn’t remember starting going --- I remember being in class and there were two teachers.  One was a Mr. Telfer, who was a tea merchant here in Huddersfield, and the other one was a Mr. Porrit, who was in business, too, it seemed like.  They were all middle class.  I remember we sat around in these chairs in the basement in Sunday School, Mr. Porrit was teaching, and I was asking these questions.  I couldn’t get a satisfactory answer, I pressed for answers, and I pressed for answers again.  Eventually he lost his temper with me, became very angry, and told me to get out

I was a bit miffed at this, so I up and got out and went for a walk downtown.  I remember the fair had come to town and they’d put the fair up.  I walked around there, and I thought, “Well, if that’s religion, you can have it.”  So I made up my mind – and I don’t even know where I got the word from – that I’d be an atheist.  It seemed to be a reasonable thing to be.  So I became an atheist, quite consciously, and never gave it much more thought.

Just before my fifteenth birthday, my birthday being in January, I left school.  I left school in December of 1949.  I’d been to the one school all the time.  I’d been an indifferent scholar.  Though they said I had some intelligence, it never seemed to show in my schoolwork.  I was a constant truant, often aided and abetted by my mother, who used to hide me at home and pretend I’d gone to school and then give me some money to go to the pictures.

I used to go to the pictures seven, eight, nine, ten times a week.  There were twenty-one cinemas in Huddersfield, there were afternoon programmes as well as evening programmes, and that was something else I enjoyed.  I enjoyed the cinema.  I also enjoyed the theatre.  We had a theatre in Huddersfield, and I enjoyed that.  I always had a special feeling in the theatres, and still do.  We also had a music hall, the Palace, and every Saturday night I used to be there up in what we call the gods, so-called, from the ceiling paintings of Greek and Roman deities, where they used to paint the pictures of the angels right up in the cheap seats.  And oh, I used to come alive there.  There was so much going on.  I think it was the colour that it added to my life, you know.  It was another world, and I enjoyed it.  I loved it.

Because there were so many cinemas and so many changes of programmes, I used to go into one and out and go right into another one.  Sometimes we used to collect the beer bottles that the boarders had brought home..  You know, they’d bring bottles home and I used to stick them in a carrier-bag, take them to the back door of the pub and get pennies and tuppences on them, and get enough to go the pictures again.  That’s where I used to spend my time.

I was a good reader from an early age.  I used to enjoy reading very much.  During the war we had what was known as a book drive.  This was to collect old books, in order to gather waste paper, because it was hard to get hold of the trees anymore for paper.  So they had this scheme, this sort of a motivation scheme, that if you collected so many books you’d get a badge that said you were a private.  If you got a few more, you could be a lance corporal, and for a few more books you could be a corporal, then you could be a sergeant, and it went on.  The more books you got, the higher rank you got.  It was terrific, and of course, we were very much into the war at that time.  All our games were war games.  It was always the “awful Germans” beating our brave British lads.  That’s the way we used to do.

So I took a sack and went around and knocked on the doors of the people and you’ve never seen so many books.  I could have been a field marshal..  But I never handed one of them in.  (chuckling)  I took them all home and I read them and I read them and I read them.  That was another, if you like, way out, another escape.  I loved reading, and I used to read way into the night.  I used to get complaints that my light was on too late, so I used to get a candle and light that, and I used to stick it on the corner of the mattress.  Many’s the time I’ve gone to sleep and it’s burnt down and made a hole in the mattress, but I’m still here alive to tell the tale.

Anyway, I started work, having left school just before Christmas in 1949.  I was fourteen, not quite fifteen.  I started work at Sykes & Tunnicliffe Northfield Mills, Upper Almondbury.  I enjoyed it, but after three months, I was bored, and that became my problem.

J:          What kind of work was that?

B:        Well, it was known as a double plush mill.  That is, it was a mill and they made pile fabrics like a runner you might put on a pew.  Instead of just being a plain woven fabric, there was something like a carpet pile on it, and it was made out of mohair, so it was very soft and very attractive.  They used to make rugs out of this.  They were made on looms that did two pieces, two backings.  Then the loops went between.  As it came off the loom, it rolled onto an upper roll, and a lower roll and a knife went backwards and forwards and cut it round the middle, so you got two for the time of one.

            I was the sorcerer’s apprentice then.  I was the helper of the weaving shed foreman.  When they’d run to the end of a beam full of mohair yarn, we put a new one on, and we had to knot each end to each end, so they could pull them through and start another piece.  There were thousands of those.  I enjoyed working in the weaving shed.  It was a very noisy place, and because it was no noisy, I could sing at the top of my voice.  I used to sing everywhere I went, because I loved singing.  I still do it, and I don’t know I’m doing it.  My daughter, who wakes up grumpy in the mornings, complains that I go into the bathroom humming.  But if you ask me, “Did you hum in the bathroom this morning?”  I’d have to say, “No.”  She swears that I do, but I don’t remember it.

            Anyway, in the weaving shed I could sing at the top of my voice, and it was good, because it developed my voice.  Nobody could hear it, except when the loom stopped.

            So I enjoyed that, but after three months, I was really bored.  I really felt that I’d done all I could do there and there were no more challenges in the place.  I know that’s not true now, but that’s the way I viewed it at that time.

            So I left there and I went to be an apprentice in a heavy iron foundry.  I went to be an apprentice core maker.  I enjoyed that, for three months, and after three months I was completely bored again, because everything I had to do I could do and I could do well and I didn’t seem to get anywhere.  So I really got fed up and bored.  My big problem is that I’m easily bored.

            So I left there and I got a job on co-op transport, in those days the Co-operative Society.  I don’t think you have quite the same thing in the States, but it was a group of retailers, initially, who got together and operated a business consortium on socialist lines.  Because there were so many of them, they could buy goods cheaper.  They could then sell them to the working classes cheaper, and they built stores in working-class areas.  In fact, what they did was they would sell at reasonable prices, but every member for a shilling could become a shareholder – you could only have one shilling share – and then you got a number, and every time you bought something, you used to quote your number and they’d write it down and the amount you’d spent and they’d give you a receipt, very tiny ones, and the other one would go to the head office.  Then once a year you’d get your dividend – or your “divi,” as it came to be called.

            There were loads of branches of this society.  The whole country was covered with  them.  I worked for the central transport department down here, taking goods out from the warehouse to the various branches, things like sides of bacon, all kinds of provisions, and all the sugar came in sacks in those days, gunny sacks.  We just called them sacks.  And all the flour came in sacks, and the raisins, and everything.  It used to come from all over the world, and the smells were indescribable.  You don’t smell that now, because everything’s in plastic.  You miss all that.  The biscuits were loose and that kind of thing.

I was there six months, but during the six-month time that I was there, after maybe I’d been there a month or so, a friend who’d been a boyhood friend of mine – although we never went to the same school..  .  We just sort of met and I don’t remember ever meeting, but it’s like he was always there.  His name was Peter West..  We called him Pete or “Our,” which was short for “our kid,” brother.  We played together as children years and years and years.  We worked together in the first place, at Sykes & Tunnicliffe’s, but when I went to the foundry he stayed on there, and I only saw him a little while after that.

I met Peter West once downtown and he said, “Somebody’s been telling me about this terrific thing.,”  I said, “What is it?”  He said, “It’s the Spiritualist Church.  It’s a terrific laugh.  Why don’t we go this Sunday?”  I said, “Okay.”  There were loads of Spiritualist churches in Huddersfield.  There were three around town centre, and we figured out that if we planned our route carefully, we could get to all three meetings, if we ran between them.  So we went first to the National Spiritualist Church, which was down Ramsden Street, which is now where the piazza is.  They’ve done a way with most of Ramsden Street.  We went there, we went into the meeting, and it was weird.  Now I didn’t feel anything.  I had no spiritual experience there.  I was quite amazed at how flat the whole thing was.  There was a medium operating, and she was working the congregation and saying to some woman, “I see a baby floating above your head,” and this kind of thing.

Well, we thought this was rather peculiar, although we did find some amusement in it.  Then we ran across town and went to another one and the Sunday evening passed quite amusingly.

The following week we decided we’d do the same thing, so we started up Ramsden Street and we enjoyed that, thought that was a good laugh, and we went to the one which was just off the marketplace, up some little rickety stairs, a small room.  Whilst we were going to tun in there, looking over at the marketplace, which is not where they have a market now.  It’s just a little square, but they used to have a market there years ago and what’s known as market cross, and whilst the marketplace isn’t where the market is, the market cross isn’t a cross either.  It was just a plinth, the first section of which stands I should think about two feet high.  Then there’s another step about a foot high, and then there’s a round column on the top of that.  They used to have a ball on the top.  I’m not quite sure what it was all about, but obviously something very ancient.

There was a crowd around there, and I could see over and there was a young fellow up on there and he had a Bible in one hand and he had his hat in the other hand.  And he was really going to town.  I listened.  You know, I could hear over the road, and it was an American.  I said to my friend, “Let’s go listen to this American over there.”

I’d only ever seen Americans in the movies, and I thought America was wonderful.  I’d seen things like State Fair and the golden days of the West and all those things, and I thought America was a terrific place.  You know, the Hollywood image was marvellous.  It really was a desirable place.  Everything was good, people were always happy, and they were always singing.  They made a lot of musicals around that time.  I used to think, “That sounds like a good place to be,” and the fellow always got the girls in the end as well, which seemed like a pretty good arrangement.

So I said, “Well, come on, just for a minute.”  I went over there, and there was just a little crowd around, and it was Elder Burton Edward Tew, who was very tall, and Elder Darren Dean Lee, who was from San Diego and later became a doctor or dentist[1].  They were talking, and there was Mary Harling, who’d joined the Church only a few months previously, and Jackie Addy, who joined the Church about the same time, and Kath Crowther may have been there, but I think she may not have been as well.  She may have gone home with her kids.

But there was just one or two around, and I was given a handful of pamphlets and invited down to church the following week.  I said, “Yes, sure.  I’ll go.”  I was interested in the fact that they were Americans.  As I say, I’d never seen a real live American, and that was what the attraction was.

So I took my handful of pamphlets and ran across the road and up to this Spiritualist church, where a couple visiting from Bradford told us how very lucky we were to have them with us tonight, because they usually charged for their appearance.  There was a cake on the table, that was going to be raffled later.  You know, this church had everything.  While the wife was giving a sermon, the fellow that wasn’t doing the preaching – it was a Dundee cake, with almonds all over the outside – was picking the almonds off and eating those.  That was wonderful.

That was the last time I went to a Spiritualist church, because the following week my friend wouldn’t go.  He wouldn’t go to what we found out was the Mormon Church.  He just wouldn’t go to that.  He just didn’t want to do, because he went to church for a laugh, and it didn’t seem like there’d be very many laughs there.

I went down there, and I think the branch had been open just a few months.  A family called the Buckleys had been converted as a family – father, mother, son, and daughter – and then they got the spirit of gathering to Zion.  They had originally met in their home[2].  That’s where the branch had opened up, in their home.  But they were selling their home and they were going to Salt Lake.

The pull was amazing in those days.  You really can’t imagine what it was like.  All the Saints in this country were restless.  Everyone that joined the Church wanted to go to Salt Lake.  It doesn’t happen now.  Salt Lake seems remote, somehow, because the Church has become more international, I guess.  But the spirit of gathering was powerful.  It really moved upon you.  I used to dream about going to Salt Lake, real dreams, at night-time.  They were some marvellous dreams, too.

Anyway, I went down, and they’d just got this place on Rosemary Lane, a very large room, up about nineteen or twenty steps.  We still argue about how many steps there were, and they demolished the place, so we can’t be sure now.  But they were stone steps and they were very, very steep.  Up till recently it had been a drinking club.  They called it the Sportsman’s Club.  It was over a blacksmith’s shop at that time.  The blacksmith’s shop later became a car warehouse.  That’s progress, you see, from the horse to the motorcar.  The drinking club had been closed by the police, because some man had kicked a woman down the stairs and she’d died.  They thought this was the sort of thing they couldn’t have in Huddersfield and so they shut them down.  It was available for rent, and the missionaries rented it for 26 pounds a quarter.

On this Sunday – and I don’t know whether it was morning or afternoon – I remember getting myself ready to go down there and go to my first Mormon meeting.  I walked through the door and up these stone steps, and at the top of the steps was the door.  There was a door downstairs, to the street, and then you went up the stairs and there was a door into the room.  I put my hand on the doorknob and turned it like that and just pushed the door open, and it hit me.

I mean, I can imagine this, and I have imagined it and I’ve spoken of it from time to time, but to describe it adequately is very difficult.  It felt to me as if I was just filled with light and warmth, all at the same time.  If you’ve ever really blushed rapidly and gone bluf!, I seemed to be instantly inflated with this kind of thing and the feeling that I had was something I’d never felt before.  It was powerful.  It was overwhelming.  It’s hard to do justice to what I felt.  It was like an explosion of euphoria inside of me.  All the words I could say are inadequate to describe the phenomenon – it was truly miraculous.

This all happened in a flash, just as I turned the knob and opened that door.  I heard a voice inside my head, my own voice, say to myself quite clearly, “I am going to be one of these people.”  And I didn’t know anything about them, not a thing.  I mean, I’d never heard the word “Mormon” before.  I hadn’t heard it by then, even.

As it happened, I had, but I wasn’t to remember that until years and years and years afterwards.  Then it came to me that during my thirteen-year-old year at school, which was a couple of years previous to my meeting these missionaries, during history, which is a subject I absolutely abhorred – history depressed me, as it was all war.  I found it so depressing that I could never come to terms with it and I never understood a history lesson in my life.  But I remembered --- and I must have been twenty or twenty-two then – a lesson we’d had when I was about thirteen, during which a statement was made, just a statement in isolation.  I think we did the history of America on a Tuesday afternoon.  You know, we covered it that well  (chuckling)  It was a terrific school.  Anyway, I remembered a statement being made about these people who had crossed the plains in wagon trains, and I remember then thinking how lovely that must be.  I’ve since learned that it was anything but lovely, but then it seems to be attractive.

J:          An adventure.

B:        Yes, that’s it.  I think it was the going away that appealed to me.

So on this Sunday I went into the – I hate to call it a chapel, but into what we called the church, and the missionaries were there.  I think there were about three or four of them.  There must have been either four or two.  I didn’t know they didn’t have odd numbers then.  And there were maybe four or five members, that’s all.  And it was like going home – not my home, not the one I had – because all the people in that room came over to me and shook my hand.  (voice filled with emotion)  I felt welcome, I felt loved, and it was terrific.  It really was terrific.

I was never taught the gospel.  In those times, the missionaries taught what was known as the Anderson Plan.  That is, it had been formulated by an ex-missionary called Anderson.  It was twenty-six lessons and the scheme was that when you got a contact or investigator, you taught them one lesson a week for twenty-six weeks, which is six months, and at the end of that they were baptised.

But they’d just got this church, and there was a lot to do to it, so everybody would go down, the missionaries would have overalls on, and we’d have overalls on, or old clothes, and we’d be painting walls and we’d be scrubbing floors, and then we’d be traffic waxing them, and we’d be cleaning up some chairs that we’d managed to get hold of.  You know, all the chairs were odd, a few from here, a few from there.  We’d be doing that kind of thing, and cleaning the windows to try and make it nice, although it was a bit of a drab place.  It was no palace and it wasn’t beautiful, but it was ours and it had a special spirit about it that was very, very precious and choice.  So while we painted the walls, Elder Lee used to talk to me quite a lot and say, “We believe that God has a body like ours, and that Jesus has, and the Holy Ghost is just a personage of spirit.”  And I’d say, “Oh, yes.”

J:          And while he was describing this, he was taking you through the lessons.

B:        That’s right.  That’s what we were doing, while we were painting.  That was my teaching.  And you know, I had no difficulty at all in accepting anything I was ever taught.  There was no need to argue the case or to emphasise anything.  They just told me what it was, and it just fitted right in.  It was just like remembering something.  We all forget things, and then somebody reminds us, but it’s no shock or surprise to us.  We say, “Ah, yes,” when it revives the memory in us.  That’s just how it was, as they were telling me things.

I remember how they taught me the Word of Wisdom.  After every Sunday evening service, we’d go to the marketplace and we’d have a street meeting.  I started speaking at street meetings at age sixteen.  It was a great grounding for speaking and teaching.  Somebody would get up on the plinth there and give forth to ‘My friends of Huddersfield.”  Everybody would go up there and gather round and give pamphlets out and talk to people that came by.  Then I'd go uptown on the way home at the end of that, and Elder Lee once walked me to the traffic lights, about ten yards, and he put his arm round my shoulder and said, "You know, Ronnie, we don’t smoke, we don’t drink, and we don’t drink tea or coffee.”  And I said, “Okay.” 

That was my Word of Wisdom lesson.  In fact, I didn't know it was the Word of Wisdom.  I didn't know that the health law was called the Word of Wisdom.  I just knew that we didn't drink tea, coffee, or use alcohol or tobacco.

I can't remember whether I was smoking.  I know I started smoking when I was about eight, experimentally, and from time to time I'd pick that up.  I think I may have been smoking.  I never liked drink, for two reasons.  One is it tasted awful and the other is I saw what drinking did in my family.  So I've never given drink a good press, for any reason whatsoever.  As far as tea and coffee, I absolutely loved coffee.  To this day I've never found anything that tastes better than coffee.  Tea I can take or leave.  We drank tea mostly at home, so I went home and told my mother, "I don't want any more tea."  I still had my pint pot.  We used to drink out of pint pots in those days, working-class folks.  I used to have everything in it but the tea.  I used to have hot water, milk, and sugar, just the same.

That was never a problem, but at the pre-baptismal interview, the district president, who was a missionary – Earl Stanley Jones, a nice man, came to interview me, and he sat there and interviewed me and my grandmother actually.  When you came to our house, it was Grandmother that saw you, whoever you were. 

He asked them what kind of a boy I was, and she said, "Well, he's all right."  I was quite surprised she gave me such praise, because she'd certainly never given any indication prior to that time that she thought that I was all right.  So I was quite pleased with that, and they agreed that I could be baptised, if that's what I wanted.

They never stood in the way, which I'm pleased for.  My mother always said, "Well, why don't you be a Catholic?  They have lovely services."  That was my religious guidance from my mother.  But later on she said,  "Well, I don't care what you are as long as you go to church," something which she never did.

Anyway, as I was to be baptised, this Elder Jones said, "What do you think about the Word of Wisdom?"  I said, "What's that?" [chuckling]  So he explained, and I said, "Well, that's okay.”  "What do you think about Joseph Smith?"  "Fine."  No problems at all.

Most of the missionaries had been born and raised in the Church, and they seemed to have a culture which was desirable, and I always say, and I believe it very firmly, that the Church became my mother and father.  It became the arbiter of taste and value for me.  It was the guidepost in my life, and it set the standard quite clearly and said, "This is right, and that is wrong."

So it was never difficult making a choice between right and wrong or the right stand and the wrong stand.  The only difficulty, of course, was sticking to the standard.  For instance, I'd been brought up in a house where swearing was just part of the vocabulary. 

So I swore, and the most difficult thing I had when I joined the Church was to stop swearing.  It just used to fall out of my mouth.  It was just part of my habits, part of the culture that I had, and that was the great difficulty.  But I finally made it, after a great deal of effort and an awful lot of repenting,  [chuckling]  But I made it, and I saw better things were possible, and I wanted them.

Soon after I joined the Church, they called me to be a teacher in Primary.  I was teaching children that weren't much younger than myself, very mixed age group.  Kath Crowther was the Primary mother in those days, and it was due to her efforts that the branch was opened in the first place.  She'd been born in the Church.  Her parents came from Hull, where they'd been members of the Church – Walter Yull, "Pop Yull," as I used to call him, and Edna, his wife.  They'd had loads of children, and Kath was one of them.  Kath lived in Huddersfield and she got married and she'd got a couple of little kiddies and had a couple more later.  Her husband wasn't a member, and still isn't, and he used to oppose her coming to church.  At that time I think the only nearby branch of the Church was at Dewsbury, and you used to go over there if you wanted to go to church.

Then about 1948, Kath opened what was known as a neighbourhood Primary at her home, out at Lepton, and got a few of her own children going and a few others.  From that she started to push for a branch in Huddersfield, and I believe that the response was that they put some missionaries in and they started the place up.

Now Kath has done an oral history, and she explains this more fully from her point of view.  It's just hearsay from mine.  She deserves a lot of credit for starting up that neighbourhood Primary and helping to get the branch established, and she also deserves a lot of credit for the difficult years that this branch went through when it was just the sisters that kept it alive.  There were no brethren.

When I was seventeen I enlisted in the army.  It was during the time of national service, and we had to go.  I couldn't wait.  I decided I'd join up for an extra year and get a bit more money.  I stayed at the co-operative transport and then I got a job in a brickyard, and the brickyard offered me such a variety of employment from day to day that I stayed there almost till the time I went into the forces, because I was never on the same job two days running.  I used to go into this job and they'd say, "Wherever there is a need, will you go and do that?"  And that appealed to me.  I liked the variety, and so I managed to stay there.

I used to take the Bible to work with me.  I had it in one of my jacket pockets, and I'd read the Bible when I'd have a minute.  Then the other pocket would be full of tracts, and my favourite tract, of all time I think, must be Ben E. Rich's A Friendly Discussion, and the other one was John Morgan's The Plan of Salvation.

A Friendly Discussion I enjoyed because it explained very succinctly the Godhead idea, and I needed to know that well enough to be able to tell other people about it.  The Plan of Salvation was beautiful, because it's mostly from the New Testament and it outlines the plan of salvation – faith, repentance, baptism, and the gift of the Holy Ghost – in such an expert manner.  To me the logic of it was absolutely overwhelming, it was so beautiful.

I used to live by these two pamphlets, and everybody at work knew I was a Mormon, and a brickyard is not a place where the cultured dwell.  It's a bit of a rough place, and if you can't do anything else, you used to go in the brickyard.  It was just over the road, actually, from here, on the other side of the road in those days.

It's been flattened now, and they've filled it in as a tip and they're going to develop it into a leisure centre or leisure park thing.

I didn't realise then the interest that people at work had in me as a Mormon.  We never called ourselves "Latter-day Saints" in those days.  We were always just Mormons, everybody knew we were Mormons, and we knew we were Mormons.  It was sometimes hard to think of my- self as a Latter-day Saint, after being a Mormon that long.  They used to ask me questions all day long about it, and I didn't realise at the time, but they were rather like the Sadducees and the Pharisees asking the Saviour "trick" questions, because there was always a trick in it, you see.  Not being wise to that, I always took it seriously and they always got a serious answer.  That made me a lot of friends, somehow.  It didn't seem to work as it should have worked.  You know, the idea was that you were always hostile to religious people, because they're cranky.  But I guess somehow I just desired to live my religion and to try and explain to people what was so, and it worked well for me.

Now I went into the forces when I was seventeen and a half, when I joined up.  I went into the REME, which is the Corps of Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, and they decided I should be a vehicle mechanic.  I don't know whether they ever regretted that decision, but I was an indifferent vehicle mechanic,  (chuckling] I was slightly indifferent.  I learned a lot and I did some good, but I also did a bit of damage too.  But I think that was about par for the course, when you take somebody and put them on a sixteen-week course and let them loose on the transport with a tool kit then.  But I enjoyed it.

I used to come home almost every weekend, when I was stationed in this country, and quite often I would bring someone with me who lived too far away to get home, and I'd take them to church on the Sunday and come back.  I used to bring loads of people, and they all used to come to church.  They used to call me "the vicar," because my name's Bray, you see, and there's the Vicar of Bray, plus the fact that I was a bit of a preacher.  One boy later on, many years later, joined the Church and has since slid away.  I never felt that I should have any credit for that.  Maybe I didn't teach him too well.  This was Brian Golding, who is now fully active in the Bournemouth Ward and is a great leader.

I was always interested in letting people know about the gospel.  But the best bit of my life, as far as my church was concerned, happened when I went abroad.  I went over to Egypt, and I was attached to the Green Howards, which is a very old infantry regiment.  There I looked after the tracked vehicles for them.  There were quite a few Christians who were members of the force at that time.  They were in doing their national service.  There was a group of probably four or five really born-again Christians in the Green Howards, and it was the segment I was with and somehow we'd just gravitate together.  You know, birds of a feather.  So we sort of got together, and we found that we had lots of things in common, as far as religion.  So they thought it would be a good idea if we had weekly Bible study classes.

After being in Egypt about four-and-a-half months we moved up to Cyprus, and there we approached the authorities and they said, "Yes, you can have a room in the education centre once a week for your Bible study."  Well, that was terrific.  So one night a week we'd go up there and we'd all take our Bibles and sit in there.  They'd say, "Well, what are we going to do?  Who's going to lead this?"  And I'd say, "Well, I don't mind."

Now the great thing about joining the Church when I joined the Church was that it was missionary centred.  Although now that's frowned upon, in those days it was not only necessary but it was good, because we used to go everywhere with the missionaries.  We used to go tracting with them.  They used to say, "What are you doing tonight?"  "Well, nothing."  "Well, we're going out tracting.  You want to come?"  “  Yes," and we'd go out tracting.  So we got used to knocking on doors.

If there was a function in another branch somewhere, the missionaries would go, because the missionaries were the Church, you see.  Every branch around here had a missionary as a branch president.  So they were the Church.  They were our priesthood leaders.  They would go everywhere with the members, and it was all on the bus.

We'd get on the bus, and they never talked about the weather and they never just gazed through the window.  They used to get their scriptures out and we used to learn the scriptures as we travelled on.  I remember one time I travelled from Huddersfield to Halifax and learned Matthew 3:15-16, word for word, and you had to get it word perfect.  You see, I was being taught.  I didn't know it.  I thought I was having fun, you see, but I learned the scriptures that way, and I learned how to teach the gospel, and I learned how to defend the gospel, particularly from the Latter-day Saint point of view.

So at these Bible study classes in Cyprus, I was the fellow that knew his way through the scriptures.  So I offered to lead them, and I led them.  And I taught them the gospel from their books.  At times they looked at the outside of their books to see if they'd still got the book that they were used to.  It's incredible.  They used to scratch their heads and say, "I can't understand.  I haven't seen that before."  It was just a new way of looking at something that they'd sort of glossed over before.  But it was good.

Eventually we found an Englishman who was living down in Larnaca, about twelve miles away from the camp.  He'd been a missionary to Palestine for the Anglican Church.  He'd married a Greek lady and they'd had a couple of kids, and he was working there at the American Academy.  He was a nice chap, and he invited us to go down to his home every Sunday night, where we would have a non-denominational church meeting.  Now of course he'd never met a Mormon be-fore.  He'd heard about them.  So it was non-denominational right until the time I got there, and then it became definitely partisan.  [laughing]  But it was all good humour.  There was no bitterness.  I gave our point of view, and they would try and defend theirs and so on.  We used to get along very well together.

One Sunday I couldn't go, because I had to do a guard duty and stay at camp.  And you know what they did while I was on guard duty?  They held a prayer meeting for my conversion.  And I thanked them for it, because that helped convert me even more.  [laughing]

J:   These were all evangelical Anglicans?

B:   Yes, born again, and really nice people.  None of them were really oddballs or anything like that.  They were very, very nice, a terrific group of lads.

Of course the ex-missionary to Palestine and his wife, the Christian missionary, prayed for my conversion.  I was amused by that, but that was good.  It reminds me in a way of when I was a missionary.  Our mission president was Clifton GM Kerr, who, if you know anything about the [Utah] state legislature, was the Speaker for so many years.  He told me the story that he used to do what I used to do.  If you're out of town and there's no branch of the Church, you go somewhere.  I used to go to the Methodists or some chapel or some gospel hall.  If I'm away from home on Sunday I get in with some people.

President Kerr told me that once he went to this place, and it was out in the wilds and there was no church.  So he went to the Methodist Sunday School or something like that there.  They had an adult class, and he sat in there, and the teacher stood up and said, "Today we're going to talk about the Bible's definition of the Godhead."  And he thought, "Great!"  So the teacher gave all the scriptures that we use and when President Kerr drew the conclusion that God had a body of flesh, bone, and spirit, the teacher agreed with him.  He told him our concept of the Godhead, and the teacher agreed on every point.  When the class was leaving, the teacher came over to President Kerr and shook his hand and said, "You're a Mormon, aren't you?"  And he said, "I am."  The teacher said, "So am I."  [laughing]  So they got a lot of LDS teaching there.  But that was good.

I came out of the army when I was still only twenty, still a bit wet behind the ears, in 1955, and came back to the branch here in Huddersfield.  Then I was approached as to the possibility of serving a full-time mission.

I was very excited about that, because the missionaries were just about the best thing I'd ever seen.  They really were.  Those early missionaries-well, early in MY life-carried the gospel standard so high that I don't know if I thought they were a little lower than the angels.  I think sometimes I thought the angels were a little lower than they were.  They were amazing men.  They really were choice.  Everyone of them seemed solid.  You could trust them.  It was really amazing.  People sometimes are so unkind, about Americans in general and missionaries in particular, but you couldn't fault these.  I think it's prejudice that does that, and that's always a bad thing, but they were amazing.  They really were.

So when they offered me the chance and it was mooted that I might be one of them, I thought, "Great, I'm going to have to grow here.”  In March of the following year, 1956, I was called on a mission.  I just thrilled.  Then that started the hardest year I have ever known.

We were called for twelve months during that time, British missionaries were, and I was called at the same time as a young girl from Dewsbury Branch, who had been a friend of mine since I joined the Church.  Her name was June Garner, she was sixteen years old, and she was called on a full-time mission.  I think the only other missionary I know of who was that age or younger was Joseph F. Smith, who I think was fifteen or sixteen when he went on his first full-time mission.  We travelled down to Balham together, to 149 Nightingale Lane, which was church headquarters at that time, and there we met up with another sister missionary – this was Wendy Jolly, who was from Ipswich – and we went out into the field.

Some months later an amazing thing happened.  The Bristol District was presided over originally by Tom Shilton when I got there, but he left soon after and then we had Sherman A. Johansen as our district president.  The headquarters was in Bristol, at 176 Cheltenham Road, which was a converted building.  Then there was a branch in Cheltenham.  I don't know how many miles north that is, but it's a good few miles north.  The branch there had an old chapel.  Then there was a branch in Stroud, in Gloucester, there was a branch in Bournemouth, and there was a branch in Plymouth.  There was also a small branch at Newton Abbot.  There were two missionaries in each of those, with four in Bristol.  That was about twelve missionaries in the whole of what is now the Southwest British Mission, or the Bristol Mission, I think they call it now.  Of course it was a long way between branches.

After about three or four months, I got a companion who was a new missionary.  His name was Neil McEwen and he'd been converted in Nottingham and joined the Church.  He came over and he was my companion, and then June Garner and Wendy Jolly ended up as companions in the same district.  So out of twelve missionaries, we had four that were British or "blokes," as we were called, bloke missionaries.  That was terrific.  Wendy Jolly and Neil McEwen eventually married.  They live in Huddersfield now.  He is on the high council.  He's been a bishop - I think maybe three or four times he's been in office.  He's very reusable.  Neil's a good man.  He's always been a missionary.  He is the stake mission president.

When I went into that mission, I actually worked in the Ipswich area for about three or four weeks.  They put me with an American elder who had been a career man in the military.  Elder Cleveland, and he'd come out and he was about forty-five or forty-six.  He was having great difficulties settling down, because of course he came out and they put him as a junior companion to somebody that was about twenty or twenty-one.  He just could not maintain that relationship.  You see, he'd had an armful of stripes, and it's a common difficulty with career military men that he just could not be directed by someone who was so young.  That was a serious problem for him, and so they tried him with companion after companion after companion, and it never worked out.  He used to just stop absolutely dead and do nothing.

It was quite a responsibility.  They thought they would try me with him because they felt that I was strong.  I wasn't that strong, [laughing] but they put me with him and they made him senior companion.  They explained the difficulty to me and said, "How do you feel?"  I said, "Fine, no problem.  I'll do whatever he wants me to do."  And I did.  But one of the things he wanted me to do was to go to the pictures quite a lot and this sort of thing, and so it didn't work that way round either, which was very sad.  So he went home early.  I felt for him, because he was a man struggling within himself.

So they moved me then over to the Bristol District and they put me down in Southampton with a Canadian elder of the name of Kelvin Thomas Waywell, from Toronto.  He'd worked up here at Huddersfield for a while, and he was an unusual roan.  He was poor.  Most of the missionaries we'd seen always looked well dressed and always smelled of Old Spice, incidentally, which I thought was something you got in Salt Lake City when you came out on your mission.  [chuckling]  Elder Waywell was poor.  He didn't have a seagoing trunk.  They all came by the QEII, the Queen Elizabeth, or the Queen Mary, and they all had these big seagoing trunks.  He had a Gladstone bag, and everything he had would fit in there and leave room for more, just in case he got more.

Elder Waywell was single-minded.  He was so single-minded that sometimes he forgot he'd got a companion.  But he was a worker, and he did a lot of good.  Now what you had to do with Elder Waywell is you had to follow him closely, because if you blinked, he'd be gone.  He'd just anticipate you were following him.  But he was a real worker, he was an excellent teacher, and I learned a lot from him.  They put me to work with him in Southampton because he'd had a companion that couldn't quite cope with his remoteness.  Now remoteness was no stranger to me, and it didn't bother me, you see.  I just took him as he was, we got on fine, and we worked.

We went to Southampton, and there was no branch there.  They weren't having any meetings.  It was just missionaries, and they were teaching one chap. Bill Pretty.  I think he's still alive.  He must be knocking on now.  He'd been a cook in the navy.  He'd never married, he lived with his mother, and he was a strange fellow.  He had the biggest Bible in the world, a Douay translation.  We used to ask him to read a scripture and he'd read out something that was a little bit strange to us, and we'd say, "What you got there?"

Elder Waywell had made up his mind that Bill Pretty was not going to join the Church, that it was really a waste of time and that he was just not a potential Latter-day Saint.  But he let us in, so Elder Waywell decided that what he was going to do, he was going to use him as practice.  At least you could get in and you could give a lesson.  And I tell you, we didn’t always get the lessons right.

I was just beginning and tried and sometimes used to get the questions wrong, but it didn't matter.  I would put the question, but if you got it back-to-front or asked the wrong question.  Bill Pretty always gave the right answer.  You couldn't keep him out.  He was one of those.  So he joined.

Then there was a family, known as a "scattered family," that lived way out in the country somewhere, the Garths.  They'd been in the Church years ago, somewhere.  Maybe they joined in Canada or somewhere, and then they came back to this country and lived out in the wilds and lost contact with the Church, but still Considered themselves members.  They smoked quite heavily.  It was not unknown in   those days for members who'd been active in the Church to smoke. 

The Church suffered a great deal during the war.  In the first place, a lot of people emigrated.  As I said before, the power of the spirit of gathering had to be felt to be believed.  You know, you'd find yourself walking towards Liverpool and that sort of thing.  [laughing]

It might have been a street meeting that brought us together with the Garths.  I think they were driving through.  They had a van that drove out of the ark, and they'd just got so many kids they could never count them.  So when they said they would come to church, first of all we hired a school room.  That wasn't always convenient, for caretaking problems.  Then we got a room in the Temperance Institute in Southampton, in Carlton Crescent.  Oh, that was beautiful.  Again it was the dark oak panelling.  It had been built during the Victorian age, when everything you did you did for a purpose, but it was also pretty as well.  You know, they built beauty into it.  There were these old pictures of the founders and the important people hanging on the walls.  Everything was so beautiful, not like the sort of geometric things you see now, where you just build a set of boxes, and it's all utilitarian.  It was lovely to be there.  There was a piano, and nobody could play the piano.

Elder Waywell was the branch president, I was the Relief Society president and the Sunday School superintendent, he was the Primary president, and we did all the teaching ourselves, because none of  the people there had had either the experience or the will to do it.  We'd get up there, and it's ...  I don't know.  Maybe someday there'll be a machine that you can plug into your head and you'll feel what somebody else felt.  Until then, you're sort of left with descriptions, which aren't adequate.

In that place where we met there, we used to have the sacrament.  We'd administer the sacrament every week, we'd have the prayers, and we'd do the talks.  It was something special, spiritual, like the place we had in Huddersfield here.  There was a spirit in that place.  After the meeting, you didn't want to leave, if you know what I mean.  It's like when you go to the temple for a week and it's time to go home, and you don't want to go out, back into the world.  You want to stay there.  That's how we used to feel.  There was just something so special and numinous there. 

Then from time to time there was a family down in Portsmouth, where there had been an old branch that had closed, the Gates family, and they could get up about once every three weeks on the train.  And he could play the piano.  So once every three weeks we had piano music, which was lovely.

It was great pioneering work.  Very seldom do we get opportunities of opening new branches of the Church.  I was kind of happy to be there and to do a lot of pioneering work, to see a place grow.  I think they've got two wards down there now.

I moved from there over to Bournemouth to be with an elder who specifically had been sent to look for a house to buy for a chapel for them.  The Bournemouth Branch, as it was called, actually met in a gospel hall in Southbourne, which is a few miles outside of Bournemouth.  It was a fellowship hall, and they'd got a decent-sized branch going there.  That is, they'd get something like fifteen to twenty out every week, which was a remarkable size of a congregation.  And they'd got a very good programme going there and some really nice people.

The church authorities considered that they were ready for a building, so this elder[3] spent a lot of time looking for a building, and I with him.  He spent a lot of time ostensibly looking for a building and didn't really feel like doing the missionary work.  I felt a bit of a vacuum about that.  I wasn't so happy about it.  So I spoke to the district president and said, "You know, I'd like to get somewhere I could do a bit more work.  I don't feel like I am here."  So he moved me up to Bristol, and that's when Neil McEwen came to be my companion, and it was his first assignment.  We worked an area of Bristol.  It was a working-class area called Ringwood Estate.

J:   This was a section of Bristol?

B:   Yes.  It was commonly known as "Murder Mile," and I've never forgotten that.  It was a huge crescent, maybe 300 houses in the crescent, and then a long road and then a bit over the other road.  It'll come to me sooner or later[4].  We tracted every door in there, and we got in most of them.  The work we did there was less missionary and more pastoral, and that was an amazing experience.  The people had so many problems and saw so few ministers – because being called Murder Mile, it was a rough area – that they were just glad of someone from any church who would take enough interest to knock on their door and want to come in and talk to them.  So we got in just about every door we knocked on.

We'd sit down and we'd tell them where we were from, what we were doing, and nine times out of ten they'd say, "I've got a problem.”  And what was I?  I was just going on twenty-one.  Neil was about a year younger than I am.  He came out of national service and went on his mission soon after.  So he was about twenty.  And there we were, with these people pouring out their hearts to us, and it re- ally required a wisdom which we didn't possess.  But we used the gospel rule, you see, to try and show them ways over the problems.  And we'd be called into houses.  People'd call us into houses, you know.  We'd get recommended - not because of the gospel mess age we brought, the message of the Restoration, but because the people needed help with their problems.

I think there's something to be learned there, that you need to fulfil a person's basic needs before you can go on to other things, let's say higher things.  It's hard to tell a man about the restoration of the gospel if he's got hunger pains in his belly.  You've got to fill that basic need first, and then he's comfortable and he'll listen to you.

J:   So how did you find yourself filling these basic needs?

B:   Well, advice mostly.  And people were amazingly receptive to what we said.  I've never been particularly wise in personal relationships, always had difficulties with them, so I don't know.  It just seemed to come, almost as if by inspiration, and it was great.

Now Elder John Harmer, who's something big in politics, I think he's a senator now, was a member of the mission presidency.  They used to have full-time missionaries with some outstanding abilities, as he had, as a counsellor, and then they would have a local brother as the other counsellor.  He used to travel around, and I remember he came to work with Neil and myself up in Ringwood, Bristol and one of the questions he used to ask was, "How do the people

in the area respond to you?"  I said, "Oh, they seem to like us well enough."  So he said, "Well, I'll go up and work there."  So he went up there, he and his companion, and he worked with us in

that area.

The people there used to call to us in the street.  We couldn't walk down the street without that happening.  It was amazing.  I was looking a bit serious, actually, at one point.  You have to be

serious when you're talking to a member of the mission presidency.  One of the girls we'd actually been teaching, Joyce Hopper, who we'd got great hopes for, was Pentecostal.  We taught her principles she never knew existed, and she was really going good, but dropped out at the end, couldn't quite make it.  But that day she shouted on the road:  "Ronnie, don't look so bleeding miserable!”  [chuckling]  As we were leaving the area, Elder Harmer said, "Elder Bray, these people don't like you.  They love you."  And I guess that's true.  It was marvellous.  For the time we were there, we were part of that place.

We did baptise a family from there, Edward Wills and his wife, and later the children.  She wouldn't be baptised the same day as her husband, and we didn't know why.  But we found out it was because she was.  waiting for her teeth to come.  She'd had all her teeth out and her new teeth hadn't arrived and she would not go be baptised till she could be baptised with her teeth, a lovely lady.

From there I moved up to Cheltenham, in Gloucester, where they had a chapel in Knapp Road.  It was a converted chapel.  My companion there was Billy Ray Anderson, another young man fresh out in the mission field from Green River, Wyoming.  He was a veteran.  I think it was Korea he'd been serving in.  He was a good lad too.  We did an awful lot of tracting there, an awful lot.  We worked so hard there, and we never met with any real success by the way of baptisms.  But notwithstanding that, a few people were baptised because we were there.

The amazing thing is that in almost every established branch, there would be people there who had been going to church for years and were not baptised.  I remember saying to at least three people, "Why aren't you baptised?"  Because they'd go to everything.  They'd be in everything.  They'd open and close with prayer, you know.  "Why aren't you baptised?"  And they used to say, "Well, nobody's ever asked me."  So I said, "You want to be baptised?"  And they'd say, "Yes."  And in they'd go.  Ken Suggars from Bristol was one of these, and there was another one in Cheltenham named Keith Burton. 

We also tracted up a sister.  She was a German sister, married an Englishman and moved over, who'd completely lost contact with the Church.  She was very excited about it, and she came to church a few times, but then she never came anymore.  I could never understand that.

For the final few months on my mission, I went back down to Southampton again.  By this time the branch had got about ten or eleven regular attenders each week.  It had got the nucleus of a good branch and some nice people in it, and it was looking solid.

I worked there with a man who had come out into the mission field the same day as myself.  Lee Aldous Brown from Orem, Utah.  He was quite a character.  We used to call him the "Orem Kid," because he was a kid.  He'd developed this speaking voice, which was very low and very deliberate, [speaking with a lowered voice] because he felt that added spirituality to his voice,  [laughing]  He was quite a character, but he was lovely.  I really loved him.

We opened up a neighbourhood Primary in one of the big housing estates, out at Millbrook, and we rented a schoolroom for it.  And every Tuesday we got forty to fifty non-member children coming to that Primary.  We were overwhelmed with them.  Amongst other talents I'd developed on my mission, I had learnt to play the ukulele.  That was from Billy Ray Anderson, who brought one with him, and it was fine with me.  It was beautiful.  So I bought one and became

quite accomplished at it.  I used to take that to Primary and I used to do the music on the ukulele, with no pianist, and the kids loved it.  The mothers used to send them to what they called the "Mormon Club."  [laughing]  We had to teach them it was Primary, but that didn't mean anything to them.  It was the Mormon Club.  We just had scads and scads of them.  If we'd had the people there to look after them, we could have done an awful lot with those kids, nurtured them for ten or fifteen years, and they'd have grown up in the Church, a lot of them.

J:   Now when you say you could have done more with them if you'd had people to look after them, what was the makeup of the branch at the time?

B:   Well, the missionaries of course were always the backbone of the branches – except in Bournemouth, where we had some very strong local leadership.  There was Harry Summersell, who was a man of probably about forty-five, and he was very able.  His wife – I think it was Lillian, but I'm not sure—was a marvellous woman.  They'd got one or two really strong local priesthood brethren, who were the backbone of the Bournemouth Branch.

But otherwise, like in Southampton, the missionaries were still the backbone of it.  One missionary, a senior companion, would be the branch president.  He would be the minister to the people.  We would do the home teaching, as it were, where we'd visit the people at least once a month, and quite often more often, because they were not used to the Church.  We had to look after the sheep we'd got while we were looking for new members as well.

There were the Garths.  Now you would love the Garths.  Everybody loved the Garths.  They struggled very hard to live the gospel principles, as far as the Word of Wisdom is concerned.  In all other respects they were ideal.  They were very ordinary people, very working class.  He worked as a poster hanger, a bill poster.  I don't know if you have those [in the States].  You know, they put the posters up on the billboards, as I guess you call them in America.  And his daughter worked with him.

His daughter Janet was about twenty-one or twenty-two, I should think, and she was really beautiful and blonde.  She was gorgeous.  For her background, she was really smart and bright and so full of the gospel.  It was unusual, because she'd been isolated from the Church for a long time when they'd been scattered members.  They'd lived in areas in the country where there was no church and where they were lucky if they got one visit a year from special missionaries trying to keep contact with the scattered members.  But all the kids were brought up the same way.  They were all so loving.  As a family, they had such great love between them.  You could almost peel the layers off, it was so good.

They became the backbone, as it were, of the local membership, with Bill Pretty.  Bill Pretty you could describe best as an anchorman – always there, solid, not very imaginative, but he'd be there every week.  We even got him to get a King James Bible when he was baptised.  And he tried.  Bill tried very, very hard.  He studied the gospel very hard.  He had communications problems.  One of the problems he had was that his mind used to stop working as soon as he'd start speaking, so he used to say something and then he'd for- get what he was talking about.  He knew what he wanted to talk about, but as soon as he started talking he used to forget.  So he used to stand there and sort of rock back on his heels, and a lot of time used to go by while he was thinking.  But he was dependable, and he was one of the stalwarts of the Church.

Then we'd found a Sister Mintram.  She'd become a member many years before, her husband wasn't a member, and she'd lost contact with the Church.  She came back out, but she'd be sort of hit and miss.  She needed an awful lot of support, because she was out of the habit of coming to church and she'd got a lot of problems in her life and she needed a lot of pastoral care.

Then there were two very special sisters.  One was Sister Wilma Chandler, and the other was Florence or Florrie Talbot.  These sisters I'd met when I'd been in Southampton the first time with Elder Waywell.  They lived at a place we used to call Mousehole Lane, but it's named after a place in Cornwall and it's correctly pronounced "Mouzel."  They lived in a semidetached house there, on a little roadway leading to Mousehole Lane.  The Chandlers lived in the outside one, so they were three or four doors away from the Talbots.

We called on the Chandlers and we left a Book of Mormon with Wilma and her husband Jack, who was a green grocer and therefore very rich, and we said we'd call back in a week.  We used to give them a week between each appointment, you see.  Then we didn't get in the next door, and we didn't get in the next door, and then the next door we got in, and that was Florence Talbot.  We got in there, we sat down, and we gave a Book of Mormon presentation, and I'd never seen such an effect on anyone before with this presentation.  It was quite amazing.  She was really moved.

We made an appointment and went back the next week, and of course we called on the Chandlers first.  Jack Chandler sat in his chair and he'd got the Book of Mormon all ready.  You know, you learned to read the signs when it was coming back.  He handed it back, saying, "Thanks very much."  We said, "What do you think about the book, Mr. Chandler?"  He said, "If anybody told me that book wasn't true, I'd call him a liar.  Thank you very much," and he gave it

back.  We couldn't persuade him to keep the book, so we took it with us.  He also gave us some fruit. 

Then we called back on Sister Talbot, and she said, "Oh, have you been to the Chandlers?"  We said, "Yes."  "How did you get on?"  We said, "Oh, they gave us the book back."  She said, "Give it to me.”  She took the book, she disappeared through the house, came back ten minutes later, and said, "She's going to read it," referring to Sister Chandler.  So I said, "How have you got on?"  "Oh," she said, "I've read it."  "How do you feel about it?"  She said, "Let me tell you something.  I was a bit overcome last week when you were here."  I wanted to say, "Yes, we noticed," but I didn't.

She said, "Some years ago I was very ill."  Her husband, incidentally, was a tug captain.  He was away on the tug business, so she didn't see him for weeks on end.  She said, "Some years ago I was very ill and lay in hospital.  I thought about my life, and I thought about what I'd got, what I wanted, and what I thought I might get.  I got really depressed, and I made up my mind that I was going to kill myself.  If I got better, I was going to kill myself.  And as I lay there in that hospital bed, the strangest feeling came over me, and it just drove out all the bitterness and the anxiety that I had and just sort of filled me and I felt so serene and at peace.  I never felt like that before.  And I heard a voice say, 'Don't kill yourself.  Join my church.'  From that day until the time you came in last week, I never felt like that again.  But as you sat there talking, I felt that same feeling again.  I just knew."  And that woman never looked back.

Now Sister Chandler joined the Church.  Jack never did.  Her son joined the Church.  Florrie Talbot couldn't join the Church just then.  She wanted to join with her husband Frederick, called Eddie.  Eddie was away at sea.  She'd got four children, beautiful children, marvellous.  We taught them with her.  She couldn't get baptised, as she needed her husband's permission, and of course he needed to know something about it.  She wrapped up a Book of Mormon and she wrote him a letter:  "Dear Eddie, I've found the most wonderful thing.  Please read this book," and she told him about the Church and about the gospel and about the Book of Mormon, parcelled it up, and sent it to him.  It was delivered to him while he was on board.

He opened the parcel, read the letter, took hold of the book, and with some opprobrious effort hurled it through the window into the deep.  He then headed his tug back up to his port, tied it up, got a taxi home, and stormed into the house saying, "What are you doing?  What's all this about?"  She told him all about it.  Well, he wasn't going to have any of this.  He was a real hard nose was Eddie—very intelligent, but very suspicious—and he was going to sort it all out.  Well, he sorted it all out, and it took him two years to sort it all out, but he got baptised, his wife got baptised, and his children got baptised.  Three of them have been on missions and they're all married in the temple.  They emigrated to Salt Lake some years ago.  He was probably the best local leader that they ever had in Southampton, a terrific man.

J:   How long was he a leader there before he emigrated?

B:   I'm very poor on times and dates and things.  I think he was branch president after he'd been in the Church about six months.  They put him in and he organised things extremely well.  He was a great organisation man.  Sometimes organisation sort of overlapped on other things.  But then he was a leader there for I don't know, maybe ten, thirteen, fourteen years, until the time he emigrated.

J:   So sometime close to 1970, probably.

B:   Yes, I think that would be very close to it.  I was back as a building missionary in Southampton, built the chapel down there, and I was there in '65.  He was still there then.  In fact, I stayed with him.  They put us in digs with members, and I stayed with his family.  I think it would be something like five years later when they emigrated, as near as I can tell.

It seemed as if most the branches were getting pretty reasonable nuclei of members.  One thing they did have in common, one thing which I miss a great deal now, is that when members got together in those days, they talked about the gospel.  It was scriptures out and it was gospel principles all the way.  Nowadays if they meet – and this is not really a criticism, just an observation – they tend to talk about football, the weather, the holidays, and avoid that sort of fanaticism, if you like.  But I enjoy being a fanatic.  It's good to sort of live your religion at the lower level and let it spread up through the rest of you.  That was what people did.  If we got together, we talked about the gospel.  Whenever Latter-day Saints met, it was gospel, gospel, gospel, and it was really something.

For me it was school and university all rolled into one, because my schooling was elementary, which" is just one step ahead of primary.  And I learnt very little school, principally because half the time I wasn't there, and the other half because when I was there—and I know this is difficult to believe—I really did not know why I was there.  I didn't know my purpose in being there.  So a lot of the stuff used to wash over me.  I'd be drawing little pictures—one teacher, Charles Brummitt used to say, "When I want some light entertainment, I look over Bray's shoulder!—or thinking about something else and wondering what all the fuss was about.  I enjoyed play times and home time, but missed the opportunity of an education, really.  But I saw people in the Church who knew a lot of things, and the Church just seemed to have so many facets to it that you just couldn't remain a Latter-day Saint and remain ignorant.  You were caught up in it.  You became involved in everything.

When something happened in the branches in those days, everybody was involved.  No one was banned because they were too old or the wrong sex or anything like that.  If something was happening, everybody was in it.  If you had a social, everybody went to the social.  Everybody went to the socials.  If someone didn't go to the socials, they were sick and they got visited.  It was just like having a family gathering and saying, "Where's Mother?"  And that's just the way it was, a marvellous feeling.  There were some problems from time to time, but, like most good families, you got over them and it was rather lovely.

When my mission was finished, I came home and I married a girl, Esmé Rosemary Beatrice Aubrey.  I married a girl I'd met in Bournemouth, we had a couple of children, and the marriage didn't work.  I still wish it had, but it didn't.  She now lives in the States.  She remarried.  She married a Jim Hill, an ex-missionary.  My children by her are both out there.  The eldest, Andrea, is married and has got three children.  They live in Wyoming.  And Curtis, who's my eldest son – we called him Curtis after A. Ray Curtis, who was president of the Bristol Mission, the Southwest British as it was at that time when I was building the Southampton chapel.  In fact, he called me on a building mission.  He was a good man, a really good man, and I believe he was one of the first regional representatives.  But mission presidents seemed to change.

When I first joined the Church, I'm not quite sure who the mission president was, but I think it was Stayner Richards.  Stayner Richards was a brilliant man.  He was a lawyer and had a very analytical mind.  I remember meeting him.  I can't remember the occasion, but it was in his office down at Nightingale Lane.  I remember sitting there, and conversations with him were very protracted affairs, because every time you asked him a question or said something, you could see him thinking about it.  He never gave an immediate response.  He weighed everything.  He was a very nice man, but I think President Curtis was the first one that I felt close to.

President Kerr was very much like that, but President Kerr was unusual, because in talking to you he'd take hold of your hand like that, and he'd shove it in his pocket with his and walk you up and down like that.  He was a very warm man.  President Curtis was very similar, though not that close.  He was extremely affable and he took a lot of interest in me, because I was having a lot of difficulties, because of the break-up of my marriage at that time.  So he called me on a building mission and always maintained an interest in me, for which I was glad.

J:   So he called you on the building mission very soon after your divorce?

B:   I wasn't divorced.  I was still married but separated.  We'd been separated for some time.  In fact, my wife came from Bournemouth and she went back down there and after a little while I thought, "I'll go and see if I can't patch things up."  So I went down, and I really didn't have a hope, but I didn't know that at that time.  I tried to mend things, but there was no mending to be done.

J:   Can you put your finger on what you think was the basic problem with the marriage?

B:   Oh, yes.  I've had a lot of time to think about it.  There was a cultural difference between my wife and myself.  I was very much from a working-class background and had a working-class cultural outlook, even though the gospel was starting to polish the rough bits off.  That's a process which is still continuing.  You know, I'm not done yet.  My wife, on the other hand, came from I suppose lower middle class, but with upper middle class pretensions.  She'd had an extremely good education.  She'd been to Bournemouth School for Girls, which was like a grammar school, a high school, and she was very well cultivated.

So that was a difference, but that was not a major contributing factor to the break-up of the marriage.  I think what it was is that in spite of the fact that I was twenty-two by the time we got married, I was still far from being mature.  I was still very suspicious.  I didn't trust people too much.  I wanted to, but I always had this feeling that somehow I wasn't in touch with them.  I still felt this sense of isolation.  And to some extent I still do, but in the last few years it's improved remarkably, a great deal, which I'm very happy for.  But I think Esmé wanted me to be something that I wasn't and couldn't be. 

When she first met me, the circumstance in which she saw me, as a missionary, misled her.  I was apparently outward going, and I've always tried to be outward going.  I mean, you cannot be too introspective in the Church or you just can't operate.  Especially when there's only a few of you, you've got to pitch in and do whatever you're called upon to do.  So I think I developed the semblance of being an outgoing person.  I tended to overcompensate and, so that I felt more secure, I appeared to be confident, which quite often was just a sham.  But you can get into the habit of it, and it be- comes fairly effective after a while.  People don't know how much you're cringing inside.  They see the outward thing and think, "He rules the world," but it's not always so.

I think that what really happened is that Esmé was unhappy at home with her mother and father.  She wanted to be taken away from all that, and so I think she projected onto me an image of something that I was not.  I think maybe another ten or fifteen years and I might have become something close to it, but she could not wait.  She took all of life's disappointments very, very seriously and very deeply.  We tried and we tried and we talked it out, but it just seemed to be that at a very basic level of communication we didn't really talk about the same things, and I could not see how I could be what she wanted me to be.  It's just like if you asked me to grow another foot taller, I wouldn't know where to begin.  And it was that kind of thing she wanted me to do, as far as my character, my personality and my temperament, to make those changes, which are difficult, if possible at all.  I think that's what the major source of her disappointments were.

I always felt that we could make it work, if we could be patient.  There were times when I became impatient, of course, because I've always been far from a patient person.  That's something else.  This is currently one of my goals, to improve in patience.  I get impatient with myself doing that.  (chuckling]

But I think that's basically where we didn't quite meet on things.  I was very sad at the break-up.  We were separated about six-and-a-half years before we finally divorced.  It was a long time.  And all that time I only had one desire, and that was to mend the marriage.  I really wore myself out with it.  I remember being very depressed, to the point that I needed hospitalisation on a couple of occasions and contemplated suicide very seriously.  I found it very, very hard to take.  I was very fond of her and the kids.

J:   What kind of help did you get?

B:   Well, medical, really.  I went to the mental hospital a couple of times and had shock treatment, which didn't touch me at all, didn't help, so they abandoned that, and anti-depressants, which just make you sleepy.

I think really it wasn't a true clinical depression.  I think it was just my learned response to life's disappointments, but it took me a long time to learn that.  It had to do with the development of insight, and the more insight I developed the less depressed I got.  Nowadays I don't get depressed at all.  Plus there's a passage in my patriarchal blessing, which has been a power in my life to help me remove that.  It says that I shall "stand unafraid in the majesty of the priesthood."  I think when I got depressed, I was afraid at the same time.  Sometimes you have a patriarchal blessing for years and you read it and you read it and you read it, and all of a sudden something means something to you, to the point that you wonder, "Was it there before?"  I read that phrase some years ago and I realised I never needed to feel afraid or depressed again.

Some mornings I used to wake up and it just felt like the ceiling was coming down, that impending catastrophe was there, with no name to it, nothing specific, just a free floating anxiety.  I used to get down on my knees and I used to pray, and it would just go "Whoosh!" and it was gone.  That happened a few times, and now I just don't get depressed.  Sometimes I'll feel that I'm not quite in control of things or things are going to happen that I don't want to happen, but then I talk to myself and I say, "By this time tomorrow you'll feel a whole lot different about it," and I do.  That's been terrific.  But it took roe a long time to get there.

At one time we had Dr. Dean Belnap here as president of the British Mission, and I met him at a youth convention.  We talked and he asked me about myself.  I told him about my psychiatric problems, and he said, "Why don't you come and see me?"  So I went down to see him, and he talked and talked to me, and he told me a lot of things about myself that I didn't know and gave me a great deal of hope and encouragement.  He said, "You know, when you're resurrected, you won't have these problems.  But you don't have to wait that long.  You can get help now."  And he helped me a lot.

I guess the biggest help I've ever had, really, has been from my present wife, Norma.  She is so wise and spiritual.  And she's wise.  I don't know.  She's just wise.  What can I say?  She talks so much sense, and if I can't quite see something as it should be, I ask her and she'll just put it straight for me like that.  Her perception of things is brilliant, and that's a great help.  So I don't have those problems now.

Then, as soon as I got divorced, which was about 1964, I met a girl named Geraldine Maureen Murray from another branch at a church skating outing, and we just got married straightaway.  I think my mission ended about August or September 1964 and I married Geraldine in October of that year.  Elder Russell C. Taylor during my restoration-of-blessings interview in April 1985 said to me, "You marry readily."  I never considered it like that, but it just seemed the right thing to do.  And that marriage never really took off.  There were too many differences between us, really, but I didn't see those.

My son Matthew was born to that marriage.  When we divorced, I had custody of Matthew and I brought him up, but sadly, during the period that Matthew was young, I became inactive in the Church and he lost contact with the Church as a result of that.  The worst thing I ever did was I let him think for himself and I didn't direct him.  His thinking on religious matters consequently, now that he's twenty-two, is such that he is a confirmed agnostic.  He'll talk about the Church.  I mean, we talk for hours sometimes, and I keep saying to him, "Keep your mind open.  Keep your mind open."  But he's lost to the gospel just yet.

I remarried while Matthew was young.  I married my third wife, June.  We had a child, Alex, who now lives in London.  June, incidentally, is now the manageress of the BYU Study Abroad centre in London, June Lawrence.  She's married to Fred Lawrence.  We're excellent friends, and when my wife and I go down to the temple, we meet them down at the temple and we go and stay with them.  So it's a good thing.  But I lost Matthew through that.

I was inactive in the Church a long time, and then I was excommunicated in 1973, as a result of adultery.  I lived with a girl for a long time.  We had a son, who's now thirteen.  I've visited him every weekend for the past twelve or thirteen years.  He spends most of the weekends with me and comes out to church.  He's not a member yet, but I do believe that he's gaining a testimony.  Because of his home circumstances I don't press too hard for it, but I think it will come just going the right way.  I give him books to read and talk to him and he comes to church and everything.  So the time will come when he'll join the Church.  I'm sure his mother will raise some objections, but I also think that the Lord will make a way for him, because he's a good lad.  I think he'll be okay.

[Note added during review, 1989:  Peter was baptised in February 1988 and is now a teacher.  RB]

I was out of the Church a long, long time.  I discovered something, which was very, very important.  I'd often spoken with people who had gone inactive, and quite often they would say the reason they'd gone inactive was because they wanted to find out what life was like on the other side, outside the Church.  I always thought that was a pretty weak excuse.  You know, you don't have to have your hand crushed to know it hurts.  The thing I discovered was that no one ever left this church and became a better man.  I didn't, certainly not.  I became a worse man.  Although I was happy enough, in many ways, the strange thing about it—and I think you've got to experience this to understand it—is that I lost my testimony.  There's no question of it.  People say you never lose your testimony, but I don't believe that.  I really don't.  My experience certainly is that I lost mine, and I don't think I'm unique.

So I lost my testimony.  However, I was careful as I could be of several things.  One is that no one who ever knew of me as a bad man should know of my association with the Church, because I didn't want to bring any discredit to the Church, even though I was excommunicated.  The second thing is that I still could not help defending the Church.  It was a habit I'd got into and I couldn't help it.  I used to wonder why I was doing that, if I didn't believe this anymore.  The third thing is I could never get over Joseph Smith.  That was always a problem to me.  It's still the same kind of problem today.  I just can't find fault with him.

Now never a day went by, and I was away from the Church thirteen years altogether, when I didn't think about the Church, never a day.  I'd meet people in the street, members, like Brian Crowther, Kath's son, and Ruth Brook, who had been one of the early members of the Church here in Huddersfield, and they'd say, "You know the gospel's true, don't you?"  And I could not say to them, "No, I don't."  I could not say that to them.  I felt it, but I didn't in any way want to disappoint them.  And I felt it as quite a responsibility, because I'd got a lot of friends in the Church, I'd had a lot of influence on people in the Church, and I'd taught the gospel to a lot of people in the Church.

I always avoided them, because I didn't want them to see me now, because I didn't want what I was doing to have any adverse effect upon their testimonies and faith.  I never sought to destroy anyone's testimony, I never sought to do the Church any harm, and I used to be almost afraid of meeting the church members, because they always used to ask the same thing:  "The Church is true, isn't it?"

J:   And you didn't want to hurt them?

B:   No, I didn't.  I found it embarrassing, because my honest answer would be, "No, I don't think it is."  And what can you do?  I couldn't tell a lie.  So I used to be as noncommittal as possible. 

Then something happened, I think it was about 1982.  By this time I'd married my fourth wife, Lyn, who was a non-member.  I took up a career as a country singer and did quite well at it for a few years, doing the clubs and the theatres and the pubs, singing good old country music, and wearing a cowboy hat.  While doing that I met this girl.  She'd been divorced for several years.  She was nice.  She really was.  Then we got married.  She used to accuse me of being a Mormon, and I'd say, "I'm not a Mormon."  She'd say, "Why do you say that?  You've got Mormon ways."  I felt somewhat complimented by that, but I never thought seriously about going back to church.  In fact, someone once asked me, when I'd only been out of the Church for a few years, "Do you think you'll ever go back to church?"  I said, "I cannot see it."  And I was that emphatic about it.

But a few things happened that convinced me of my own mortality.  There were two deaths.  One was my wife's brother, Don.  He died young.  He had a heart attack and died.  He was gone before we had a chance to miss him.  Then a brother whose name was Clifford Collier that died.  Clifford was also excommunicated, and he was still excommunicated when he died.  So there were two funerals, just a day apart.  Clifford's was to take place one day down in Wales, and Don's, my wife's brother, was to take place up in Dewsbury the following day. 

Because I'd known Clifford's wife.  Dot, who had been a member of the Church for years and years, and their son John Victor Collier, who was now a bishop in Nottingham, and had a close association with them, I thought I'd better go down to the funeral.  I went down to the funeral, and that was the first time I'd been in a Latter-day Saint church for a long time, apart from once when I went down when my third wife's daughter, Simone Elaine Abbott, got married.  I sat in church then, down in Ipswich chapel.  I enjoyed the wedding on the Saturday, and then I went to church on the Sunday.

I went to the service and then I went to the Sunday School.  And I was glad to get out, because things started happening to me.  I honestly feel that if I'd stayed in that building another half hour, I'd have asked for the missionary discussions.

J:   That was when you went to the marriage?

B:   Yes.  Well, the wedding was on a Saturday, and I was touched at the wedding on the Saturday, because really I should have been giving the bride away, but she had her grandfather instead.  That's just one of those things.  That's a little bit of selfishness.  But on the Sunday, I went to the church service and it was a sacrament service, and I was to some extent moved by it.  Then I went to the Sunday School class, and I just couldn't help joining in.  I really felt, "I've got to get it out of here, because if I don't get out of here, they're going to get me back."  I really felt that, and I considered it to be a lucky escape at that time.

But I went down to this service in Wales, the funeral service for Clifford Collier, and that was held in the church there at Rhyl.  I sat in there and there were lots and lots of people I knew.  I was with people like Kath Crowther and other people from Huddersfield that had known the Colliers.  They got up and they gave the funeral sermons and Joseph Smith would have been proud of them.  You know, Joseph's funeral sermons were something really special, and these sermons were very special, in spite of the fact that the man was excommunicated.  Nobody mentioned that.  Of course that put him in a very sad situation, dying while excommunicated.  But for all that, there was a spirit there that was uplifting, and it was reaching me.

That troubled me greatly.  I was again being pulled, and I really didn't want to be pulled.  I sat there in that funeral service, and I thought, "There's that man dead.  Who knows?"  I'd not thought about dying or death at the end of this life, the prospect of that which is to come, for a long, long time.  It focused my mind upon this.  As we left the chapel to get in the cars to follow around to the burial ground, Kath Crowther said to me, rather tearful, as she was very moved by the funeral, "Whatever you do, don't die outside the Church."  And I had never considered that even.  It had never occurred to me that that was a problem.  So it gave me something to think about the next few days.

Now the following day I was back in Dewsbury and I went to Don's funeral, my brother-in-law, and that was the first transistor funeral – really.  It was semi-conducted by a vicar.  I'm sure his heart was somewhere else.  I don't know where.  If you want to be depressed, go to an Anglican funeral.  The vicar didn't know who he was burying.  He'd never met him.  He'd met the family a couple of minutes before and got a few names, and then he got up there and he just rolled it through.

The closeness in time of those two funerals and the contrast between them, the depression on the one hand and the hope on the other, was so marked that it made me make a decision.  The decision was, "I want to find out whether or not the Church is true."  That was a significant decision, but it was very difficult to realise, because I was selling electric showers by this time and I worked in various areas of West Yorkshire and South Yorkshire.

Whenever I was over in Huddersfield—I was living in Mirfield,

which was about five or six miles away—I used to call on Bishop William Herbert Crisp.  He'd been one of the first bishops in Huddersfield—not the first, but one of the first—and he'd been a man who for me had been the archetypal bishop.  You see Bill Crisp and you measure all bishops by him for the rest of your life.  He'd been the man who'd pulled me into his office and said, "I'm not very happy with the way you're living your life," and he'd laid down what he wanted me to do, and I said, "Yes, bishop," and went out and did it.  He was that kind of man, a lovely man.  He retired a few years ago and went to North Wales to retire where he could fish and they called him as bishop again,  [laughing]  He was born to be a bishop.

But I went up to his home, and I used to visit once a month or once every six weeks, when I was in the area, and we'd sit down and talk about old times, and he would never embarrass me.  Bill would never say, "When are you coming back to church?"  He just made me welcome and gave me something to drink and said, "Good to see you, pal.  When you're around again, call again."  So it was nice to go there.  On this occasion I sat there, and I was going to say, "Bill, what do I have to do to get back in the Church?" or at least to find out.  I wanted to know.  I still didn't know, you see.  I still didn't have this testimony, but now I needed to know, and that need was very great.  I sat there for an hour talking, and I could not form my question in my mouth.  So I went away without having asked, and I thought, "Oh, I'm no better off than I was when I came in." 

A couple of days later when I got home, my wife Lyn said, "Oh, there's a couple of Mormon missionaries been for you.  They want to see you."  I said, "Oh, do they know me?"  She said, "I don't know.  They just said they wanted to talk to you."  “  Are they coming back?"  I was very keen that they do.  She said, "Oh yes, they're going to come back."  They must have come back eight times, and  each time I was out.  This was Elder John Hyatt and Elder Brinkerhoff.  She told them, "Look for the car.  If the car's there, he's here."

They came back one day, after it must have been a couple months of trying, and I'm forever grateful that they came back.  They knocked on the door, they came in, they introduced themselves, and to my surprise they didn't know me.  I thought they'd come looking for me, you see.  They sat down and said, "We're missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  What do you know about the Church?"  I was immediately tempted to pull their leg and say, "Well, nothing.  Tell me all about it."  But I was getting what I wanted, so I said, "To tell you the truth, I know quite a bit about it."  So they said, "Do you know someone who is a member?"  I said, "I was a member myself.  Now I'm excommunicated."

They said, "Oh.  Well, how do you feel about the Church?"  I said, "Well, that's my problem.  I don't know.  But I want to know.  I need to know how I feel about the Church."  They said, "How would it be if we came by each week and taught you a lesson?"  I said, "I would like that very much."  They said, "Great."  They gave me some material, first discussion stuff, and I said, "That's fine.  That's most welcome.  I would like to go through it again an d look at things."

Then they said, "Now what about prayer?"  I had not prayed for thirteen years, not one word.  There had been times when I'd felt like praying, but at those times I'd said, "No, if I don't pray in the good times, I'm not going to pray in the bad times."  I don't know whether that was a good thing or not.  I would advise against it myself, if anyone was to ask me.  But that's the attitude I took:  "If I'm not going to talk to Heavenly Father in the good times, I'm certainly not going to cry in the bad times.  I think you've got to play it fair as you can."

So they said, "Will you pray?"  That was hard.  But I realised that if I wanted to know what I wanted to know, I'd got to do it, and there was only one way of doing it.  So I accepted their challenge to pray.  I committed myself to pray.

After they'd gone, I was alone by myself in the house and I thought, "Well, you've committed.  You'd better do it."  So I knelt down on the rug in front of the fire in that house at Mirfield, and for the first time in thirteen years I prayed.  And the answer was  immediate, absolutely immediate.  Again it was the light coming down and the warmth and the presence of all this spirit that I'd learned to identify.  I asked, "Is the Church true?  I need to know."  And do you know what the answer was?  It was, "Remember the former things."  That was my answer.

So I sat down and I made a conscious effort to remember the former things, all that I'd seen and heard and that I'd done.  I remembered the time that I'd been called as an elders quorum president in East Anglia, a quorum that covered the whole of East Anglia, twelve units, in the days of big quorums.  And I remember that it wasn't quite the quorum that it should have been.  There was a lot of work could be done on it to get it nearer the kind of quorum the Lord intended, and I was getting an awful lot of resistance to the changes I needed to make to get it running along the right lines and getting it effective in its groups.

The resistance go so strong and so powerful that I began to be afraid that I would not be able to do what I felt I should do and what I felt I'd been commissioned to do.  In fact, it got so bad that I almost felt that I ought to just back off and let it ride just as it was.  But I also felt that that wasn't why I'd been called.

So I decided what I would do was that I would ask the Lord to help me make this decision.  I knelt to pray that night, and I prayed that the Lord would show me which way I should go:  Should I let things go as they were now, or should I try and get it working as I felt the quorum should, as our instructions were?  And that night I had a dream.  I dreamt that I was walking down a country lane, and just ahead of me was a cross-roads, where one lane went to the right and another lane went to the left.  The lanes were clearly defined, because there were walls around them, these dry stone walls.  And at the far side of the road ahead of me, the Saviour stood.  He didn't speak to me, but He just beckoned me to go that way.

When I woke up in the morning, I was convinced that the way I should pursue the quorum was to do it the Saviour's way, and not to be turned to the right nor to the left, and certainly not to go backwards, but to pursue it solidly forward.  And that's what I did.  It took a while, but the resistance was overcome and the quorum blossomed almost as a rose.  It was tough at first, but I think that taught me something, that you can overcome difficulties and you don't have to run away from them and avoid them.

I remembered also my son Matthew, whom I've spoke of previously.  Matthew was an unusual child.  He would be ill for days before he would tell you that he was ill.  He'd say, "I've got a toothache.”  "How long have you had it?"  "About four days now."  This was when he was three or four years old.  He wouldn't complain that way.  It was only after he'd suffered for so long and it didn't go away that he would say anything about it.

One day we came home from church – we were in Ipswich at the time – and he was really ill.  And he was so ill that he complained of being ill, so we put him to bed.  We had a couple of missionaries come over.  We used to have a lot of people visit the house.  I said to one of them, "Will you assist me in administering to Matthew?"  "Sure."  So we went in, we administered to him, we walked out of the bedroom, and he got out of the bed and he followed us out, completely well.

I'd had so many experiences which were miraculous.  I think the greatest miracle is the way lives change when the gospel touches them—not only direction changes, but outlook changes.  It changes a person from the inside out, and the change is so great.  I've seen that in people.  I've seen people overcome serious disabilities through the gospel, what would have been serious impediments.

They're miracles.  I'd seen and done that much that as I remembered the former things, I was able to call myself a fool.  I wondered how I could ever lose a testimony like that, and it seemed quite significant.  So now I don't let myself forget those things, and of course I've had experiences since then which, if necessary, reinforce them.  But the great thing about it is that the law still works.

So I went back to church.  You know, one of the hardest things I ever did was going back to church, just walking through a door, because I'd knew it would be an awfully embarrassing time.  But I thought, "Well, that's the price you've got to pay.  Sometimes there's a price to pay," and I certainly had a price to pay. 

I went back to church.  I was living in Mirfield, which put me in Dewsbury Ward.  So I went to Dewsbury Ward, and it was the consolidated programme.  A lot of things had happened in the Church.  A lot of things had changed since I'd been away.  I stood in the corridors by myself.  No one spoke to me.  The people that I knew were busy, because there was not much time between meetings.  So I felt desperately lonely and isolated again, which is a feeling that I don't enjoy, but I said to myself, "This is part of the price.”  And I accepted it and it never gave me a moment's trouble.

I was baptised after I'd been coming out about nine months.  President [Peter] Burnett was the stake president then, and still is now, a good man.  He was in fact the bishop who convened the court that excommunicated me so many years before.  He gave me an awful lot of help and encouragement.  I threw myself into whatever it was I could do and after nine months of coming there I was rebaptised.

They gave me a job straightaway.  They had me teach Gospel Doctrine class, which I enjoyed.  I'd always studied the gospel, but I studied the gospel even harder now.  When I'd gone inactive, I'd given a lot of my church books to someone and said, "Here, I'll never use these again."  I knew this person was a hoarder and as a result would never throw them away, because books have always been precious to me.  Ever since those war years when I didn't become a field marshal during the book drive, I've always been very avaricious about books.  But I didn't want the embarrassment of having church books in the house.

I kept my Bible, incidentally, and the three-in-one, which the Caldwells—that's an American family that I stayed with in Ipswich when I was a building missionary—gave me as a birthday gift.  I kept that for sentimental reasons, and I kept my Bible, which had been halfway around the world with me and I'd used on my mission.  But everything else I gave away. 

However, I went to see this fellow and he said, "Well, you'll want these back now."  I said, "Yes, thanks very much," and I got my books back.  [chuckling]  Then I started buying more books.  I got very interested in the Old Testament, because they called me to teach seminary and it was Old Testament—four years ago, because we're just doing it again this year.  So I started buying old books about the Old Testament, books written by ministers and scholars.  I just kept buying them and buying them and buying and I just hit the times right, because everybody was throwing them out, throwing them out, and you could pick them up for next to nothing.  Some of the books were beautiful.  I've got Edersheim's The Temple:  Its Ministry and Services As They Were at The Time of Jesus, which cost me about ten bob, which, is about a dollar.  You can't believe it.  And Farrar's Life of Christ, in two volumes, cost me about £3, which is about four or five dollars.  Edersheim's The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah I got for about £3.  I just filled my  shelves up and read and read and studied and studied, and all my old love for the gospel came back, and even more.

Then I met this wife of mine.  She'd been divorced some sixteen years, soon after she'd joined the Church.  She's quite a remarkable lady.  She was a seminary teacher as well, out in Bradford.  I feel like Job.  My latter end is better than my beginning.  The blessings that I've had in the last five years now have been great. 

J:   From '82 to '87.

B:   Yes, just five years.  After I'd been baptised—February 2nd, 1984, that would be, I think—I had my priesthood blessings restored on April 13th of the following year. 

I see a lot of people in that situation, waiting for their blessings to be restored, and they get awfully impatient.  I would have felt that if I'd ever got impatient that I wouldn't have been ready for it.  I enjoyed every minute I waited, because I knew that I was paying the price, and I had to pay the price.  And unless you've paid the price, it's not yours.  But I was busy.  It wasn't that I just sat home doing nothing.  I was filled with the gospel.  I was studying it.  I was teaching it.  I was having a marvellous time.

I finally got restored and about three weeks later I took my wife to the temple, on May 4th, 1985, we were sealed, and four of her children are now sealed to me.  They got permission from their dad.  One lives out in Seattle, Washington.  I don't know whether she will be sealed or not.  That still remains to be seen.

But as I think of the blessings that I've enjoyed, I think in many respects I've matured.  Although I've still got some way to go, I think the last five years of my church membership have been the most fruitful, the most solidly constructive ones.  It's been a steady progress.  I've been constantly achieving.

I've had a lot of help to do that, because it wasn't long after I received my priesthood that President Burnett called me as his executive secretary.  That calling really was the most fun I've ever had in a calling, because it's such a busy calling.  It really is.  It's demanding.  In fact, it's impossible for one man to do it properly.  So that occupied me.  I enjoyed that so much, and still

do, of course, because I'm still the executive secretary, because it keeps me busy and I need to be busy in the Church.  I think everybody needs to be busy in the Church to stay in the Church.  I think that the gospel is something you cannot afford to take a sabbatical from, because you need to stay right close by it and always constantly be involved.

I have continued to study the gospel since I came back in.  In fact, as soon as I started coming back to church, I found myself cast in the role of an apologist for the Church.  I sat next to a young man who opened his case and he got out this booklet that one of his Christian friends had dropped through his letter box anonymously.  I can't remember the title of the book now, but it was an anti-Mormon book.  It had severely depressed him, and it severely affected his testimony, because the things that were written in there were very, very hurtful for the Church.  I skimmed through it during priesthood lesson and I said, "Look, will you let me borrow this book for a week?  I'll bring you a book next week."  I spent all my free time that week answering every question that there was in there, and he got quite a thick book back for that.  Unfortunately I did not make a copy of that. 

J:   You wrote a book?

B:   I wrote a book for him, yes.  It took me a week.  I answered every objection and put things right.  That sort of set me up, and after that people would ask me about this and about that aspect of the gospel, and people would bring me pamphlets about the Church.  I would say, "Okay, let me have it, I'll look at it, and I'll give it back next week."  I went on from there and I wrote that much and studied that much.

I think the answer to being firm in the gospel lies in two things.  One is an understanding of the scriptures and the doctrines that are in them, and the other is, without doubt, a good knowledge of church history, because a lot of objections to the Church can be answered if you know church history.  That's one area where ignorance is really harmful.

So I set about to improve myself in these areas, and my magnum opus so far came because of my son Gary, Gary Redmonds, who's on a mission now in the Toronto Mission.  He's Norma's son and he's sealed to us.  He's just got about five months to do.  He was out there, and he and his friend from home, Chris Leonard, who was also in the same mission, went out a few months afterwards, met a minister in Trenton, Ontario, Raymond Cross, who is apparently the chief anti-  Mormon minister in that area.  Somebody out there, one of the members of the stake, Marty Hayward of Trenton, Ontario, had got involved with him somehow and had said, "If you've got any questions, we'll answer your questions."  So Chris sent over this list of about seventeen or eighteen questions, about twenty-four foolscap sheets, with lots and lots and lots of supplementaries.  And the man knew his anti-Mormonism.  However, he didn't know Mormonism.

They sent that over to the regional representative, who was Gordon Williams at the time, who has recently been released and now serves on the high council here.  Gordon passed it on to me and said, "Do something about it."  So I got to work on it, and oh, it was marvellous.  Everything I needed to know, I had at home.  Everything.  I mean, I never throw anything away—books, magazines, you ask my wife.  She tolerates it.  My daughter hates it.  But I keep them all in my room, my study.  I looked up everything, and I'd got something on everything I needed, some old Ensigns, some old Improvement Eras, some old Millennial Stars, and many of the church books that I'd got.  It was just all there.

So I just sat down, and it took me about six weeks solid to write it all out.  I think it was 114 pages in close typescript.  I sent it out and it arrived on September 1st, last year, the very morning of the day that they were to meet this minister again.  They took it out to him, and it didn't convert him, but it did convert him in a sense.  It didn't convert him to Mormonism, but he has changed his approach.  He now asks his questions in a much more reverent attitude, because so many of the things that he had seriously believed were absolutely not true.  Of inestimable value was Francis W. Kirkham's book, A New Witness for Christ in America, second volume, which is the only one I've got.  I'd like to read the first volume and also be able to use part of it, because I sent out a rough draft.  I used a lot of material from other sources, which I haven't identified but which I'd like to sort of get into a book.

The vicar wrote to me a very nice letter, with some supplementary questions, all of which were easily answered, and I sent that off to him.  Then I wrote an article.  We've had a lot of anti-Mormon feeling in the town in the last two years, saying that we're not Christians.

I'll give you some examples.  Two years ago the missionaries had a missionary Christmas and they sang hymns down at the piazza, which is an open place in Huddersfield, and then they'd made arrangements to go to St. Luke's Hospital to sing Christmas carols for the patients who were in hospital on Christmas.  They were met at the door by the hospital padre, who was a local minister—I don't know him—and he refused them admission on the grounds that they weren't Christians.

Then we had Brother Clyde Burgess die a couple of years ago.  He was in Second Ward and was a member of the bishopric.  He lived out at Holmfirth, which is about seven miles out of Huddersfield, and he comes from a family which has lived out there a long time and all his family were buried in Holmfirth Anglican churchyard.  So permission was given for him to be buried there, but they would not let the bishop offer graveside prayers or dedicate the grave, on the grounds that we were not Christians.

We had Harry Kilner, who's been running auctions down at Queen Street Methodist Mission for years.  You know, you hire the room and use it for what you want, and for a few years he'd been using it.  Then someone said to him, "This church of yours, has it got a nickname?"  So he said, "Yes."  "What is it?"  He said, "It's the Mormons."  "We thought so.  You can't use these rooms anymore."  He said, "Why not?"  "Because you're not Christians."

The bishop went to the YMCA in town and said, "Do you rent rooms out for auctions and things?"  They said, "We do.  Who wants it?”  He said, "Well, we're the Latter-day Saint Church."  "So you're the Mormons, aren't you?"  He said, "Yes."  They said, "Well, you can't have it.  You're not Christians."

Some of my seminary students who go to the local high schools here—which are not quite the same as high schools in the States, as they're at a lower level, younger students—had been taught in religious education classes that Mormons are not Christians, and the teachers would not be corrected.  So I've written a book.  Are Mormons Christians?  It's short.  I spoke to the school inspector, because they have a teacher who looks after the ethics and moral side of things.  They said if I would prepare something, they would take care of it so that they would teach them aright.

We baptised a sister about nine or ten months ago, a lovely sister in Ward II, Carol Iversen.  As soon as she became a Latter-day Saint, her brother discovered that he'd got a sister.  He's a

Christadelphian.  He sent her some of the most scurrilous anti-Mormon stuff you've ever seen in your life.  Of course she was a bit disturbed by it.  That was passed on to me and I wrote another

book.  Dear David Iversen, and sent that back to him.  Then he sent another book to her, as he never answered me, and I wrote another  lot about that.  And so it continues.

Now I never attack their positions.  I merely explain ours and put the record right.  I think that's important.  But I like it.  It keeps me busy.

I also do quite a lot of firesides.  For the past few years I've been associated with the single adult programme.  Originally I was called as the stake chairman of the single adult council and tried to get that working.  That's a programme which is neglected world-wide, I feel, generally, and one which I greatly have a feeling for, because I do understand.  Having been married that often, which means I've been single as many times, I understand the plight and the special needs of those who are single in the Church.  Fortunately I was called to the high council just over a year ago and was given the responsibility for single adults.  So I'm still working very hard and I do a lot of firesides.  I do them up and down the country in different stakes, for the conventions and the work-shops and that kind of thing.  I try to make them believe what I believe, that they are special people that have special needs and we need to stay strong.

All in all, I've kept very, very busy in the Church, and I'm happy that way.  Sometimes it seems a little heavy,  [chuckling]  Some- times I feel I'd like just time to breathe, but after a couple of days I get through my load and I get breathing space again.

So I'm happy to be involved.  It keeps me alive.  That's I think the main difference now.  If I look back on the time I was inactive and out of the Church and the time that I've spent in these last five years, the blessings that I've got now are much greater than any I've ever had at any time before.  I feel alive.  I feel as if I'm now engaged in pursuing major aims in life, whereas before I was very much a spectator and often saw the people doing things which I would like to do.

If I had control over my life and could do a rerun and just sort of sketch some things out and put some things in, I think the kind of thing I would have liked would be to have a good education and the kind of confidence you get with that education, that you get from public schools in England usually.  But I think also that it brings with it its own problems.  I think it's more difficult to believe.  I think faith becomes less possible, in many cases, because you can have your head filled with so many ideas and philosophies and things that you really find it difficult to admit new ideas.

So, all in all, although my life has been a strange and chequered one, I firmly believe that it's possibly the best one I could have had, and any shortcomings which I may have felt my childhood had are now more than adequately compensated for.  And I honestly feel this, that my blessings are so great, so many blessings, real blessings—the way I feel about myself, the way I feel about the Church, the way I feel about my family, and the things that happen to me in life that if I were to be given another blessing, I'd have to let one go to make room for it.  Now that's a pretty good way to feel, and that's the way I feel right now.

J:   You don't agonise over all of these past problems and injustices and difficulties?

B:   No, not any more.  A great help to me, when I was going back into the Church and preparing for baptism, was that the stake president doing one of his interviews said to me, "One of the most important things you must do"—apart from not dying before I got baptised, which he stressed—"is that when the Lord forgives you, you must forgive yourself."  Then he said, "A lot of men come back into the Church but never forgive themselves, and always the memory is there."  I can honestly say that I feel forgiven and I forgive myself.

I realise there's no profit in mooching over the past, which I'd done for years anyway.  I just feel happy and content to go forward.  If anyone should be impertinent enough to say, "Have you been an adulterer?”  I would say, "Yes, I have been.  Now I'm not.  Now let's get on with it."  I don't feel that I'm just 99 percent a member.  I think I'm 101 percent.  I feel it's my church again.  I feel right at home in it, and I'm just happy to be doing what I can in it.

J:   I think you've given us a good feel for the sweep of your life, and I appreciate the way you have moved us through that.  Should we go back and pick some things up?

B:   Okay.

J:   I think we ought to at least summarise your building missionary experience.  This was an interesting time in the Church in the British Isles, one that later came to an end I guess because of labour conditions and so forth.  Please tell what you remember, in terms of your involvement, the work with the members, and the feeling there was about what was done.

B:   Well, all of a sudden the church building programme seemed to be upon us.  It came from nowhere, and just, poof, all of a sudden everybody was building something.  I remember being very excited about this, because for years we'd met in rented rooms and converted houses, and the possibility that now we'd have buildings which were our own, which were purpose built and which actually looked like churches, seemed very exciting.

More exciting than that was the philosophy of church building with donated labour and building missionaries.  I thought that was a terrific idea.  I really did.  I thought that was straight out of Enoch's time, and I thought it was wonderful.  I thought what a marvellous system, what a marvellous programme it was.

When President Curtis called me on a building mission, I was happy to go.  It meant leaving behind my wife, as she still was then, and the work towards a reconciliation, but I felt that this was the thing I ought to do.  I worked on the Ipswich and the Southampton chapels.

I went to Ipswich and the supervisor was Don Worthen, who was from Salt Lake somewhere, and he was a man that I loved very much.  Don Worthen was very much a patriarchal figure.  He must have been about seventy years old then.

The building missionaries that were on the site at the time were Dennis Clancy – who incidentally I saw in January of this year, when I went to a building missionary reunion up in Dundee, all the Dundee missionaries, and he was from Dundee.  So I went up there and saw him again.  He's not changed a great deal, just got older and greyer.  He was only a lad at the time.  There was Malcolm Metcalfe, who was a serious, sensible one.  There was John Rhodes, who was from Stoke, who was the opposite of everything Dennis Clancy was.  I'm not being unkind, because I love him as a brother, but Dennis was a ruffian, while John was cultured, very cultured.  He even adopted the middle names "Marc Antony"—John Marc Antony Rhodes—not something everyone does.  Later we were joined by a lad from Lincoln, Mel Lavender, who was a marvellous wit, great humour.

It was in May of 1963 that I went to Ipswich.  I was collected from the station by Janet Caldwell.  She'd been Janet Josephson.  Her mother was Marba C. Josephson, who for many years was one of the associate editors of the Improvement Era.  Janet was a lovely girl.  She'd married Dean Caldwell.  He was a career US Air Force man.  He'd been in Great Britain during the war, when he first started his career, and he was quite a few years older than her.  He was a good man, the basic sort of practical man who struggled hard to live the gospel—not that he had any great problems, but it was an effort for him.  But the greatest thing about it is that he maintained the struggle, and that shows the measure of the man that he was.

They'd decided they would take a building missionary in.  The programme was that the local members housed the building missionary and the building missionary got ten shillings a week, which was equivalent to 50p now, not a lot, and it wasn't a lot then.  Then they gave the people who housed the missionaries about £3 or £3/10 a week, about nine or ten dollars in those days, to feed them.  Then anything they needed otherwise, clothes or new boots, or if you had a bike, batteries, that came from the ward building fund.  Well, they were branches then.

The Caldwells took me in, and I stayed with them all the time I was in Ipswich, nine months.  And I tell you, they were marvellous.  I've never met more generous people.  It was just a pleasure to be there.  They had four children.  They'd been married a long time and they'd had no children, so they adopted two, one and then another, Michael the eldest and then David, and of course after they got the two adopted, they had two of their own then.  It seems to work that way.  So they had four children, and they took me in as well and made me most welcome and treated me like a long-lost son, although I was older than most building missionaries at that time.  I was twenty-seven or twenty-eight, so quite long in the tooth, really.  But they treated me so well, and they just did everything they could to make roe comfortable.  They were marvellous people.

All the missionaries in our area, incidentally, were housed with American families.  It seemed that the British Saints had still got something to learn about sacrificing and giving.  But it always has been, and still is to my mind in many respects today, true that the American Saints are far more generous.  They haven't got the British reserve, which is the great problem with us.

As far as working on the building site, they'd done the hardest work, which was digging the foundation holes during the winter of '63, which was an incredibly hard winter here.  The earth was like iron and they had picks with which to dig.  It was all a very primitive operation.  But they'd pulled together and worked very hard.  So when I got there, the foundations were in and the great concrete span ribs were up, and we took it on from there.  We were putting the roof on and we started doing the brick.

Now I knew that you used the rough side of a saw to cut wood with, but there wasn't a great deal more that I knew about building.  But Don Worthen was a major influence in my life.  There have been others through my church life whom I've neglected to mention, but Don Worthen was a major influence.  I think in my time I must have had something over seventy-five different jobs.  That's why it's quite difficult to summarise.  Don Worthen was the first person I ever worked for that trusted me well enough to not direct me, but to make suggestions and then walk away and let me complete it myself.

I learnt from him that if you made a mistake, it wasn't the end of the world.  I was twenty-eight, and I grew up feeling guilty.  If I'd have been stood in a bus stop and the fellow next to me dropped dead, I would have felt that somehow it had been my fault and I was going to get blamed for it.  That was just the way it was.  But with Don Worthen, if I ever made a mistake - and I made some very costly mistakes in the early months of my building mission, which is easy.  You know, you drop a concrete lintel and it cracks and it's got to be paid for.  At one time I would have wanted to run away.  I felt very downcast and said, "Elder Worthen, I'm very sorry I broke that lintel."  He said, "That's okay.  We'll get another one," and that was the end of it.  And when you went in for your tea, he wasn't waiting to go on about this concrete lintel, which had been my previous experience.

So he gave me confidence to trust people more.  As a result of that, I learned that I could trust people more and I could make confessions about things which weren't so good and the mistakes I'd made and people accepted them and I felt much easier in life.

He taught me a great many things besides how to build, because he did a lot of building on me, in his way.  He was very wise, and I learned from him that it's not always a bad thing to take advice.

On the building site, which had been an orchard, there was a little old house.  We used the house as an office and as somewhere to store things while we built the chapel, and then we were going to demolish the house and make a lawn over it.  There was a toilet in this house, and it got blocked up.  So he figured that what had happened was that the earth pipes had crumbled and they needed digging out and replacing.

So we sort of figured, "There's the toilet," which was outside, "there's the manhole in the road, and that's a straight line."  So we dug down there, but we didn't find anything, and we dug there, and we dug there, and we dug there, and we dug there.  Don Worthen came by and saw all these holes and it looked like a battlefield, with all these shell holes.  He said, "Why don't you dig under the path?" and he walked off.  That was his way.  He wouldn't stay there and wait to see what you were going to do.  "Why don't you dig under the path?"  So Mel Lavender and I, who were digging the holes, said, "Silly old fool.  What's the point in digging over there?"  But we'd dug everywhere else.  There was only under the path to dig.  So we dug under the path, and that's where it was.

So I learned that advice is often good and that it's often the shortcut.  It saves you a lot of time.  The biggest problems that I saw in the building programme, and I saw them in both the sites I worked on, and I heard them as common experience from other building missionaries, was that it became a "them and us" situation, very much a them and us.  I see now at this distance that it was almost inevitable, because the building missionaries for the most part were young men.  The majority of them were boys.  Dennis Clancy was sixteen when he went on his building mission.  He was eighteen after two years and then he went home, but he was still a boy.  He was still growing.  A lot of them were seventeen and eighteen.  And a lot of them were boys who weren't in any regular or good employment.  Some of them had just joined the Church.  They were rough, they were out of work, so they sent them on a building mission, and they went.

So they went, and they knew what they were going to do, but their background made it very easy for the local members to reject them, to say, "They're ruffians."  And the problem seemed to grow.  First of all, the members seemed to resent having to pay for the missionaries' keep.  It was only £3 a week, which meant that whoever took them in was making a loss.  They had to keep them out of their own pocket, largely.  Again the sacrifice came in.

Then this other thing grew up.  These young fellows felt this resentment.  They felt the "them and us" and knew there was a difference, and so they became hypercritical of members who did not turn up for regular work on the building site.  In the manner of young men, they were not afraid to say, "It's time you got on the building site."  Of course people resent being told that.  And then they were critical of those who did go on the building site, because the young men developed some expertise and the members, who weren't on so often, did their best, but often made mistakes.  Sometimes a building missionary was a little unkind in pointing out the mistakes – somewhat happily, I might add.  So quite often this sort of antagonism grew up between the building missionaries and the local members.

Now the building supervisors were in the middle of this, because they were responsible for the building missionaries and they were also of course principal members of the ward or branch building committee.  It depends which way the cookie crumbles as to whose side they were mostly on.  This caused quite a lot of problems from time to time, and there was generally a feeling of some rancour there.  There was a lot of criticism from the branch members to the building missionaries and back again—which was sad, really, because it demeaned the concept of the building missionary programme.

It was a terrific inspiration that we should build chapels that way.  I think it's marvellous, because it gave everybody a stake in the building.  It made it their building.  I'm one of the custodians here in the stakehouse, and I know if there's any damage done to this building, it's usually not by those who had a hand in building it.  There are people whose sweat and blood is in the bricks, if you like.

So that was the sad part, in my mind, about the building programme.  The great thing about it was that we did build these chapels, and they did get finished—sometimes a little late, but they did get done.  And they changed a great deal.  First of all, they changed the Church's impact upon the community, because now suddenly we were visible.  We weren't just a few people getting off a bus and disappearing into an old house.  Here it was.  It looked like a Latter-day Saint church.  You can't mistake them.  So we'd arrived in that sense.

Also having a chapel provided the opportunity for the members in this church to do what they'd never been able to do, and that was to experience the total programme of the Church, because we had the room, we had the facilities, and in the early days when they built these buildings, they spared no expense and anything we wanted, we got it.

I remember that a lot of people were very, very anxious about these buildings, a lot of the local leadership, because they were so good.  They'd say, "What happens if we damage them?"  Mark E. Peterson came round, who was president of the West European Mission at that time, and he came round this building.  There was a beautiful parquet floor we had in the cultural hall, that's now a bit of a patchwork, an done of the bishops said, "What's going to happen if they wear the floor out, or something?  They were worried about wearing the building out.  President Peterson pout everything into perspective by saying, "If you wear it out, we'll build you another."

So then people got the idea that it was okay to use the buildings.  It was okay to walk on the floors and open and close the doors.  We'd never had anything new before, and it was a major advance for the Church in this country.

I try and understand the feelings that we get sometimes.  We're used to this now.  This is normal for us.  Sometimes if we bring friends to church, we worry that they'll not find everything to their liking, the missionary nerves syndrome.  But I remember how readily we took them to our dusty rooms and our converted houses where we met.  We were never afraid of them, and now our perception seems to have changed, and somehow the building won't be enough, and there's maybe something else they need.

The youth of course have benefited greatly by it, since they're able to do all kinds of activities that we were just not able to do before.  It's really been marvellous.

The building of the Ipswich chapel went on very well.  It was generally on schedule, and we had a lot of fun.  I think the most important thing was that it was enjoyable.  You know, the odd needle and a little bit of rancour came and went, and generally there were a few protagonists that sort of kept up the animosity that existed.  But I don't think overall, once you'd sort of got your attitude right about it, that it was a serious thing.

J:   You don't think it dominated the scene, either for most of the members or for the building missionaries?

B;   It did for a while.  There certainly were times in my experience when that was the major issue.  We were fortunate in Ipswich in having a superintendent who had what we in this country would call a lot of "edge.”  I don't know how that would translate.  He was supremely confident in his own abilities.  He had a charisma.  As I say, he was patriarchal.  I think that probably describes it.  If you think of the Old Testament patriarchs, they weren't afraid to say what they thought.  Every fast and testimony meeting Elder Worthen, with a four-in-one under his arm—and he was quite a broad man, so he used to waddle—would waddle to the front, turn round and stare out, and bear his testimony and say, "Now I've got the best bunch of missionaries in the whole programme."  And when he said it, you knew he meant it.

The chief antagonist, who I won't name, on one occasion said to him.  You know, I wish my company thought as much of me as you think of your building missionaries.”  And Elder Worthen said, Well, if they don't, whose fault is that?”  [laughing]  So he got suitably squashed, although it didn't basically alter the man.  He's still very active in the Church, and he's doing a lot of good work in the Church.  It's just sad that some people have this faculty for criticism, and exercise it.  It's a puzzle to me.  But notwithstanding that, generally, a lot of good things happened.

In Ipswich they'd got an awful lot of young people, and at twenty-eight I was aligned with the young people rather more than with the older ones.  I've always enjoyed the company of young people, and I still do.  I think young people are a special responsibility.  It's not a question of saying, "They're the Church tomorrow."  I think that's the wrong way around.  The right way to look at it is, "Their tomorrow is in the Church," and if we don't hold them in the Church they're going to lose far more than we lose.  We just lose numbers.  They lose something that's far more serious.  They lose their exaltation.  And so, bless them, they've always been precious.  But they were so marvellous.  They'd got humour and they'd got spirituality.  It's a perfect mix when you get people like that.  They just jelled so well together, and it just worked so well.  It was just a joy when they came to the building site, and then we'd go up to MIA and join in with them, and there were no barriers at that level.  That was beautiful.  That was really nice.

I learnt a lot about building while I was at Ipswich, and I learned a lot about life from Don Worthen and from the Caldwells, who were very good and eventually ended up having two building missionaries stay with them.  The other one was Alan Webster from Lowestoft, a good lad.  The branch was supposed to give you your clothes, but the Caldwells used to go up to the PX.  and I'd get back and my drawers were just full of new things.  And they never said, "These are for you."  They were just there, and they looked so marvellous.

I maintained a correspondence with them for years and years and years, but when I became inactive, I let it go.  In fact, I've got a note in my notebook here to get hold of the membership people – you know, you can put a member request through—and get back a hold of them, because they deserve much better than my neglect.

It then became necessary, for legal reasons, for me to move to Southampton.  My children were living in Bournemouth and I hadn't seen them for a while, and the divorce was getting ready to go through.  It still wound on for several years after that, actually, or another year.  But my solicitor felt that in order to secure access, I ought to see them more often.  I'd only been able to see them as and when.  So I explained this to the Building Department, and they were very good in transferring me to Southampton.  I didn't want to leave Ipswich, I must admit.  Somehow my heart had gotten into the place, and I loved the people.  I loved the Caldwells.  It was just painful to leave.

But I went down to Southampton, and they expressly said, "The work there is behind schedule.  See what you can do to move it ahead."  So I went down there and got busy.  It was a different chapel, different people.  There was Dave Winters.  We used to call him "Lord Winters," because he had the air of an aristocrat, and he was about 6'6" and very handsome.  He was a good lad.  There was little Alex Young from Scotland, a fiery little fellow, and I can't remember who else at the moment.  We hired the brickwork out to a member of the Church.  He was a bricklayer, and his language was awful.  (chuckling]  I mean, it was really awful.  We used to tell him off, and he always used to quote Joseph Smith, saying, "I'd rather have a man who will swear a string as long as your arm than a smooth faced hypocrite," and that was his justification, which I thought wore a bit thin.

But I enjoyed building that chapel, because the challenges were great.  The supervisor was a quiet sort of chap and found it difficult to motivate both the missionaries and the members, and so things were falling regularly behind.  You know, he was a nice chap but very quiet, and when he wasn't on the building site, you never saw him.  He never had you over at the house, and he didn't speak to you on Sundays.  He was a really quiet, sort of shy chap.

The first thing I did when I got down there was build a jig, and got the roof rafters in, got the roof on, I think in about three weeks, and we did all kinds of things.  It was just so good to be in at the deep end.  You could ring up and order twenty ton of concrete, get it down and get the members up, and you would float in this all day that it used to take to finish a floor, the whole main slab.  And then when it was done, it was done.

It's still there, and if you know where to look in these buildings, there are all kinds of inscriptions which were put there by the building missionaries.  We buried a gravestone in Ipswich.  Dennis Clancy had his heart broken.  He was very fond of this girl, and someone told the girl some lies about him and she finished with him.  She would never listen to him again.  So we built a concrete slab, a gravestone, that said, "Here lies the heart of Dennis Clancy, killed by lying tongues," with the date, and we buried that in the heating duct system.  So if you know where to go and you'll risk it, you could find his tombstone.  On the stage pillars, where we capped them off with concrete, I always put my colophon in hieroglyphics.  The people probably still wonder what it is, but I know.  I should go look it up some day.

It again was good.  It was a challenge, and again the same kind of thing happened in Southampton as in Ipswich.  There was this antagonism.  The members thought the building missionaries were getting too much.  That was the one side, and then the other side was that the members weren't doing enough.  That was the beginning and end of it.

I don't really suppose that life in the Church changes much, so wherever you are I think you're going to get this sort of division in the membership.  You're going to get some who you can look at others and say, "They don't do enough," and then they'll look at somebody else and say, "Oh, they're getting favourable treatment." 

Maybe it's not the building programme that brought that on.  Maybe it's just part of the human condition.  But with the building programme, with new people and people who were established and belonged there, maybe it was just easy to identify that kind of thing.  But on reflection, I've seen the same kind of thing in wards amongst ward members.  Some will feel they're in and some will feel they're out and that sort of thing.  Maybe there's a lesson that we should have learnt from the building programme that we missed because we identified with the wrong causes.

I think we spend an awful lot of time, now, trying to hold what we've got, in the membership.  And I think that's right.  That's what we should do.  But it seems a pity, because it robs the time from gathering in new members.  We're constantly trying to find ways of holding and strengthening what we've got, and that seems to occupy an awful lot of time.

J:   Are you saying you think it ought to come more naturally?

B:   Well, I don't know.  I think if it were more natural, it would be there.  I suppose really it's to do with commitment, the level of commitment.  I'm not one of these people who think about the "good old days," though I've had some, but I've had some good new days as well and lovely experiences in the Church now and great people.  But I think that today we seem to have a lot more members who are more dependent, who need more support, both in a pastoral way, in spiritual strengthening, and in other ways.  And we expend a lot of energy there.

That's not a criticism.  It's an observation, and it's a pity it can't be otherwise.  I really don't know what the answer is.  I was the high council advisor to a ward and, until recently, to two elders quorums, and the problems are there, and I cannot see it ever being different.

That's where I've had to learn patience.  I've always responded fairly well myself to somebody sitting me down and saying, "Now look, this is what you're doing, and this is what you should be doing.  Now will you go and do that?"  I'll say, "Okay, I'll go and do it."  I appreciate that, and that's what the stake president does with me sometimes.  He pulls me in and he straightens me out and sends roe off.  Sometimes I've been a little bit impatient, because not everybody can take it that way.  Not everybody can stand correction.  A lot of people feel, if you criticise what they're doing, that somehow you're not happy with them and they feel a little bit hurt by it.  I guess that's not difficult to understand.

So that's where I've been impatient, but I'm having to learn patience, and it's doing me good.  [laughing]  By the way it hurts me, I know it's good for me, because at times I have to say to my- self, "Now be patient.  Be patient."  I have to do what Don Worthen did all those years ago with me, drop a suggestion in front of them and then you walk away.  It's not the same as ignoring it thereafter, because it's like the scripture that says, "The gods watched to see that all these things were done," but I don't think they stood right next by.  It's that sort of thing.

I feel that development of leadership is still one of the greatest problems we have, certainly in this area of the Church, because we don't know what it's like in the States.  But I rather gather that there are certainly some areas out there where the membership is more blessed with leadership.  You have a greater percentage of the membership who are more middle-class, more accomplished kind of people, who because of their work and their education have leadership abilities, which we lack very much in our area of the Church.

We do the best we can with what we've got, and that's why sometimes we're a little bit behind where we'd like to be.  I get a little bit cross sometimes with my daughter Joanne, because she gets cross with the dog—or with the two dogs, but mostly she gets cross with one of them, the unloved.  She's cross with it because it's a dog and it won't respond like a human being.  Now she's only seventeen and she's got yet to learn that as a dog you cannot find fault with it.  It is a perfect dog.  Everything it does it does like a dog and does it absolutely perfect.  But she wants to treat it like a human being, so she gets impatient with it and calls it bad names and that kind of thing.

I guess what we need to do is to allow the same kind of latitude to people.  You know, we can't make people fit our image of what a person should be as a church leader.  We've got to say, as I remember Elder Packer said in the chapel here about two-and-a-half years ago, "You're the best we've got.  If you don't do it, it won't get done.  If you want to know how stuck we are for leaders in this area, when you go home, look in the mirror.  We have to use you."  I learned a great deal from that.

So I guess, although there's a lot more we could do, it's going to take a little time.  I also think the Church, like almost every other operation, has to work very, very hard not to lose ground, to stay where it is.  If you do make some advances, that is a bonus.  We should judge progress not so much by where we are, but by where we are relative to where we were.  If we look at it that way, then we're not doing so bad.  But I guess some of us like instant success, and that's a little harder to accomplish.

J:   Well, that's true.  One tendency, I suppose, is for people to hope for improvement by saying, "Missionaries, you should be bringing in a different kind of convert here."  What's your perception on that?

B:   Well, I think the problem has always been there.  I mean, myself as a missionary, and missionaries I knew, would teach anyone that would listen.  Most missionaries these days tract in mixed areas.

I think certainly we could do with the leadership.  We could do with more leadership people.  Dennis Livesey was the first stake president we had, and when he joined the Church, he joined in the old upper room.  His wife came first, and he came the following week and has been coming ever since.  He was the first stake president we had and the only one who's gone from this stake and been a mission president.  He presided over the Scottish mission some years ago.  I had the privilege of confirming him a member of the Church.

When Dennis came in he was a salesman.  He worked for Foxborough – Yoxall, the chemical engineering company, an American company, and he covered half of England.  He'd got a background in chemistry, he'd had a good education, he was articulate, and that's something none of the rest of us were.  And it just showed.  It just shone  like a beacon.  Now all you need is a few of them a year and things start to improve.  If you give a man like that a job, he just sets about and does it, and he brings with it the expertise which is part of him.

I guess Dennis was the first one to join in this area who looked like being something, if you know what I mean.  We'd had some local leadership, but not a lot in the priesthood.  Although they made a lot of sacrifices and they worked very hard, I think with Dennis's advent into the Church here, local leadership took an awful big step up.

During the late '50s there was a flood into the Church.  The membership all of a sudden just grew, and it happened, it seemed, throughout the whole of the British Isles, that there was a big influx, as yet unexplained, at least by natural means, of people of similar ability.  All of a sudden the leadership we needed was there.

Now the sad thing about this is that that leadership is still here and it's still leading and it's not being replaced by a new wave, not to any great extent.  The majority of converts in Great Britain

are still the less educated, and still quite a lot of them are those who require a lot of ministerial work.  They require supporting and they require uplifting, almost constantly, and reassuring.

I never like to criticise missionaries, because I think there's people doing that already.  I think that maybe it is an easy option for them to tract on a council estate where they know they're going to get in and people are easy to talk to.  And yes, I'm sure there are great difficulties in tracting a posher area.  And yes, I'm sure that the amount of doors that are closed to them is greater there.  When you go and knock on the houses of the learned, you're probably less likely to get in.  But still the Lord has promised that out there somewhere, these leaders are waiting.

I think one of the difficulties is that we put missionaries in a very difficult situation.  We say to them, "Go baptise numbers.  Each of you try and get ten this month," and then we say at the same time, "Baptise potential leadership."  I don't think you can do both, as a general rule.  I think if you want numbers, you've got to be content possibly with people of less ability, who seem to have less difficulty in opening themselves up to a new faith.  If you want the leadership quality person, I think then you've got to accept reduced numbers, because you may work ten times as hard for only perhaps 1 percent of the achievement.  So I think you've got to decide what you want.

J:   This is an interesting perception, that many leaders came in the late '50s, and then, following that, we had this wave of youth converts peaking around 1961, '62.

B:   The "baseball baptisms" they're called.  Yes, that was President T. Bowring Woodbury, a man for whom I have a great appreciation and a fond memory.

On the baseball baptisms, in my mind, properly done, there's nothing wrong with a baseball baptism, as long as the people didn't think they were being baptised into the Mormon baseball team.  Baseball was the lure.  It was a youth-orientated missionary programme, and as long as the people were well taught and knew what they were getting into and had a testimony of the gospel, that was fine.  I don't think it matters where you find them, as long as it's honest.  And there's nothing dishonest about playing baseball in the park.

The problem here is that we—and I say "we" referring to the established members—did not fully understand or discharge our responsibilities.  The missionary's responsibility really ends when the converts come up out of the water, and that's when the local members' responsibility begins.  Well, it starts before then, but then it's their total responsibility.  That's how I see it.  The missionaries find them, they baptise them, and then it's our responsibility to hold them.  And we signally failed to do that, and we still fail in some areas for the same reason.

Particularly people who've been on missions themselves often say, "They're baptising them too soon, they're baptising people who aren't ready, they're baptising people with Word of Wisdom problems."  My answer is, "Okay, so what?"  That's what you've got to work with.

I have always felt that there would have been less criticism of this youth programme and greater holding power if as branches we had made a conscious decision to hold, instead of just looking at the person and saying, "Well, I've never seen him before," and ignoring him.  That's when people walk away.  As long as you're giving people the same kind of attention that the missionaries gave them, you're going to hold their interest at least, and while you're holding them, then you've got a chance to help them grow and develop.  I think we lost a great opportunity there.

J:   You seem to be saying that since that time, this resolution to hold has been put in place, basically.

B:   Well ...

J:   That's questionable?

B:   I certainly think the need to do it has been identified, definitively, and particularly in these last couple of years, when they've tried to take the "minister" out of "administer" and leave us with the ministering.  I think that's right.  I think it's too easy for us as leaders to become involved in programmes and planning meetings.  That way the Saints, particularly the weak ones, fall between the two stools.  Now, if I don't get home teaching, I'm not going to fall away.  And if I go to church on Sunday and nobody speaks to me, I'm not going to fall away.  But a lot of people need continual spiritual strengthening.  They need ministers to minister to them.  It's so important.  Religion needs feeding, particularly when it's new, and particularly if people have not been religious before and it's a new experience.  It's got to be constant with that sort of person.  We've identified the need for that, but some- times we fail to deliver and it doesn't happen.

J:   I seem to sense a sort of frustration on your part that we do need to do so much of that, which is a feeling probably shared by many church members.

B:   I feel so.  Yes.  People have needs, and if we fail to identify those needs and then to fill them adequately, then we fail in our ministry.  And our ministry's got to be serious, because it's a serious business.

The first time I went to the temple, I was sat in a little room for a pre-endowment and pre-initiatory ordinance talk, and Albert Parsons, who is now temple recorder at the London Temple and was on the presidency, sat me down with about six other brethren that were there, and he said this—and I've never forgotten these words—"In this place, either we are playing silly games, or else it's deadly serious.  No other possibility exists.  It's one of those two.  If we are playing silly games, then it doesn't matter what we do or how we do it.  It won't matter.  But if it's deadly serious, it's got to be done right."

I like to apply that to the ministerial work of the Church.  If we're just playing silly games, then it really doesn't matter how we do it.  But if it is deadly serious, then we've got to be as right as we can be with it.  We've got to get it as right as we can, because if we don't, it's people that suffer and people that fail.  Every time somebody stops coming to church ...  We can't always blame ourselves for this.  You always get a falling away, which is inherent in the person.  With some people you can do everything for them and they still fall away.  But there are an awful lot—and I would say the majority—where it needn't happen, where we could gather them and we could keep them held in.  We could perhaps love them a bit more.  We could help them with their problems a bit more and be really involved.

I think again it's a level of commitment that we need to make, first of all to understand the terms of our ministry and then to be able to make the commitment, irrespective of the sacrifice that that involves us in, and to maintain that for as long as necessary, maybe a lifetime.  If we can't do that, then we are failing.

J:   Could we move back to the question of the elders quorum presidency in East Anglia – specifically what were the challenges that you faced and then how it went in working on that?

B:   Yes.  Now I can only speak generally, as it were.  The elders quorum was twelve groups in twelve branches.  Each was presided over by a group leader, and the most common contact the elders in a branch had with anyone from the elders quorum was their weekly contact with the group leader. 

The groups had devolved—I think that's the right word—into a weekly class period, very much as we see happening today in many areas of the Church.  That was all it had become.  You went to elders class, you had a lesson from the manual, and then you went about your business.  I then, as now, identified a quorum as being something far more than that.  To me, if you belonged to a quorum, it was something special, because a quorum is part the Lord's organisation.  A quorum meant, over and above everything else, brotherhood, and that meant not a label, but a feeling.  More than just an identity, it was a state of being, that if we were in a quorum we were brothers in every sense of the word.  So if one of my brethren was hurt, I felt it and I would respond to him, and if he needed help, I was the one to give it to him.

This was the kind of feeling that I wanted to grow up amongst the quorum, that it was a quorum, that it was a brotherhood, that they felt like brothers, that they could trust their lives to each other, that they knew if they were in any kind of difficulty, they could call on any one of those who were their brothers.  Now that's perfection, but in between perfection and reality, there's an awful lot of good that can be done.  You know, we may never achieve our ideal, but as long as we're striving towards it, there is some improvement coming.  And if we fail to strive towards it, there are an awful lot of blessings there, an awful lot of benefits of quorum membership, which are being denied to people.

So I thought first of all what we'd do is we'd let them know that they were part of a quorum:  "There are other people here who are interested in you.  Your welfare is their concern.  If you've not got enough to eat, it's the quorum's concern.  If you've got a problem getting your children and your families to church, let the quorum help.  If you need your house decorated and you're a great gardener but you're a poor decorator, somebody else will decorate your house and you dig his garden."

It was that kind of thing, to get a living thing going and, above all, to teach the brethren that they were more than just members of the quorum, that each of them was a minister of the gospel, and they had a charge, as an elder in Israel, a responsibility to be a minister and to use the ministry to bless—to bless not only their own families, but the other quorum members, and then to carry the work of the ministry on through the missionary service, because we had no seventies then, and of course the majority of missionary work was done through the quorums and from the quorum.

As part of this, I felt that we should build up a fund, so that we could do two things.  One was that we could finance missionaries and give help and assistance to missionaries, principally called from amongst our own quorum, when needed, and the other was so that if any of our brethren fell on hard times, we could render immediate assistance to them, where a man could feel that as part of a quorum he really belonged to something.

Now I believe that, for many of the wrong reasons, the Freemasons have got this right and we've got it wrong.  I know we've got the ideal, but in practice it doesn't work.  And if it doesn't work, it's like a motorcar sat inside your garage with no engine.  It's beautiful to look at, but it's useless.  It's like a lighthouse in the desert—brilliant, but useless.  It serves no useful function.

So I was trying to get the brethren to see a vision of what it means to be part of a quorum; to have a vision of what it would be like to be part of this kind of brotherhood; to build, if you like, a kind of society within a society, that they would be part of that our quorum membership made them special, because it made each of their individual needs and problems the needs and problems of all of us and that we worked resolutely towards fulfilling these.

Of course the problem was that they didn't want to see the vision, and those that saw it saw it somewhat imperfectly and felt that it was going to disturb the tranquillity that they now felt in the present situation, the status quo.  They preferred the devil they knew to the devil they didn't knew, even though the benefits that I promised them were greater and they could see that.

One of our greatest difficulties is developing our own spirituality and then helping other people to achieve that, because I think if your membership is not based on spiritual lines, you're missing a great deal.  To me it's a problem if I have to say to you, "Now this is what we've been doing, but this is what we need to do, and we need to start right now."  If you say to me, "Well, that may be, but I'm not going to do it," then I've got a problem.  My problem is how to get you to change your mind.  It's motivation.

Now as leaders, one of the greatest difficulties we've got is motivation.  For me, obtaining the vision has always been easy.  You know, I get very excited.  I could get excited over a laundry list.  [laughing]  I can see amazing potential in a laundry list.  But getting other people excited in it has always been a major disappointment to me, that other people don't get excited over the programme of the Church and they're often content to let things be as they are, just to rub along as we've been going.  That's, as I mentioned before, where I'm developing patience and long-suffering and love unfeigned.  It takes longer to do it that way, but sometimes I think the results are worth it.  But you can't stop just because everybody else doesn't want to go.  Because if you do, you're not fulfilling the demands of your calling.

I think that I know how Moses felt, to some extent, in the wilderness.  And I know how the Prophet Joseph felt when his people turned against him.  I know how difficult it can be sometimes, how very hard it is for leaders who want to go somewhere, but when they turn round, there's nobody following them.  That's very difficult.

I felt at that time with the elders quorum that yes, I could say, "Okay, give up the fight."  I could let it be.  And I think I was tempted to do that, because that's easier.  It's easier to do nothing and then say, "Okay, they don't want to come with me.  I'll just be a nominal president and go and get a handshake and a good seat on the stand and that sort of thing, and just show myself now and again."

But then it disturbed me as well that I could even think like that, because whatever it is you're called to, the covenant is that you do it the best you can.  In fact, it's even better than that.  You do it as if the Saviour were doing it.  That's really the covenant.  You do it His way.  To roe that has always been the meaning of taking upon yourself the name of Christ.  It's not that you just sort of stamp His name on your clothes and say, "I'm now a Christian."  You've got to provide the evidence.  You've got to try and live in that way.

So I really had this conflict.  And I didn't feel there was anyone close that I could talk to that could help me too well on that.  I just needed to find a way out of my difficulty, which was a real

difficulty to me.  So I prayed about it.  I prayed very earnestly about it, and I explained to the Lord exactly how I saw my two options and then asked Him for His advice. 

As a result I had that dream I told you about earlier.  I woke up in the morning and I was in no doubt what I should do.  I pursued it, and I must say I ruffled an awful lot of feathers for a little time.  But then I'm happy to say that one by one, the brethren also seemed as if they started to get the vision and to get an urgency about the work, and it began to build.  We used the term, "It's cooking."  Something was happening.  You know, it was buzzing.  We got brotherhood, we got that fellowship, and the brethren started to take a pride in themselves as members of the quorum.  It was a time where I feel that a great deal of growth took place.  But it was hard.  (laughing]

J   Well, it's a never-ending battle.

B   That's right.

J   Then eventually you were released as elders president and went on.

B   I moved away from that area.  Incidentally, at that time I held nine callings in the Church, which were rather a lot.  I was elders quorum president, district councilman, I was called as a district auditor, I was superintendent of MIA, I was a seminary teacher, I ran a chorus, and I was also called as a specialist Sunday School teacher.  I taught a boy who was spastic.  So it was things like that.

J   Now when would that have been, about what years?

B   It was '69, '70, '71, around that time.

J   So it would have been right soon after this that you dropped out of activity.

B   Yes, it was.  Almost immediately.  Now the serious thing about that was that I started working as a psychiatric nurse in a hospital.  I was working shifts, and because of my shift work I was not always able to get to my meetings.  I also became quite depressed.

There were a lot of problems in that marriage too, with June.  Now of course we're good friends.  June always felt that I should be doing more, which was difficult for me to understand.  I always tried to do everything I could, even though sometimes it caused me a lot of discomfort.  I'm basically lazy.  I just like to lie there and let life roll by and be fed every so often.  So when I do engage in any activity, it's as a result of effort.  It doesn't come as easy as it looks.

But June took to preaching to me, rather harshly I thought, at times.  She'd say, "You should be doing this.  You should be doing that."  And she would argue a great deal.  I had reached a time in life where I didn't want to argue anymore, and I only sought peace.  So if she argued in this room, I would go into that room, and then she'd follow me.  It would go on for days sometimes.  I just wanted to lock myself away from it, and it got me down.  It really got me down.  I became very unhappy, and this lasted about eighteen months to two years, which I found rather wearing.

As a result of it, my activity in the Church sort of dropped off very slowly.  I was trying to keep going.  I was trying very hard to keep going, but I found it very difficult—in fact, more and more difficult all the time—to remain motivated to do the things I should.  So I let things slide bit by bit.  But it was over a rather long period.  In fact, it was over such a long period that it was almost imperceptible.  I think that was probably the most dangerous thing about it, that I didn't really at first recognise what was happening to me, and before I knew where I was, I'd convinced myself that I'd rethought the whole of life and that I'd come up with a completely different set of answers than I'd had over the past twenty years.

So I became inactive.  I used to take my family to church, drop them in the car park and go up and pick them up and take them home, but I got so I really didn't wish to see any church members.  I remember one time Dougal McKeown, who was temple president for a long time, came up through Ipswich and he called with his wife Grace to see me, and I just sat in a chair and wouldn't talk to him.  This was not me, because normally you just try and stop me talking.  So things were that bad.

Then we actually moved back up to Yorkshire.  We felt that the change might do me good, that I might feel better.  So we moved up, and I didn't feel any better and it didn't do me any good.  We split up eventually, got divorced.

By this time I had no contact with the Church at all, and that went on for years and years and years, and I was quite happy for it to be that way.  I thought at that time that I knew better than I knew before, in spite of things like Joseph Smith.  I dealt with Joseph Smith easily.  You see, I couldn't get over him, I couldn't explain him away at all, but I didn't have to think about him.  [chuckling]

So that's what I did.  Consequently I have walked in the wilderness.  I was rebaptised on a Friday.  The court was on a Wednesday, I got baptised on Friday, they had me speak in sacrament service on a Sunday, and I remember saying something I felt very, very intensely, that if you walk away from this church, you walk out into the darkest night that a man can know.  And that is true.  That's been my experience.  I walked in that darkness and walked away from the light, and I never want to be there again, never.

So I feel very intensely about activation and reactivation and home teaching and all the ministerial work that is necessary to hold people.

J:   Some of which I take it you didn't get at this time.

B:   No, but personally I was grateful for that.

J:   You didn't want it.

B:   That's right, but that's nothing to do with it.

J;   Now help me a bit with the sequence.  You were elders quorum president in Ipswich, and then you said you moved back to Yorkshire.  Was this period of declining activity taking place while you were elders quorum president?

B:   Yes, it was.  That's right.

J:   So after you'd decided to fight the good fight and you put in an effort and things had started coming around, then it started going downhill.

B:   Well, I did.  Now I can't remember the time that elapsed between that dream and my going inactive.  I just know that I was that unhappy at one time that it was time for me to go to elders quorum meeting, which was down in Brentford, and my good friend, who was also my counsellor, Paul Eggleston, came for me and I locked myself in the bathroom and wouldn't talk to him.  So he went without me.  I must have been crazy or something close to it.

Soon after that I was released.  That helped me a little.  Mind you that looking at it from this side now, if it was my responsibility – and I'm not saying this as a criticism at all, because I think the brethren were right to do what they did—I would not release someone in that situation.  I think there's a lot that could be done.  I know a lot could have been done with me.

J;   Did they just call you in and release you, say thank you and goodbye?

B:   No, they just released me.

J:   They didn't even talk to you at all?

B:   No.

J:   No counselling?

B:   No, I just woke up released one day.  Now I didn't mind that, you understand, because I wanted to be cut off, as it were.  But the point I'm trying to make is that I don't think I would do that now, and I don't think it would happen now anyway.  I think we're all wiser than we used to be, really, to some extent, and I'm grateful for that.  I know quite often in high council meetings they talk about a brother in a PEC (priesthood executive committee] position who's not firing on all cylinders, and the president just won't hear of any talk of release.  We interview him, we work with him, we challenge, and quite often it works.  That way you get your brother back up.  He's obviously the right man for the job, or he wouldn't be there in the first place, nine times out of ten.  We do sometimes make mistakes, but people need the chances.

I remember Adam S. Bennion, when I was a missionary, came over.  He was the first real apostle I'd ever seen.  He was a lovely man, and he came and talked to us about reactivation, about inactive members.  At that time inactivity was a minuscule problem.  There must have been 95 percent activity in this country.  Now it's almost the other way around.  He said, "There's many kinds of ways you can get a man back into activity.  You can bully him back.  You can work him back.  You can love him back.  But you can't forget him back."  And I've never forgotten that, because it's true.

I know people in other wards, and some in this ward, that they miss a Sunday and I go out, and they'll be out for the next Sunday, because some people respond that way.  But I know if nobody goes, then they'll be missing another Sunday.  It's a bit like the squares on a chess board, where if you put a grain of rice on the first square, two on the second, four on the third, and so on, the numbers soon reach astronomical proportions.  It's not just an extra one each time.  Each successive one doubles the total amount, and by the time you've got to three Sundays, you've got an awful big problem getting people out to church.  So if you let one Sunday be the most they ever miss without being bolstered up, you've got a lot better chance to get them back.

J:   Could you tell something about this concert programme that's going currently in this area?

B:   About eighteen months ago we had a missionary couple in the area, Paul and Alice Swenson, quite well-known people.  Alice has sung with the Tabernacle Choir, and if it's electric, Paul can make it work.  You know, he's very good that way, a man of great abilities.  He'd been a photographer.  He's done a lot of photograph work for things like Truth Restored.  He did most of the photography in that as a younger man.  They came on a mission, a retirement mission - a very cultured pair.

(Note added during review, 1989:  An article appeared in the British insert of the Ensign some months ago about the origins of the concert series.  To my mind the impression given in that article is quite misleading.  The Swensons were certainly the prime movers and originators of the series.  One of the problems of history is that often when men cannot discover origins, they will invent them!  RB]

The idea seemed to be raised, as far as I can tell, with President Dixie Leavitt, who is the mission president—who will be released tomorrow, incidentally.  The idea was that perhaps, with all  the talent there was in the mission at that time, they could hold a monthly concert.  They talked it over with the stake.

The upshot of it was that a concept grew out of this that a lot of people will not become involved in missionary work because they're shy, because they feel inadequate, and because they're afraid of being rejected if they invite someone to a church function.  They worry that if they try to have their friends meet the missionaries, the people will say flat, "No," and that seems to close that avenue for good.  Some of those "no's" can be very emphatic.

So the concept grew that if we provided once a month a concert of a sufficiently high calibre, several things could happen.  One is that no one need be afraid to invite their friends here for fear of them seeing something that puts the Church in a bad light, because the quality of the artists that would appear would be guaranteed.  We would set a minimum where below that they wouldn't be invited, but anything above that they would be welcome.  So we know that we can bring our friends here and they will not be embarrassed, and we won't be embarrassed.

The second factor was that that was an easy way to do missionary work, because it accomplished several things.  One, instead of saying to your friend, "Bill, how would you like to have the missionaries come and teach you about the gospel?”  —which is a yes/no question, and either they did or they didn't and that was the end of that—you could say, "Bill, how would you like to come to a concert at church?"  Then they'd either say yes or no.  If they said yes, they came.  In coming, first of all they saw the building.

They saw that we're nothing outrageous, that we're quite normal, and our buildings are happy places to be in, light and airy and bright.  Secondly, they saw, with the people that were there, that Latter-day Saints only really had one head, that we are not strange or easily identifiable, except perhaps by our smartness and general well-groomed appearance.  The third thing was that it may well just be possible that in that kind of ambience, they might just feel the Spirit's influence and be constrained upon to ask someone, "Tell me about your church."

You see, there is no pressure when they come here.  They come to the concert, we have a little bit of refreshment, usually a cold drink and a bun or a biscuit or something afterwards—a cookie,

that is—and then they go home.  Nobody said, "Do you want to read the Book of Mormon?  Do you want discussions?  Do you want the missionaries to come and see you?"  They don't feel any threat.  There's no pressure.

Now if your friend says, "No, I can't come," there's another concert next month.  You can keep asking.  We publish flyers with the details of the programme and the artists, and sooner or later he'll probably come to one and you've got them in.  It also projects an image of the Church as a place where reasonable people meet, behave themselves in a reasonable way, and whose main intention, of course— although it is our underlying philosophy and it runs through the whole thing—is not to get you to the waters of baptism.  That is still, of course, our ultimate goal, but it's done in a more refined way.  It doesn't go for the throat.  It's not the blunt "take it or leave it" approach that often people who are not skilled in communication fall back upon.

I remember one young sister shortly after the branch had been organised here decided that she'd go out and do missionary work.  You know, it was a great feeling to want to go out and do it.  But she didn't know how to do it.  She knocked at a door, a woman came to the door, and she said, "I don't suppose here anyone wants a religious discussion."  Well, no one did.  A different approach would likely have had more success.

We've had some of the most sublime nights that have ever been in this building in this concert series.  It works.  They're not as well supported by the local leadership as they could be.  That's because some of them have prejudices against culture.  That reflects their background.  But there is a growing appreciation amongst the Saints who do come and who do bring friends, because terrific things happen when you expose yourself to culture.

It lifts you.  It's got to, if you give it enough time.  It broadens your outlook.  It tends to make you less frivolous in your approach to life.  It gives you an appreciation of the deep drama, the human drama, which is involved in day-to-day living.  It opens up areas of expression which have been denied before.  It lets you see inside great minds.  It helps excite great feelings.  All these things are possible if you give it a chance.  It's marvellously uplifting.  It's building.  It's cultural.  It's part of our pursuit of excellence, and it's working well.

Just as one reflection on that, I'm part of this concert committee.  We have an opening prayer, closing prayer, and we have a spoken word in it also, and they've never let me do the spoken word.  I didn't ask them why, and they didn't tell me.

When I was a young ‘un at school, I'd a beautiful boy soprano voice, and I used to do the solos at school, because my voice was that nice.  It was never trained.  I'm what they call an intuitive singer.  The school was then to take part in a concert at the town hall, and this was very exciting, because I was to sing solo in front of the 1500 people you could get into the town hall.  I was very excited.  I'd always wanted to be a little bit noteworthy, and this seemed like a good chance.  Okay, so I wasn't going to be a concert pianist, but maybe I could be a great singer.  But at the last moment they didn't let me do it, because my clothes were too shabby.  That was painful.

At the last concert committee meeting we had, as the other two brethren were talking about who should do the spoken word, I said, "You know, I'd like to do that."  And they said, "Your attire isn't right."  So I told them that story and I said, "I never ever thought I'd hear that here."  But I'm going to go around the second-hand shops and get myself a jacket, and then maybe they'll let me do it.  [laughing]

[Note added during review, 1989:  Eventually about May/June 1988 I wore them down and they agreed to let me do the spoken word.  I promised to dress as smart as I could.  I wore my best suit and a bow tie so as to maintain the image that we knew what we were doing.  Then one of the brethren brought me one of his white jackets to wear on the evening.  I would have thought it could have been brought sooner!  However, the spoken word on that night was right up to standard.  Mind you, I haven't been invited back to do it again.  RB]

But the concerts really are terrific.  Last year we had a local company called the Savoyards, who do Gilbert and Sullivan and do it very well.  They are really semi-professional.  They have a little orchestra that conies as well, we pay them, and we fill the place.  They did Mikado.  This year they're doing Patience.  We're inviting them back.  I've never seen an audience in this church at any function so transfixed as they were with that Mikado.  With a few props and an awful lot of presence they took us to Japan.  My wife, who's been a member of the Church something like seventeen or eighteen years, said that was the only time that she's ever forgotten that she was in church.  They were marvellous.

So we ought to keep on that and keep having that kind of quality for that kind of purpose.  We know of one brother in Halifax who had the missionaries for three or four months and wasn't getting anywhere with them.  Or they weren't getting anywhere with him.  He couldn't quite make the decision.  He hadn't felt the Spirit.  His testimony hadn't grown to a sufficient strength so he could trust it.  He came to the concert series, and he came again, and he came again.  He looked at it and he said, "This is right.  I want to be baptised."  He started bringing his wife, from whom he was separated, and now it looks like they're getting back together and she's being taught the gospel.

So good things are coming of it.  I think it's really part of some- thing we were taught a long time ago, which is that "Zion must rise and put on her beautiful garments."  I think it's very easy for us to show an ugly side to the world.  We can be harsh, we can be rasping, and we can be demanding.  We don't always help ourselves.  I mean, we can go out after a dance at midnight here and we can bang all the car doors we want and blow the horns as we drive away and disturb the neighbours, and that doesn't do the Church any good, and it's something that's not easy to forget.  So our responsibility, I think, is more and more to have things like the concert series, to become more beautiful and desirable, so that people look at us as Latter-day Saints and say, "We want what they've got."  I think that's part of the programme we must pursue.

J:   Can you give some examples of other things you've had on the programme?

B:   The kind of things?

J:   Yes.

B:   The first one was Edna Hamilton, who's an associate organist at the (Salt Lake] Tabernacle, and she was very good and complimented the organ.  That was very enjoyable, because she was very American, and I'll explain that.  British musicians take themselves very seriously.  They have a distance from the people whom they entertain, and they're very much aware that they are the mæstros, a bit like the Italians, and treat the audience with disdain.  But always we've found, whenever we've had American artists, that they've always warmed to the people and they've taken the people into their confidence, as it were.  During the programme they've explained little bits and given little personal details, so that by the end of the evening you've not only heard beautiful music, but you've also got to know the artist.  You feel some kind of connection, some kind of kinship.  And that has been good.

I think one of the best nights we had, we had four young people that were in their final year at the Northern College of Music.  Two played the piano, they all sang, one of them played the viola and one of them played the flute.  They put on such a mixed programme.  You can imagine all the possibilities, having them in twos and threes and fours.  It was absolutely marvellous, and they were so young, two young men and two young girls, so vital, that the place was just a-thrill.  You know, the air was electric.  It was marvellous.  Every time they did something, it was better than that which they had just done, and it sort of built up right to the end.  It was beautiful.

An excellent evening was we had Robert Bailey.  Do you know Robert Bailey?

J:   No.

B:   He's the Hollywood pianist.  He was thirty-three years in the film and TV industry.  He's a Latter-day Saint.  We had him only last month, and he was just so brilliant.  He's finishing up a mission, a full-time mission, a retirement mission.  I think it's his third mission all together.  He's good, he's brilliant, he's witty, he's amusing, and he's also got the spiritual message there.  It was marvellous.

That was good, because we had the Lord Mayor here for that.  Well, he's not the Lord mayor.  I keep telling people that.  He's just the mayor.  We don't have a Lord Mayor in Huddersfield.  He was here with his wife, and he was very impressed.  In fact, in May we had had the BYU concert band here.  We should have had them last year, but because of the Libyan problem it was cancelled to this year.  We had the mayor to that, and he enjoyed that.  He's enjoying his association with the Church.  He's invited the stake president and his wife out for dinner, we hope that they're going to go, and we're going to invite him back for some other things.  We need to show that we are a reasonable, respectable people.

J:   You hope the stake president and his wife will go?

B:   Oh, they will.  They've said they will.

We've also had the Bradford youth band, marvellous, about forty young people, aged from about six to fourteen.  They wear a uniform and they play music like you've never heard it played before by young people.  It's beautiful.  We're having them back at the back end of this year. 

We had a young man whose father is the vicar of Birkby, a South African, Johannson.  Neil McEwen was in a restaurant, and this kid was playing the piano there.  He's a smart, good-looking young man who plays a lot of Scott Joplin and swing and mood music, the interpretative version of the standards.  So he invited him along to a concert.  He'd never done a concert before, but he did quite well.  He lacked a little bit of sparkle and brilliance, but a lot of that of course was nerve.  But he was very good.

Everything that we've had has been good.  We've had choirs.  Our own stake has a choir, which does a Christmas thing every year.  Last year we did "Christmas Around the Earth" as part of the

series.  I sang the cowboy song "A Cowboy's Carol."  It's real beautiful.  We've some terrific voices.  We've got a great - you call them chorister, but we call them a conductor, Mary Coles can just work magic with a choir.  She could get four pigs up and after half an hour you'd think it was a quartet from the opera.

She's very good.  And we maintain that quality, because that's the important thing, and we, encourage people to bring their friends to these concerts.  It's a lovely programme.

J:   There's financial backing for this, I suppose.

B:   Yes, from the stake missionary fund.  We don't always pay the artists.  We don't pay them a fee, usually, but if they've come a long way, we pay them expenses, and of course we buy flowers for the ladies and have those presented.  Then we underwrite the refreshments, which are simple but good.  The stake missionary fund underwrites all of that.

We had the idea of having sponsors for it, but we kicked that out, because we didn't really think it was quite right to have people's names on the programme.  We thought that was a bit too much of a worldly idea.  Then we got the idea of the bishops in each ward asking people if they would make a modest contribution, depending on how rich or poor you are, significant in some cases.  And half did and half didn't.

All in all, it holds its own fairly well, but when we have the Savoyards in, we also make a charge for the tickets, so hopefully that boosts it.

Now the last concert we had at Cleckheaton Town Hall, the BYU concert band, all the money we made from that we donated to a local charity, which was trying to raise funds for a body scan that would cost a half a million pounds.  All together these two wards here had their fast day and raised £400 between them, and we made £700 from the concert, so we gave them £1100 and we got a gold award for that and had our pictures in the paper.

That was good, and I think there's a definite emphasis on reaching out into the community and showing that we're not just an introverted church who care only for our own, but that we are interested also in being part of our community.  The accusation has been levelled against us that we are introverted.  It's in most cases justified, because we have tended to be that way.  We don't have the same standing in the community as the Church does in the well-developed areas of the United States, where it's grown to prominence and a lot of prominent people are members of the Church.  We don't have that here.  Prominent people who are members of the Church here are odd.  They're the exceptions.  They're wonders, rather than common or standard.

[Note added during review, 1989:  As of July 1989 the concert series seems to have fizzled out.  Lack of staying power on the part of the organisers would be my guess as to the reason.  As for the future of it, it don't look good!  RB]

One of the major influences in my early life in the Church, when I joined as a young man just before my sixteenth birthday, was a brother who lived at Halifax.  His name was Herbert Walker.  Herbert had been a member of the Church an awful long time, and in fact in years past I believe it's true to say that he'd been district president, one of the local leaders.  He had a rare talent, did Herbert, and that was connected with young people.  Herbert Walker could get any young person to do anything for him, anything at all.  It was an amazing gift.  We need him now to work in our youth programme.  He'd be marvellous.  Sadly he died about ten or fifteen years ago now.  His widow still comes to church, and his daughter Mary.  They're still a major force in the Church.

But Herbert was a wonderful roan, and to a young man just coming into the Church, Herbert was an example of what you could become.  He was not afraid to tell you what he thought you ought to be doing, but he had such a way of telling you that that you were never offended by it.  You were always willing to co-operate with him, because he had that spirit about him.  There was just something that was completely lovely about him.

I've thought for years what we need in this stake is a Herbert Walker Cup to be presented annually to the person who has made a significant contribution to the youth programme.  And if no one has made a contribution which can be called significant, then the cup's not awarded that year.  I don't think it should just go to the guy with the most points, because he was outstanding.

He used to run dances.  I think he was the first one in this area to run dances.  He used to hire a hall in Halifax, a public room, and get a gramophone up there, which I think they used to call phonograms, a record player.  He used to just open it up, and all the members used to go, the young folks, but anybody could go.  People could just wander in off the street.

The most common kind of dancing was waltzing, where you held your partner correctly, you held hands and then one hand around the shoulder or the back, and you moved around like that properly.  But the fashion had just grown up called "bunny hugging," which looked like you were about to grapple.  As the record was playing, Herbert used to walk in and amongst, and if he found any couples bunny hugging, he used to separate them, and they used to stay separated.  He'd got a certain charm that's indefinable, a real quality, and he was a very interesting man.  He understood the young people.  He had a rare insight into young people's needs and how they would respond.

He would set up rambles, and we used to go rambling all over, but we'd follow him forever, just follow him.  As we walked by things, he knew everything.  He would tell all kinds of interesting things about the plants in the hedgerow, the kinds of buildings, why this wall was built like that.  You know, he was just full of it.

I remember one time he took all the young men in the district, as it then was, on a day trip out to York.  He took us around York, to the museums there, and he just made history live for us and we were glad to be there.  He was a remarkable man.

It's sad that Herbert Walker died when he did.  Herbert died just before this area was turned into a stake.  He was the natural stake president, was Herbert.  But there was that about him, that although he would have had an opportunity to be stake president, he turned down the possibility long before it was offered. 

The district president at that time was Lyle T. Cooper, just before it went into stakehood, and the mission was looking at areas and looking at people.  They were making a survey so they could see the possibility for growth and development of the Church in the future and the possibility of setting up an entirely local leadership, seeing who was about.  Of course Herbert sprang to the top of the list, without any effort, even though there were some other remarkable men.  But Herbert was just that bit exalted above them.  He sought occasion to talk to President Cooper, and he said to him, "You know, I can see what's going to happen here, but when you think about local leadership, I don't want you to think about me.  I'm getting old and tired, and there are other young men coming up who would do the job much better and be able to give it the time and the energy that it deserves."

So he sort of cancelled himself out there.  He was a great man, and it wasn't too long after that that he died.  I wasn't in this area at that time, but they say that that was the biggest funeral that this area had ever seen.  They buried out at the Anglican church near where he'd been born, in the graveyard there, and you just couldn't get by for cars, just one after another.  He wrote his own funeral sermon, which was to be read out, and it was beautiful.  I read a copy of it a little while ago.  He paid tribute to the women in his life—his mother, his wife, and his daughters.  He was a marvellous man.

We could do with a few Herbert Walkers now.  He was just a man of special talent, and although it's a selfish thing to say, I'm glad I got him, because he did have an influence on me.  And I needed a lot of influence on me.  I needed an awful lot.  I've had a lot, because I was a long time in the making, and there are still men today who influence me, men that are great men.  The stake president's one.  Of course he's a good roan, and he's very gentle and he's very patient.  So I get plenty of opportunity to admire the qualities in him that I need so much in my own life.  I'm grateful for that.

J:   I'm wondering.  Brother Bray, if you could give us your perspective on the Huddersfield Branch as it's changed through the years.  You've had a chance to see it at different points in time and probably to have a view of it as it's existed through time and changed and progressed.

B:   I think in the Rosemary Lane end—which is the end I came in at, at its beginning and its end—there were three distinct phases there, one of which I was not a witness to.

Initially the feeling was that it was good.  It was family, and we hated to say good-bye to each other when we'd been to church.  It didn't matter what the meeting had been, we could always be found there stood around talking.  Sometimes we'd just gather around the piano or the little pedal organ and sing hymns for hours at the end of the meetings.  It was just so special.  It was just the one place in the world you wanted to be.

I think that the significant thing there was that, with one exception—and that's Kath Crowther, who was born in the Church—all of us were not only converts, but converts of just a few months standing, initially, maybe a year or so as it went on.  But there was something there that seemed to come without any effort, an honest appreciation of each other, however we were, and a love which seemed to be just natural.  There seemed to be no effort involved.  It just seemed to be the thing to do.  You know, you paid a tenth of your income and you loved your brothers and sisters.  It was just as simple and basic as that.  It seemed to be expected, and it was never a difficulty.

And there seemed to be a foundation—small, but strong.  Many of those members are still in the Church.  Ruth Brook, for instance, is still here.  Although her husband didn't join until many years afterwards, she's still here and strong and she's brought her children up in the Church.  Kath Crowther of course has been a mainstay of the Church for a long time.  There were also at that time Gladys Garside, Dorothy Reeder, and Kaye Bruce.  They're no longer active in the Church and haven't been for many years.

I went into the army when I was seventeen, and my friend, who was Kath Crowther's brother, Peter Yull, went into the Fleet Air Arm, which was the navy air force, to do his military training, and Walter Yull, Kath's father, became inactive.  So really there were no men left, just the missionaries.  Many, many a time on a Sunday, if the missionaries had an assignment in another branch somewhere, it'd just be sisters gathered in that place to hold a sacrament meeting.  Of course that meant they could not have the sacrament, but they would have the opening prayers, they'd have the hymns.  I'm talking about four or five sisters.  They'd just have the talks, and then Sunday School, but again no sacrament—because we used to have sacrament in Sunday School then—and the lesson period, the closing prayer, and go home.

The feeling was that they should close the branch down, but the sisters insisted, "No, don't close it down.  It's been too long coming.  Keep it open."  So they arranged that each week there would always be a pair of missionaries there that they might preside and that they might also have the sacrament.

They limped along like that for several years, due entirely to the persistence of the sisters, and they bore the whole of the thing on their backs.  It's due to their strength that the Church grew from what it was then to today's situation and that they didn't have to make another beginning somewhere.

After that, they got a few new members in, you see, and Dennis Livesey made an awful lot of difference to it, as did his wife, Helen.  She was brilliant, and they had two little girls.  Then one or two other people came.  There was Arthur Leonard, who's still with us, a high priest, and Geoff Cogan, who was the first bishop of Huddersfield but now sadly is inactive.

With that kind of growth in the Church, they felt justified in moving to bigger premises and they bought 78 New North Road.  By the time they got 78 New North Road going, it was time for the big swell in membership in this country.  This had been prophesied by President [David 0] McKay, who called it a "New Era," and this was the result of it.  A lot of membership came in at that time, with terrific leadership ability.  The majority of them are still here and they're still the leaders, which is one of the problems, of course.  We could do with some new leaders and let the old men rest.

But at that time, that seemed to consolidate the Church's position.  It gave a lot more opportunity for expansion of the programme.  It gave a lot more opportunity for fellowship within the Church and within the branches.  Instead of being, as it were, "district looking," where we had to look to the district to get any size of a crowd together, they could now get the same kind of thing in their own branches.  And they grew up loving each other, and they grew up with such a terrific feeling, and what one did, they all did.  It was marvellous.  It was in a way, I imagine, something like being in a wagon train, because you're all going the same way and the welfare of one was the welfare of all.  It's got to be that way when you're in dire circumstances.

That seemed to be the kind of spirit that dwelt within the brothers and sisters at that time.  It was a terribly exciting time.  When you went to church, you could feel it happening.  Something was happening.  You looked out, and there they all were.  You knew them all by name, you knew their kids' names, you knew their birthdays, and you just wanted to be with them all the time.  They played together, they worked together.

One of the most terrific things that happened at this time was Geoff Cogan, who I recently mentioned and who was the first bishop here in the Huddersfield Ward, had been an engineer all his life.

For some reason or another, I don't know what, he left engineering and he got a job as a Betterware salesman.  The equivalent in America used to be the Fuller Brush man.  I don't know if you still have those.  I haven't heard them mentioned for a long time.  He'd go out selling brushes door to door, and he discovered that not only did he have to work less hours, but that his standard of living shot up by something like 600 or 700 percent, which is an inordinate amount.

So he decided what he would do was he would pull some of the other brethren in the quorum in after him.  So one by one, he got the brethren in the branch selling Betterware.  There was a time in this area that if you wanted to buy a brush, you bought it from a Mormon, because they had the market.  Geoff eventually became the  area manager and then was able to get even more Latter-day Saints involved.

From that, men left jobs they'd done all their lives—jobs in the mill, jobs in engineering, labouring jobs, jobs with no hope, no prospects, no future, jobs in industries that were defunct, or that were becoming defunct, which just meant that the job would no longer be there one day and the roan would be left floundering.  Geoff got them selling, and I really believe there is no finer foundation course for being a salesman than knocking on doors and selling brushes from a suitcase.  Nowadays you show them a brush in a catalogue and call back three days later with the brush, but then you had to lug the whole lot around with you, and it was character building.  It was amazing.

So he got these brethren into selling, and they became successful.  The great thing they learned was that the mill wasn't all they need do.  They needn't spend their lives down the coal mine.  They needn't spend their lives shovelling lumps of sand from one place to another.  They could go to work dressed up, they could start later, they could finish earlier, and they could make more money.  They could be respectable.

So they undertook seriously to improve the employment status of the members, and they did it.  From such small beginnings, and from that one man, Geoff Cogan, seeing a vision of what was possible and determining that other people should enjoy the benefits he'd enjoyed, the Church now in this area is almost predominantly salesmen.

But not only that.  Another major influence in the life of the Church here was Neil McEwen.  Neil McEwen finished his mission, went back to Nottingham, and got a job selling woodworking machinery for Multico, which is a large national company that makes these things.  Huddersfield was part of his area, and he used to come up here with a pickup with a couple of machines in the back and show them to builders and take orders for them.  He showed one to a builder called Jack Brook, who still builds in Huddersfield.  He was impressed with what he saw in Neil, and he asked if there was any money in this machinery.  Neil said, "Yes, there is."  So Jack said to him, "I've got a proposition for you.  I'll provide the financial backing and the premises, I'll buy the machinery, and you sell it."

So they started a company known as Central Woodworking Machinery Company.  Neil McEwen was the sales director.  Jack Brook was a sleeping partner, and they put another man in as company secretary.

So what did Neil do?  He got these Mormons, who'd been selling on the doors, and he got them selling this machinery.  They had motorcars now, because they gave them cars and they sent them out.  I could not begin to count all the brethren that he employed selling woodworking machinery for Central Woodworking Machinery Company.  Neil finally fell out with Central over the sort of policy they'd got, and he left them, and he became the English manager for Skil, the American firm, selling tools.  Then he fell out with them because of some of their ethical concerns.  So he went into a company for himself, and he keeps going into business for himself and doing well.

The men that he put into Central stayed there.  Gordon Williams was a policeman and he got him in, made him a salesman, and before very long Gordon became the sales director.  Bishop (Derrick] Siswick had been a baker.  He went on to Betterware, and from Betterware he went to Central.

This was repeated all over.  The scope of this is incredible, where Neil just put people in.  As I said, Neil left and started another company and hired some more Mormons.  Eventually Gordon Williams, who was until recently a regional representative, also left.  Bishop Siswick left with him.  They formed Williams & Siswick, a woodworking machinery company.  They hire Mormons.  Neil Rushworth went with them.  He sells woodworking machinery.  Neville Oldham went through there.  He sells woodworking machinery, as does Roger Green, the whole lot of them.

So it used to be that if you wanted to buy a brush, you went to a Mormon.  Now it's the same with woodworking machinery.  And that was good.  That was something solid which the brethren did for them.  And of course you can imagine what it did for the branch.  It brought them even closer together, because they not only worshipped together and played together and went out on outings together, but they now worked together.  Every Monday morning was the big meeting and they used to open the week's work with prayer.  Where can you go and get that kind of thing?  It's amazing.

From New North Road they decided it was time to build a chapel.  This was the exciting time, when the branch was growing, and it needed much more room.  This was the era of the onset of the building programme, which I think had been first of all carried out in New Zealand and the Pacific and had been successful there.  Then they started it up here.

The land on which this building sits, where we are now, belonged to a local mill owner.  It was just a huge piece of land, and it was walled entirely around and it was orchards and it was paved paths and it was loggiaed paths and a huge conservatory.  There was also a beautiful house here, an old Victorian house called "Foxholme," just about through there,  [pointing]  You can't see it now, but that's the space where it was.  They met in there for several years while they dug the ground and prepared to build.  I think it took about three or four years to build this place.  It was quite a task, because of its size.

While we were building here, again they grew, because they were working together.  They worked during the day together, they worked during the evenings together, and all day Saturday they worked together.  Not only that, but if one of the other buildings – they built Dewsbury and East Leeds, Vesper Road, at the same time – was falling behind schedule, we received a diktat that we should get ourselves over there on Saturday.  So we'd all pile over there and we'd help them catch up.  It was marvellous.  We couldn't get enough of it.  It was really something.  That was the spirit of the Church, and I feel that's the spirit we should strive for, where we just can't wait to be with another Latter-day Saint.  I think it's beautiful.

"Foxholme" was the scene of much that was good—a nice little house, with an L-shaped room to meet in, which meant we had two congregations facing the middle, but it was ever so good.

There were a lot of characters that joined the Church in those days, people like Adrian Parkinson, who emigrated with his family to New Zealand, who was a brilliant pianist and had an absolute marvellous wit.  He was a very intelligent man, but he had the wit to go with it, and he kept us amused for ages.  At that time the Fords, Clifford and Jean, joined the Church.  Clifford had been a professional entertainer and Jean had produced shows in the RAF during the wartime.  She was in the forces when they met.  They put shows on, and they raised the level of the little things we used to put on for socials, brought them up to amazing standards, professional standards.

At that time of course the Manchester Stake was formed, which took in the old Leeds District.  Dennis Livesey was called to be a counsellor.  I can't remember the name of the first president.  It was an American brother.

J:   Robert Larsen, I think.

B:   Yes, that's right.  I wasn't in this area at that time.  I was moving up and down.  Later on of course William Bates was called as president of Manchester Stake, and when they formed the Leeds Stake, Dennis was the first president here.  He was a man who carried his authority well, and it was a pleasure to be with him and a pleasure to see him work, because he really knew what it was about, and it was lovely.

Then they called these men as bishops, and all of a sudden the chap that you'd known for years suddenly was something quite different.  Little Bill Crisp, who was only about that big, about 5'4" or so, bless him, who had always been a wit, all of a sudden wasn't "Bill the Wit" anymore, he was "Bill the bishop."

The feel was so much different.  There was a buzz in the air.  You see, it's easy to be in a branch in a district in a mission.  It's easy because the demands made upon you are much less than those which are required by stakehood and wardhood.  They demand much less, and they're also more distant.  Communication undergoes dilution the further down the line it gets, and so by the time things got to the branches, there really wasn't a great deal to do.  We got about 10 percent of the original instruction.  But when you become a stake, you get it undiluted and it sets things right.

The organisation that they set up was so marvellous.  We'd never seen anything like it before.  We'd never even dreamed about it.  We'd heard about these stakes in Zion, but it meant nothing.  We still didn't know what they were.  You'd talk about "stake" and you'd still see the tabernacle in the wilderness and it strengthens and holds the thing up.  That was our idea of a stake.  But now we know different.

There was such a general excitement that all these things were happening, and the country was full of Apostles and Seventies and Assistants to the Twelve, these great men that we'd only heard about.  At district conference we'd get Mark E. Peterson and Alma Sonne and Alvin Dyer.  And all these people suddenly became faces and we discovered they were real.  So the distance between us and church headquarters just seemed to shrink, and here they were, coming through the place.

I know that when they had "Foxholme," President Mark E Peterson came through, and they'd had a full-size snooker table given, and it was the pride and joy.  They'd got it all built up, and I think they'd had it up three days and not a game had been played, but we were looking forward in eager anticipation to the time it would take place.  President Peterson paused by the door and said, "Get rid of that."  So they took the big axe and they broke it up.  There was no arguing.

But everything was different.  Everything was new.  We knew that demands were going to be made on us, and we grew to try and meet these demands.  There was an excitement.  The whole thing was a challenge, and in some respects I miss that sometimes, the buzz, that it's all going to happen.  Sometimes it's a bit quiet buzzing by yourself.  But it was lovely, because it was like . . .  Did you ever see Cinerama?  You sat in the big tent and it starts off and the screen's that big.  The film used to be 16 mm and then it went to the 35 mm size, then it goes to the 70 mm, then all of a sudden the band starts playing and whoosh, it's there.  Cinerama.

Well, stakehood was like that.  All of a sudden, it just went whoosh and the band played and you were right in the middle of it.  "This Is Cinerama."  Those were unforgettable experiences.  It was so enlarging and enriching, all at once.  It was almost too much to take.  You know, some of us almost died, just out of sheer thrill, it was so good.  The demands and the challenges were welcome.  We just couldn't get enough of it.  You know, we loved to be there, and we talked about these new callings and new positions and about the growth that was going to come, and it was quite amazing.

We have some old tapes in the library here, the old conferences, on reel to reel.  We don't hear them a lot now, but sometimes when we're working one place, I put them on and I listen to them.  I hear President [Selvoy J] Boyer, who was mission president and then temple president, the first one we had here, and Brother Peterson and all these.  You listen to them, and they're really telling the brethren what they were going to do, and there's no mistaking it, and it's lovely.  Then little kids stand up and speak, and those little kids are high councilmen and bishops now.  They're asking questions, in a question-and-answer period.  It's amazing.  It's lovely.

It's difficult to look backwards and appreciate what has come out of this, particularly in this area.  You know, this area has produced more stake presidents than any other area in this country.  I'm not quite sure what the count is now, but there was President Roberts, as he used to be, Boris Roberts.  He came from Huddersfield and was president over at Liverpool.  It's now President

[Rodney A] Fullwood over there.  The world is full of bishops from Huddersfield.  We've got one in Reading, Keith Wigglesworth, who came from Leeds.  We've got one in Nottingham now, John Collier, who came from Huddersfield.  There's Mike Reynolds who went down to the Midlands and he's a bishop.  He's from here.  We train them up, we send them out, they call them to positions, and it's marvellous.  It's been a very fertile breeding ground.

I think one of the greatest blessings that we've had here is that our stake now occupies only about half of the old Leeds District, because they keep cutting it down geographically as we grow numerically.  So it's a compact area.  Our stake now is about fifteen miles across, at its widest part, and we have eight units in five buildings, which is pretty nice.  We're looking forward to divide again.  We're looking to divide Huddersfield to make a third unit out of the two, we're looking to divide Wakefield and make two out of one, and we're looking to divide Bradford and make three out of two.  It may not be too long, hopefully, before we divide the stake again.

In those far-off days, in 1950, when I joined the Church, we could not have had that kind of vision.  It just wasn't possible.  What we had then was good.  It was only in later years that we were taught to look ahead, and I think to some extent we must do that now as well.  We must not become complacent if what we've got seems to be satisfactory, but also plan ahead.  The pioneers, when they went across the plains, planted crops and moved on, so that those that followed the next spring would have something to eat.  I think that our role in the Church has to be somewhat like that, so that there is something here that's good and grand, so that when our children grow up they have a church that's solid, that's good, that has the right kind of standards, that doesn't have to fight the old battles that the pioneers fought, because it will have fresh challenges to meet.

I think some of the sadness that I feel is that sometimes we live as if there is no tomorrow, and we forget that our children and our grandchildren are coming behind us.  One of the things that's sad about the single adult programme is that we can't get the co-operation we need from the brethren in the priesthood at all times.  I think it's sad, because someday they're going to end up there, in the single adult programme, and maybe someday I will again.  I'm not going to live forever, and my wife's not, and it would be just nice if when any of us get into that state, we don't have to look around and say, "Well, where's our programme?" because we've neglected it.  I think every part of the church programme we need to consolidate and get it a little bit nearer to the ideal, so that every generation gets a little bit more benefit out of it.

J:   We thank you very much for your contribution.  It's much appreciated.

B:   Thank you.  I've enjoyed it.

APPENDICES

1.      FURTHER COMMENTS ON BRAY FAMILY BACKGROUND

2.       

2.   FURTHER COMMENTS ON EXPERIENCES FOLLOWING HIS BAPTISM

3.   FURTHER COMMENTS ON HIS MISSIONARY EXPERIENCES, 1956-57

4.   PRESIDENT T. BOWRING WOODBURY

5.   COMMENTS ON HIS EMPLOYMENTS

6.   THOUGHTS ON HIS MARRIAGES, AND ON HIS EXCOMMUNICATION AND SUBSEQUENT READMISSION TO MEMBERSHIP IN THE CHURCH

7.      COMMENTS ON HIS ACTIVITIES SINCE JULY 1987

FURTHER COMMENTS ON BRAY FAMILY BACKGROUND

My grandfather used the name "Willis Gray" when acting as a comedian on the music halls, "Willis" being my grandmother's maiden name, and "Gray" being close to "Bray."

My grandmother, Lena Willis Bray, was quite a remarkable woman.  I have only one direct memory of her, and that was on the occasion of my sister Irene (René) and I visiting her when she was in St. Luke's Hospital in Huddersfield sometime during the early 1950s.  She was in a bed the last on the right in a ward of perhaps twenty beds, and her bed was right against the wall.  Although she remained in the bed, I could see that she was quite a small woman and rather rotund.  She had long hair that was good and thick and almost completely gray.  It looked as if it might have been blonde or sandy—I never knew.  She smiled the whole time we were there and seemed such a jolly woman.  By the side of her bed were a pair of those old-fashioned wooden crutches.

We took her some eggs, hen's eggs, and she insisted that we write her name upon the eggs, so that when the nurses cooked them for her—they were obviously going to be boiled—she would be sure to get the very eggs we had taken for her.  It did not strike me at that time, but it struck me when it was too late, that she may just have loved us and so in her simple way demonstrated the value she placed upon our poor offering by ensuring that she ate our eggs.

Thinking about this now produces a profound sadness, for I never saw her again.  I cannot now recall that I thought much about her in the years that followed.  I believe that soon afterwards I went into the forces and she slipped out of my life almost as quietly as she had slipped into it that day in St. Luke's.  I know that she once had a sweet shop on Northgate, Huddersfield, which was the start of Bradford Road.  It was on the edge of the slum area known as Castlegate.

I understand that she used to make a lot of her own sweets.  Most of the time I understand that she was separated from Oliver, my grandfather.

My father once told me that quite early in her married life—I don't know how early, but she had some children, and again I don't know how many, but she was in town (Huddersfield)—she had some kind of an accident that resulted in her breaking her leg.  She could not be persuaded to go to the infirmary, but insisted on being bundled into a horsedrawn cab and taken home to "my babies."  Because of her injury she had to lie on her back on the floor of the cab and her broken leg just dangled out of the door.  She never had any medical attention, being too poor, and so she used crutches until her dying day.

At the time that I lived in Abbey Road, Fartown, when I was about two years old I think, she lived in the same road but in a different house.  My grandfather, from whom she was separated at the time, lived at 3, Turnbridge Road, part of the Castlegate slum area.

More about my father, George Frederick Bray:  On his father Oliver's marriage certificate, one of the witnesses is George Frederick Willis, whom I take to be the brother of Lena.  Father always told me that he was named for George Frederick Handel, but I have my doubts about this now. 

Lena's father was a master bootmaker and Oliver was also a master bootmaker.  I believe there may be some connection between the trades that Oliver and his father-in-law had and the fact that Oliver married his daughter. 

My father was also a master bootmaker, according to my mother, but I rather think that she was dignifying his trade of cobbler or boot repairer.  Of his craft she spoke in glowing terms, so perhaps she is right and I am wrong.  Her memory is faulty, not because she does not remember but because she tends to jump to conclusions.  (For instance, she once came to hear my performance as a country singer at a club in Huddersfield.  I sang "Nobody's Child."  She then told me that my father had written it.  He may have sung it, but he certainly didn't write it.) 

Father did write songs, somewhere between six and seven hundred.  None were ever published, as far as I know, but when I was about fourteen he gave me the manuscripts of two of them.  I was, alas, too young to be trusted with such things.  He also gave me a medal inscribed to him as the "Best Man at PT" [physical training] which he had received during his military service.  I lost both the manuscripts and the medal.

My father remarried Catherine "Kitty" Marshall.  I called her "Aunt Kitty."  She was a very small, dark lady, extremely polite and always good to me.  Each time I saw them, they were living in almost abject poverty, always rented accommodation limited to one room, with the exception of the time they lived in a council house in Wythenshawe, Manchester.

The first time I saw my father after the episodes in my infancy I would be about ten years old and at school in the playground of Spring Grove Elementary School, when a schoolboy said, "There's a man over there wants to see you."  I went to the edge of the wall where a man was sitting.  He smiled a lot and I noticed that he had a finger, or maybe two, missing—just the tips, I think.  I also noticed the heavy nicotine stains.  He asked if I knew who he was and I said no.  "I'm your daddy," he said.  I liked that very much.

He arranged to see me after school and took me down to where he was living on the third floor of a house at the bottom of Spring Street.  There's a bus station sat on top of the place it used to be now.  There I met my sister Noreena Mary Bray for the first time, a rather chubby, golden-haired little girl who smiled most of the time.  They had nothing, but shared it with me.  He seemed eager to please me and I felt just a bit like an important visitor, and I liked that more than a bit.

I was late home and when asked where I had been and after I'd explained that I'd been to my dad's, my mother remarked, "I expect he'll want you to live with him when you leave school!" 

The economic implications of this remark did not strike me at the time.  Incidentally, he never expressed any desire to have me live with him, and I never felt that I wanted to.  He never occurred to me as an avenue of escape from the difficulties of my childhood.

I had an internalised pride, almost a secret joy, at finding my father.  I can't honestly say that it had any profound effect on me, but it made my bosom burn for a bit.  I didn't see him too often.  He never came looking for me, but from time to time I went to see him.

On one of these impulsive visits he was working as a coal-man and had the coal lorry outside the house with most of the furniture, such as it was, on the coal lorry.  He was doing a "moonlight flit.'  I went with him and another friend of his.  They got to an empty cottage and got in by breaking the door down.  As the furniture was being passed through the window, the lady next door, who had gone out during the attempt to enter, arrived back with an elderly gentleman who introduced himself as the owner of the cottage.  There was some discussion between my grandfather and the landlord.  Negotiations were not possible.  My father offered to pay rent, but the man refused all offers and insisted that the wagon be loaded up again and the trespassers leave.  Eventually the landlord had his way and we set off into the night on the coal wagon.  Father dropped me off in town, explaining that he wasn't going back to Spring Street[5].

Some few years later, three or four, I heard that he was at Wythenshawe, Manchester.  I rode over on my bicycle once.  I think, but I'm not sure, that George Frederick Bray II was born there. 

Perhaps a year later Father had moved from the reasonably salubrious environment of Wythenshawe to the decaying suburb of Miles Platting.  I remember my first visit to the house.  No. 2 Thursday Street, one of several small brick-built houses against the railway embankment or bridge, on narrow streets of perhaps a hundred years ago, with history taking its last gasp before dereliction and decay wiped it off the face of the earth and eventually from the memory of man.  The walls of the terraced houses were propped up by wooden supports that criss-crossed the street.

My father had secured one room in No. 2.  The floor sloped at an alarming angle.  The tiny room with sagging window frame held a common bed, on which we all sat, the only other furniture in the room being a wooden table which my father was burning a leg at a time to try and heat the room.  It was a pitiful scene, although I did not think so at the time.  My father often had an air about him of high adventure.  I would be perhaps fourteen or fifteen years at this time.  I must say that as I recall the scene there was no air of dejection.  All seemed bright.  The two children always seemed quite cheerful and bright whenever I saw them.  Aunt Kitty, I learned later, smiled and supported my father because she had to live with him.  I am pretty sure but not definite that she came from an Irish Catholic line and traditionally she was committed to the marriage, however unsatisfactory it was.

It's sad to say, in spite of my father's prodigious talents, none of which ever bore fruit, that he had another darker side.  He was a dreamer whose dreams only crumbled—he was plagued by a surrealism which he did not comprehend.  He considered himself the victim of circumstance, fate, and the malice of others.  The only solace he ever found was in drink, for I believe that he was not capable of human love, as it is commonly understood.  He drank beer to change his perception of the world.  At first he became animated, encouraged, and amusing company.  Later, when either he had drunk more or when the effect was wearing off, he would become fractious, difficult, paranoid, and violent.  Sadly his violence was to the best of my knowledge always directed against the defenceless—most often Aunt Kitty.

I happened to be visiting him in 1966 when he was back in Huddersfield living at 150 Longwood Gate—like most of my father's addresses now flattened—when he was ready to fight the world.  My sister Noreena had visited René for the first time.  I had arranged the visit and Father, returning to his home in his cups, awaited our return.  He was fulminating at the idea that she whom he knew to be his daughter had visited she whom he doubted to be his daughter.  After thirty-two years or so he could still summon sufficient bitterness to make an ugly scene.  For my part he sought to stab me with a knife taken from the table drawer.  I disarmed him and left the house.

I did not see him again for several years, but when Matthew was about eleven, I discovered where he had moved to.  It was a cottage at the back of Castle Hill.  Matt and I were living at 39 Reins Terrace, Honley, Huddersfield at this time and one Sunday I said to Matt, "Let's go and visit your grandfather."  We walked to the house, a journey of about three or four miles, mostly uphill, but a very beautiful sunny day.  Noreena was outside the house in the garden with her daughter Janet.  We exchanged greetings and she said that Dad was in the house.  "I'll go in and tell him you're here," she said.  I stood by the door and eventually heard Dad's voice rather gruffly saying, "Tell him to bugger off!"  The attempt at reconciliation a failure, I stayed and talked to Noreena and Janet for a while and then we walked home again.

The next time I saw Dad was when Noreena telephoned me and said that he wanted to see me.  By now he was living in Lancaster Crescent in Almondbury, on the Fernside housing estate.  I went and he explained that he had asked me to call because some children further along the road were calling Janet names and making her unhappy and he wanted roe to go and beat up the parents.  I explained to him that there were other ways of solving problems and left.

Several years went by and I did not see him again.  From time to time I would see Noreena, or we would speak on the telephone, and she kept me informed about his state of mind and his health.

In 1980, or about this time, I learned that he was living at 5 Hopkinson Road, Sheepridge, Huddersfield.  I'm not sure whether or not Noreena asked me to call.  I cannot remember the details, but I called and Noreena let me in.  I went into the living room, avoiding a pile of blankets in the middle of the room.  A small bed at one side of the room was unmade and had no occupant.  I asked Noreena where Dad was and she indicated that he was under the pile of blankets.  I pulled them back and there he was.  He looked decidedly old, with long gray hair, a full beard, and many other signs of neglect.  I learned that he was drinking a bottle of whiskey a day, or at least half a bottle.  Noreena was devoted to looking after him and was in the practice of keeping Janet away from school to look after her.

I telephoned Dr. John S. Hughes, a consultant psychiatrist for whom I had worked as a nurse and with whom I had a good relationship.  I explained my father's condition.  He told me to take him up to Storthes Hall Hospital and admit him.  After examining my father, Dr. Hughes warned him that if he took another drink he would probably die, due to the advanced stage of injury to his liver, and to my knowledge he never drank again.  Eventually he was rehabilitated and transferred to an old folks' home.  Hartley Grange in Bradley, Huddersfield.  I never saw him looking better or happier.

His wife, Kitty, had died some years earlier, probably about 1970, but I'm not sure.  He once spoke to me about a childhood sweetheart he had had who was called Phyllis.  She lived in Golcar, Huddersfield.  He said that Phyllis had written saying that she wanted to look after him.  I said that sounded like a good idea and my sister Noreena said that Phyllis was a nice lady.

The next thing I heard was that he had married Phyllis and was living in her home at Golcar.  Noreena told me that they were happy and that they would soon go on holiday.  Then Noreena telephoned me at Mirfield, or it could have been Heckmondwike by this time, to say that he was not very well.  I went to see him on the Wednesday of the week following his return from holiday.  He had had a good holiday and when they had got back to Huddersfield he seemed to be ill with a cold, a rather severe cold.  He would be about seventy-two then and he had taken to his bed.  When I saw him on the Wednesday, Phyllis said that he was much better.  He was still in bed and a bit weak, but bright enough.  Talking did not tire him.  When I left I was quite satisfied that his condition was improving and that he would recover.  Two days later he died.

Now it's a funny thing.  My very young memories of my father, and the kind of things my mother and grandma had told me about my dad, never seemed significant.  I mean, they did not colour my perception or appreciation of him.  What I knew of him and what I felt about him were all the results of my later experience with him, from ten years old and afterwards.  I know that it is accurate to say that I never loved him.  It would be difficult for me to say that I respected him.  I did not.  I knew that he was my father and that he'd given me life and that made a relationship inevitable.  That's one  thing I learned from the gospel.  But I believe that all I did for him was done out of a sense of duty, but willingly and cheerfully.  And yet, having said all that, I felt a sense of loss at his passing that was almost unendurable.

The funeral was a miserable affair—a quick, brief, stereotyped ceremony at the crematorium by a vicar that obviously didn't know him and who hadn't bothered to find out much about him. 

Then the coffin went through the curtains into the innards of that place and the tape played the 23rd Psalm and it was home time.  It was like saying good-bye before you had a chance to know him.  But the sense of loss persisted, and it turned into grief as I not only mourned him but felt bereft.

One day I was driving through Halifax and my thoughts were concentrated upon him.  Life was becoming unbearable.  As I drove I prayed aloud, something I often did.  I prayed for solace and comfort in my loss.  My prayer was answered in a miraculous way.  With my eyes open I saw the Saviour, His pierced hands extended, and he spoke to me.  His voice was kind and convincing:  "I have overcome death."

Then I saw a vision of my father.  Gone were the gray hairs, and gone was the seventy-two-year-old man I had recently said farewell to.  He was a youth, handsome, smiling, and with a golden light shining upon him.  The impression came to me immediately that he had accepted the gospel in the eternal worlds.  My grief was banished at that moment and never returned.  I think that this teaches me that all the difficulties of our relationships can be worked through.  I feel good about him now!

2

FURTHER COMMENTS ON EXPERIENCES FOLLOWING HIS BAPTISM

I'd like to add a word of explanation about my life following my joining the Church.  I don't think I covered it adequately in the interview.

There would be some times when I'd be just too lazy to get up and go to church—not many, but I always felt guilty.  In spite of that I loved the gospel and I loved the Church—maybe in part because it filled emotional needs, as some have suggested.  If it did, I see no harm in that.  But my principal reason for being a member was entirely spiritual.  I know that I had a revelatory experience at the top of those steps in Huddersfield.  Anything else I got out of the Church was a bonus, in addition to believing that I was doing what God wanted me to do and had directed me to do.  After that there were not many days when I didn't feel that He was very close to me and that He was just about twenty feet overhead.  That sense of His reality and closeness are what changed my life.

I always felt that any fall from grace was a disaster.  I've since learned that humans do slip from time to time but that repentance is not just for the very wicked.  It fits all cases.  I just wish that I'd learned that sooner.  Sometimes the sinner puts too much distance between himself and God, because he thinks there's too much space there already.  We need to teach this more positively.

However, what I'm trying to say is that I took my religion deep down inside of me.  Home was a very irreligious place.  I never saw a Bible, except the one I had, and I've no idea where that came from.  The missionaries were very good to me and I loved to spend time with them.  They had the Spirit with them and I could feel that.  They were wonderful days.  Even when it was raining, the sun seemed to be shining.  The branch members were filled with love for each other and I remember those days with such a warm, happy glow.  It seemed that all my life experiences before my conversion I related to myself, the egotism of childhood.  But now I related all experience to the framework of the gospel.  It was a wonderful voyage of discovery as spiritual horizons and understanding grew ever wider.  The gospel was all my life.  I think that's why it's hard for me to understand lack of commitment in people.  I do try to be patient with them and make allowances for the human condition, but it's an effort.

3

FURTHER COMMENTS ON HIS MISSIONARY EXPERIENCES, 1956-57

My missionary companion at one stage was Elder Cleveland, an American.  Also staying at the house in Peterborough, 303 Eastfield Road, which was the meetinghouse, were Elder and Sister Douglas Brammer.  He was originally from Sheffield, Yorkshire but had emigrated whilst still quite young, had been a school teacher, and had come on a retirement mission, as one of the earliest "couples."  He was a good man and I met him again some years later on another mission with his second wife.

Elder Cleveland and I helped build the baptismal font at 303.  We also rigged up the microphone to Elder Brammer's radio and broadcast "The Truth about the Utah Mormons"  Elder Brammer nodded sagely as we explained that Mormons no longer practised polygamy, but exploded into scholarly and righteous indignation when we added "except in the temple"!  He wrote President Kerr about the broadcast, but was very understanding when eventually we confessed to the hoax.

I have thought that it might be helpful to include comments based upon my missionary journal, as well as some actual extracts from my journal regarding my experiences in Southampton and other branches.

Sunday, April 15th, 1956 I was present with Elder Kelvin Thomas Waywell, President Thomas E. Shilton, and Elder Boyd Hoggan at the first meeting of the Southampton Branch.  We met at the Temperance Institute and the Garths met with us. 

My mission journal records:

"[Bristol]  Got breakfast ready with Elder Hoggan.  Went to priesthood.  Then by train to S'hampton.  To Temperance Hall.  Got it ready.  Met Elder Waywell.  Had S'School.  I am branch clerk, S'School teacher, priesthood teacher, S'School secretary.  Had good S'School.  Plenty of [the Garths'] children.  A great future.  First meeting of a branch.  History!  Priesthood and Relief.  Sacrament—I spoke first.  Apostasy and restoration.  Saw Barrie [Crossley, from Halifax, then on military service at Netley Hospital[6] near Southampton].  [Also] a lady from Sunderland."

I believe that the brother from Portsmouth who came about every three weeks was called Gates and he was an elder.  Brother Garth was at this time a teacher.

On Sunday, April 22nd, 1956 my journal records that Mr. Bill Pretty came out.

I want to record a special friend that Elder Waywell and I had in Southampton.  We only ever knew him as "Pop."  He owned a small cafe—a rundown, not-too-clean, fly-infested place—but Pop had a heart of pure gold.  He knew that we were ministers and he looked after us.  Neither of us was rich, but Pop just used to charge us 2/6 (12.5p under the present system, about 25 cents US) no matter what we ate.  I'd like to believe that he would receive the reward reserved for those who assist the servants of the Lord.

Sunday, April 29th, 1956 Elder Waywell and I returned to Southampton from Plymouth, where we had had a missionary meeting over the weekend.  We had travelled to Newton Abbot and witnessed the baptism of Jim Turner in a river.  I don't recall which river.  At the baptism a young child fell in and Elder Russell Blair Kinnersley from Salt Lake City jumped in fully clothed to rescue him.  Elder Kinnersley's father owned a "Dairy Queen" and, all being well, there's a free ice cream still waiting for me there!  I was so tired on my return that I fell down the steps of the bus station at Bournemouth, where we caught the connecting bus to Southampton.  Then to the Temperance Institute for services.  We had our first circuit speakers.  They were Harry and Lillian Summersell from Bournemouth Branch.  Harry was the branch president and a very nice roan.  He and Lillian served the Church faithfully and well for many years.

Saturday, May 5th, 1956 I entered into my journal some brief details concerning a family called Beers.  They knew the Garths.  The Beers had a child who became very ill, and eventually medical science stood aside and waited for the inevitable.  The Garths told the Beers about priesthood blessings in such cases and the Beers in their desperation asked for help.  Since Brother Garth was at this time only a teacher he contacted mission headquarters at 149 Nightingale Lane, Balham, London and some elders were sent to visit the family and administer to their dying child.  The outcome was that the child was miraculously healed.  I recorded, "Beers are not interested any more.  The elders healed their child, but they do not seem to recognise the hand or God nor his authority."  The elders had visited them before the branch was formed.

On Sunday, May 6th I had a discussion with one of Sister Mintram's sons.  Derrick, who insisted that he did not believe in God, only in the devil.  I showed him the scripture which stated that the devils believed in God and trembled.  He was very disappointed!  This being fast Sunday I blessed Anthony Mintram, the first child to be blessed in the Southampton Branch.  I also record under this date that Derrick Mintram was about ready to be ordained a deacon.

On May 15th, 1956 we rented a room at 92 McNaughton Road in Southampton.  The landlady was a Mrs. Niele—I'm not sure of the spelling, but that's how I have it.  When the arrangement was made by Elder Waywell, she had to prepare the room and she told us this date that her husband had helped her to do so.  This might not be unusual but for the fact that Mrs. Niele was a widow.  She said that when she was moving the furniture into place a voice had said, "I'll help you," and all the heavy furniture slid with absolute ease into place, just where she wanted it.

On Friday, May 18th, 1956 we rented a stall in Southampton market and displayed tracts on it and spoke to passers by about the gospel.  Brother Garth and Janet came by and he bought us a polyethylene sheet to cover the literature when it rained.  Brother Garth and Janet, who worked together, came by almost every day and sometimes more often.  They were extremely supportive of us in our missionary work.  Brother Garth struggled a little with the Word of Wisdom but started paying his tithing on this date.  We would have been lost without the Garths.

Thursday, May 24th, 1956.  "The police have stopped us holding street meetings in Southampton.  We used to hold them at the cenotaph, and later in Above Bar [name of a street] outside a furniture store.  Apparently there is a bylaw that makes it illegal to strew or cause to be strewn printed matter, or suchlike, on the streets.  The police argument [was] that there was a danger that anyone not wishing to keep the literature we dispensed so liberally could then 'strew' it onto the floor.  No more street meetings!"

Saturday, May 26th found me transferred to Bournemouth.  The next day was the Sunday that Florence [Florrie] Talbot was to first attend church.

On Sunday, May 27th, 1956 district president Thomas E. Shilton and Elder Starley went to Southampton and made it an independent branch.

Thursday, June 14th, Bournemouth.  "In our tracting today we called on an old man who was 83 years old.  He thought that we were the officers who had come to evict him.  With his consent I prayed for him before leaving the house, and during the prayer he broke down and wept.  It was heartrending."

In June Elder Sherman A. Johansen became district president.

August 14th, 1956.  "Elder Neil McEwen, my companion in Bristol, and I travelled to Stroud on circuit.  We went into a sweet shop and the owner, a lady, said, 'You back again?'  I said that we had never been there before in our lives, and she said, 'Isn't it funny how you all look alike?"  We hadn't even introduced ourselves.

4

PRESIDENT T. BOWRING WOODBURY

President Woodbury was a fairly high-profile mission president.  He was not easy to miss and whenever I recall him to my mind's eye, he always has that broad smile that suited him so well.

He counselled Esmé and I during one of the difficult periods of our marriage, when Andrea was only a baby.  We went to see him in London, and his counsel was that we should just let our love for each other flow.  I remember him saying to me that if the time ever came when I could not take my baby, Andy, in my arms, "My, how your arms would ache."

From what I know of his time, I am sure that many of the missionaries were not in harmony with him.  I also recall that he was not too well thought of by some of the local leadership either.  I suppose that this realisation of his appreciation by them caused me, and still does, some real unhappiness.  There is an important principle here.  If we sustain a mission president, then we should do just that.  Talking's no good when it comes to sustaining.  Actions are what count.

Those so-called baseball baptisms, and the baptisms into the Mormon basketball club, are spoken of light-heartedly.  As I have indicated in the taped interview, the thing that was wrong with that programme was not President Woodbury's plan, nor his missionaries' methods.  "There's more than one way to skin a cat" is an old saying that indicates an ancient truth:  There may be more than one way to do something right.  I believe that any way is the "right" way to bring people to a knowledge of the truth.  The baseball-basketball programme was designed to bring the missionaries into contact with a goodly number of non-member youth.  This happened.

What happened next is that once contacted by the missionaries, the young people were then brought into contact with local membership.  This was the later '50s and the Church was expanding.  If we'd stretched ourselves we could have made the most of this heaven-sent opportunity.  It is no good for us to sit back and let the missionaries do all the work.  It is a joint responsibility, and too often the membership fails to take care of the precious souls.  I believe that that's all that was wrong with that programme.

The only time I failed to understand President Woodbury was on the occasion of my wife Esmé visiting him with her boyfriend, a member of the Church who was at that time serving as a branch president.

Esmé and I were still married but not living together.  Esmé reported, and I've only her word for it, that President Woodbury had told her that he "felt impressed that he [the boyfriend] would make her a good husband."  I don't need to point out the problems of that kind of counsel, if the report is correct, but I never felt different about President Woodbury because of it.  I only puzzled over it a bit.

5

COMMENTS ON HIS EMPLOYMENTS

Since I left school I have had a variety of jobs.  My average stay at one job used to be three months, but I've improved on that in recent years.

I think I soon got bored.  When I started work, it was customary to trust young people with very little responsibility, which narrowed the range of activities in the workplace and soon led to boredom, notwithstanding the fact that I have always lived a rich inner life and have probably lived more in my head than I have in the real world.  I used to daydream, but nothing phantastic.  When I joined the Church, I then had the chance to think about the scriptures, which I always took to work with me, usually a pocket-sized Bible.  I would discourse in my head whilst working or whilst walking about. 

The exercise was good and I believe it helped to develop my oratorical skills.  However, I lacked a classical base—that is, my schooling wasn't very good and I didn't know much about the rest of the world.  Now one thing I've learned that is essential if you're going to become effective as a communicator is that you can get people to leap into new concepts, themes, and directions providing that you get them to jump from somewhere that they know.  It's the "Where the heck are we?" problem.

Anyway, I had a succession of jobs and the only ones that I can say that I've really enjoyed are psychiatric nursing, the time I was the squadron chief clerk during my second lot of military service, and the time I spent selling Dolphin showers from door to door.  Some I haven't minded, some I've hated, some I've tolerated, but these three I loved.

I suppose that I was difficult to employ because I always had ideas about how the job should be done.  I never left any job just as I found it.  As soon as I got it, I would ask myself, "Is this the best way to do the job?  The quickest way?  The easiest way?"  Then I'd devise different ways.  I think that you can improve on almost anything if you put your mind to it.  Sometimes the suggestions were welcome and at other times they were not.  Usually the more secure the boss or supervisor was, the better the ideas were received.

6

THOUGHTS ON HIS MARRIAGES, AND ON HIS EXCOMMUNICATION

AND SUBSEQUENT RE-ADMISSION TO MEMBERSHIP IN THE CHURCH

To most people, member and non-member alike, the idea of a Latter-day Saint having several marriages, albeit consecutive, seems strange, anomalous, and to some extent even difficult to reconcile with the principles of the restored gospel, in particular, and with Christian ideals in general.  And the truth of the matter is that I feel just the same about it.  Not that I am embarrassed by it—I have put all that could cause me embarrassment behind me—but somehow it doesn't sit quite right.

It is only possible to reconcile my life with the philosophical principles of the gospel when I remember that life is a journey and not a destination.  In the past I have looked at fellow Saints, secure in their apparently happy marriages and with their families and all aspects of their lives seemingly well-founded, with some feeling not of envy exactly, but with deep longing that has not been free from pain.

At one time, when my second marriage was foundering, I wrote to my bishop at the time.  Bishop William Herbert Crisp, to request that my name be removed from the records of the Church.  The reasons that I gave were that having failed in two marriages, I felt myself to be an embarrassment to the Church—something I have always tried to avoid—and that as a result of the emotional traumas concomitant upon the break-up of my marriage to Esmé, which were profound and protracted, involving several periods of hospitalisation and therapies, I felt incomplete—somehow less than whole—and entirely rejectable.  This experience had also revealed serious personality defects which I have struggled to set right, but was always conscious of the inevitability of failure.

Most importantly I felt that my life-profile could never be made to conform to a Latter-day Saint profile.  It was rather as if I had had my day of judgement, or rather that I was being judged daily.

Through a history of disappointments, heartbreaks, and tears I recognise that I not only feared the eternal judgement of God, having become entirely convinced that I was constitutionally and spiritually inferior, but I was also afraid of the day-to-day judgement of my peers in the Church, since in my heart of hearts I knew that they did not value me as much as I would have liked, and I always felt as if I was either treated as a figure of fun or condescended to.  I used to perform at socials as a comedian, but after a painful period of introspection whenever I was asked to do "something funny," I used to recite tragic poetry.  I used to paint, but changed my subject matter away from idyllic pastoralism towards the unknown, unseen pain of the mind.

I no longer carry those ideas, for I am purged of them.  But the purging has been a very lonely experience.  There is no doubt that because of my experiences, I have an unusual rapport with single adult members.  I have lived their lives, felt their pain, known their frustrations, and above all I have shared the all-enveloping despair of their loneliness.

It is sad that in spite of all that has been written and said about the Single Adult programme, no fundamental progress has been made.  Somehow the Church at large has failed—and I use that word advisedly—to make the programme part of the common fabric of church life.

To my mind—and I admit to having a very special point of view—the programme should have the same weight as the Relief Society or Sunday School programmes.  I know that the machinery exists for the programme to be successful, but until a more emphasised lead comes from the Brethren, the programme will be forgotten and its great aims will be neglected and our forgotten brothers and sisters who would have received its benefits will sicken and die.

I did not intend to deal here with the Single Adult problem, but it is a significant problem and the problem is church wide.

Let me now deal with the way I now feel about my marital record.  As I have stated, I am no longer embarrassed.  Do other brothers and sisters view me in the same light as they did before?  Many of them do.  How do I deal with this?  I just love them and leave them to heaven.

I became inactive in the Church in about 1971 or '11, perhaps a little earlier, as dates and the like are not my strong point.  I was away for about twelve or thirteen years all together, and I have now been back in the Church for six years.  That's almost twenty years, give or take a bit, since I went inactive, and yet there are still people who insist on treating me as the person I was twenty years ago.  I was in the early to middle thirties then.  I'm now in my early to middle fifties.  Since my return I've served as a Gospel Doctrine teacher, seminary teacher.  Gospel Essentials teacher, stake executive secretary, high councillor, bishop's counsellor, and now I'm a high priests group leader.  I'm not perfect, but I'm making the effort.  If I'm given an assignment it's as good as done.  I achieve a minimum of 100 percent home teaching each month, I pay my tithes and offerings, and the extras when they're asked for, and yet I still get criticised for the person I either was, or was perceived as being, at least twenty years ago.

It is important to stress here that this does not get me down, nor does it shake my faith, and neither does it stop me from loving my critics.  Perhaps this is too personal, but it is my experience.  What becomes of others who are treated similarly and yet who cannot make the mental and spiritual and emotional accommodation necessary to reduce it to a manageable proportion? 

Full gospel life is possible after divorce and remarriage—even after four divorces and five marriages!  Full gospel life is possible after excommunication and readmission.  Let me tell you from the bottom of my heart that it is possible to know beyond doubt that God forgives all these excesses, and at the same time it is possible for members of the Church to treat such a history, not with any sense of awe or reverence, as would be entirely appropriate, but with a levity that destroys the sacral nature of a changed life.

Since I came back into the Church, something wonderful has happened to me.  First, I have felt the relief of forgiveness for past sins.  A powerful sense of forgiveness and sanctification overcame me and I have never doubted that Heavenly Father has accepted my sacrifice.  Second, I have rediscovered the power of covenants that are honoured.  Third, I have been blessed to meet an outstanding example of Latter-day Saint womanhood, who saw me and my potential, rather than my failures and shortcomings.  She encourages me to reach for my potential, to stretch myself, and to extend the arenas of my endeavours.  When others say I cannot, it is Norma who tells me that they're wrong and assures me that it is within the realm of possibility for us to achieve it.  She is without doubt the greatest blessing of all.  It is a pity that there isn't a "Norma" for every- one who needs one.

Lest I have painted too negative a picture, let me mention those whose influence and example towards me has been positive and encouraging.  Peter Burnett was the bishop who convened the court that led to my excommunication, the stake president who reconvened the court that readmitted me, and is now the regional representative who still encourages me and expresses his faith in me.  George Michael Jokl, BA was the CES co-ordinator who had faith in me, a newly rebaptised member, and appointed me an early-morning seminary teacher.

Bishop Rodney Crossley was the bishop of Bradford II Ward when I transferred membership to live in Bradford to be near Norma when we were courting.  At first he was extremely nervous of my coming and told Norma that she was bringing him "trouble" by my joining his ward.  Bishop Crossley found me friendly and helped to build me into what I am today by his care and concern, which he did not fail to demonstrate.

Bishop Philip Stocks was bishop of the Dewsbury Ward that I attended when I started attending church again.  He and his family were the very spirit of welcome, fellowship, and encouragement.  I do not believe that I would have failed without their help, for my commitment was good, but they smoothed the difficult path that leads to the road home and they made roe feel good about myself.  Lots of other people were very good to me, and most people were more than welcoming and supportive.  For these I am eternally grateful.

I have also had several opportunities to counsel both brothers and sisters who are walking the same road back that I once trod.  Often they are impatient and I try to help them recover their patience and to see the road back not as an obstacle but as the opportunity given them that they may demonstrate by their walk and conduct that they mean what they say they intend, that their repentance is sincere, and that they are willing to wait upon the Lord until He shall say, "Enough," and welcome them back into the Kingdom.

I believe that we must become more aware of the human condition.  Perhaps in our ministries we often fail to understand how life and its experiences affect people deep down, how their hearts respond to certain situations, and how their minds think and react to their changing circumstances and their experiences. 

Probably each of us has a vision of human happiness, and as a result of this it may be that our lives are spent in searching for the fulfilment of something that may have no more substance than a dream.

One of the prime concerns of the gospel of Jesus Christ is to help men and women make adjustments to their dreams to bring them within the realms of the desirable and the attainable and, whenever possible, to exchange the dream for a true vision of our individual possibilities as they are revealed to us and then to support us in the realisation of that vision, both in and out of the world.  When every brother and sister is so motivated, then I think we shall have built Zion, or at least we will have moved a not insignificant way towards being more Christlike.  And this, I perceive, is what it means to "perfect the Saints."

In fine, I believe that my life is now like Job's, whose latter end was better than his beginning.  He reaped the reward of continued faithfulness, whereas I am reaping the rewards of a return to faithfulness and, like the labourer of the last hour of the day, I have been promised a full reward with those who have laboured all the day long, which reward by the goodness and mercy and grace of God I shall someday enjoy in His eternal Kingdom.

July 6th, 1989

Addendum

The transcript of the 1987 interview does not appear to mention my divorce from Lyn.  Lyn was not a member of the Church.  Her name was Evelyn Greenwood when I met her.  She was divorced.  Her maiden name was Spenceley.  When I was rebaptised—I would add with her full approval—she eventually decided that our lives lay in different directions and she felt that we were unequally yoked.  She wanted a divorce and would not yield to the compromise that I offered her, that I would only go to Sunday meetings and would not go to church any other time unless she felt like coming with me.  I also offered to take her anywhere she wanted to go after church on Sunday.  I told her that if she wanted to go out for a drink that I would take her.  She could not accept this and so she left to stay with her daughter.  I met with her and persuaded her to return to the house and said that I would leave instead of her.  She swore that she loved me and that she always would but said that I would be better off with a "nice Mormon wife."
7

COMMENTS ON HIS ACTIVITIES SINCE JULY 1987

The interview with Richard Jensen was July 1987, so I am writing this two years later.

Probably the most significant event in the intervening period has been my efforts to enter the University of Leeds to read theology and religious studies for a baccalaureate degree.

Other significant events:  In December 1987 I was released as stake executive secretary and from the high council to serve with Bishop John Philip Scott, as his counsellor, in the Huddersfield II Ward.

I served for thirteen months and then was released and called to serve as high priests group leader, which calling I now hold.  I am maintained as stake special adviser, with my wife Norma, to the Single Adult programme.  I worked with Peter Hillary, who was originally intended to be the nominal high councillor for the programme, but Peter was anything but nominal.  He has been released from the high council and is now bishop of the Bradford I Ward.  We have not yet had another high councillor appointed to oversee the programme, but when we do I would hope that he would be but half as committed as Peter and he would do very well!

In the Single Adult programme, the most significant events have been the annual area Single Adult conferences which are hosted by our stake.  The 1989 conference was the fourth successive annual one.  The first three we charge £6 per head for the whole weekend, including food and entertainment.  Accommodation is provided free by local members.  This year, because of escalating prices we increased the all-inclusive cost to £7.50 (about U$11.00).  We are the cheapest in the country and also the best.  We do not set out to give attendees a "good time."  Rather we aim to increase their faith and testimony and to let them develop Christlike qualities in service projects.  All our workshops are spiritual, and the service projects are done for people who cannot do things for themselves or who have special needs.  This year we sent two choirs to old folks' homes.  We also hosted a party for about sixty disabled and underprivileged children.  Hilda Grant from Lichfield is the brains behind the children's party, since she has much experience with the handicapped on account of her daughter Sarah, who is severely handicapped.

This year we enjoyed the special blessing of having Elder Dallin H. Oaks of the Council of the Twelve address the Saturday morning general session.  I had heard that he was visiting the building to interview and wrote him a letter inviting him to address the session if he had a few moments.  A thrill went through the congregation as he entered, and he then spoke for fifteen minutes.  It was both wonderful and memorable.

Our house has been wonderfully cosmopolitan during the last year.  In September 1988 Anna Marie Bajerska brought a Singaporean student to church.  I introduced myself to him.  He is an ex-Hindu, now an Anglican, called Chandra Sekehran-Karrupiah.  He was then thirty years old and had come to England to take a degree in business law at Huddersfield Polytechnic.  He was staying at Anna's father's rooming house, which is where she met him—she gave him the Book of Mormon—but he had to pay £35 a week to stay there and provide himself with his own food.  He expressed a hope that he might find more reasonable accommodation and we decided to "adopt" him and treat him as one of our own sons.  He has settled into the family nicely and we feel very comfortable with him.  He has improved his idea of what Mormons are like and acts to some extent as our apologist to his "born-again" friends.

A couple of doors away we had some mainland Chinese students, also at Polytechnic, one of whom.  Sun Jianjun, struck up a friendship with us.  We got to like this young man, age thirty-seven, very much and when he was granted leave to stay over his time to complete his project, but without corresponding funds, we took him in and "adopted" him.  How this young man grew in our hearts.  We gave him the Book of Mormon in Chinese, and also Joseph Smith's testimony in Chinese.  When he went back home in January 1989, it felt as if part of us was leaving for good.

Our hearts have been deeply saddened by recent events in China.  We had been encouraged by Jian Jun's optimistic reports of the liberalisation of Chinese society, and to see that spirit denied so brutally was to us a personal tragedy, because of our great love for our son.  And I believe that Jianjun learned something during his stay with us.  In our "Visitors' Book" he wrote, "This is my second home.  I spent very nice life here.  I got warm treatment and concern.  I learned the golden heart of kind people.  I felt real feeling.  I will never forget all of you.  I will never forget the life here.  I come from the banks of the Yellow River.  China is thousands of miles far from England.  But kindness and friendship cannot be limited by geographic distance.  Kind people can always understand each other, not only by language but also by heart.  I wish you are always happy!  I wish the world is full of love. 

God bless you.

Your son. 

Sun Jianjun. 

13 January 1989."

I saw him off at the bus station.  He had instructed his "mother," Norma, not to come to the station because he knew how upset she was at his leaving.  He was right.  She cried for days after his departure.

A few days later we got a note from him, included with the door key he had mistakenly taken with him.  He signed off, "I am very sorry that I brought our door key.  I mail it back.  I hope that it will safely go back.  I am leaving but my heart is not leaving.  Do cheer up please, not too sad.  I am never leaving.  I hope you will be happy. 

Yours son.  Jianjun. 

15th January 1989."

On the Thursday of that week we got a very brief phone call from him.  He flew out of England that day, and we dared to entertain the hope that we might visit him someday, or that he might return.  We have received one letter from him since his return.  He speaks of his love for his adopted home, for its greenery, and for its freedoms.  We have not heard since, nor shall we write until we may more accurately calculate the possibility that our coiwrn.ini cat ions to him might be interpreted in any way that would jeopardise his safety.

Our hope is that if further communication is not possible, then each Christmas he will remember his first and maybe only Christmas, when.  he came with us to our daughter Karen's in Telford, Shropshire, where we introduced him to charades and to the Christmas story told by people who felt it in their hearts, and where we also introduced him to the kinds of excesses that make Christmas memorable in other ways.  He is ever in our prayers, and we also pray that somewhere in Inner Mongolia at some times our wonderful Chinese son will pick up his Book of Mormon, read its pages, remember Christmas, ponder the atonement of Christ, and remember us as we remember him.

In 1988 I resumed my education where I left off in 1949.  I have had ambitions of scholarship since I returned to the Church, although I have no formal educational qualifications.  In London last year I met Richard G. Ellsworth, professor of English at BYU, when he at- tended a couple of high priests group meetings at Hyde Park chapel which I taught.  On the journey back to the London Study Abroad centre he asked me what I did for a living.  I told him I was a custodian for O&M [Operations & Maintenance Division of the Church's Physical Facilities Department], whereupon he said that I ought to be a don, since I had a natural gift for teaching.

This got me thinking and then, as events sometimes do, they conspired to cause others to remark that I should seek formal academic qualifications.  Norma supported roe in this.  Discussing the difficulty of returning to do Ordinary and Advanced General Certificates of Education and the time this would involve with a young member of our ward, Carol Iversen, who was taking that very route, she remarked that I could get in as a mature student by the "Mature Route."

I wrote to Leeds University asking them to let me in.  I had an interview in September 1988 with Alistair Mason, BA, BD, the undergraduate admissions tutor.  We talked for about forty-five minutes about the Mormon attitude towards the scriptures.  He said at the conclusion that he was impressed and encouraged, and he asked that I write an essay for him.  He asked me to write concerning covenants in the Old Testament.  I felt like exclaiming, "Anywhere but into the briar patch!"  The essay was received as being to my credit, and I had already started an "Access" course at Huddersfield Technical College two nights a week.

I applied to UCCA for admission, was turned down by Manchester, out of hand, and by Nottingham, who invited me to apply a year later, when I would have had the diploma in social sciences that I was studying for at college.  (I was interviewed at Nottingham by the professor who is setting up a Mormon Studies section.  I intend to write to him to offer my assistance with the project—selection of materials, etc.)

I sat the mature matriculation in May of this year and was successful, I have submitted my four course works to Leeds, all of which attracted high marks—74 percent, 88 percent, 80 percent, and 80 percent—and await a decision from the university on these course works for them to confirm their conditional offer to me for admission in October this year.  Now I'm praying that I will be successful.

I am currently sorting out books from my personal library that I can dispose of to make way for the flood of new materials that I will have to house.  My library boasts about a thousand books, with mountains of papers, notebooks, some old journals, piles of Ensigns, Millennial Stars, Improvement Eras, and even Instructors I have never been known to throw anything away.

The major sections of my library are: biblical—commentaries, critiques, exposes, etc.; Christian history—the early fathers, Augustine, Origen, etc., histories, critiques.  Reformation material (both Catholic and Protestant), Protestant and free church histories, church magazines, etc.; lives of Christ—I have about fifteen different "lives"; LDS Church history; LDS Church doctrine; and I don't know how many Bibles and Books of Mormon I have—just lots, various editions.  I once had an early edition of the Book of Mormon before it was divided into verses, but my then wife, Esmé, gave it to Johnny and Iris Babbage of Bournemouth, and one of them may still have it—they're divorced.

My great enthusiasm is Jerusalem—for what it has been and is and for what has happened there.  I present slide shows to various groups about Jerusalem and never tire of it.  Some day I hope to take a party of Single Adults to Jerusalem for an inspirational visit.

I'm still involved in apologetical works with the Reverend Ray Cross of Trenton, Ontario.  He never tires, but unfortunately his prejudices mar his scholastic detachment.  He's a challenge!

I'm also involved with a young man, John Walsh, a Catholic with a BA in history, who is hoping to pursue a diploma and possibly a master's in theology at Leeds this year.  We meet weekly for about an hour to discuss Peter, succession, apostasy, and restoration,  it is a very friendly discussion that we have.  Originally he wrote to President Lawrence Lee, then president of the England Leeds Mission.  President Lee, for whom I had undertaken some research and also presented with some other materials I had researched, asked me to meet with him.  We expect the dialogue to last for several years.

We are looking forward to visiting Norma's daughter, Pamela, in Seattle, Washington this Christmas.  We've bought the tickets.  I've never been to the USA, although Norma has been a couple of times.  I'm hoping that we can visit Gayle and Ruby Williams at Pingree, Idaho.  We might also visit my children in Wyoming, Andrea and Curtis, Esmé’s children, but I'm not sure how welcome I'd be.

Otherwise life is great.  The gospel is true, the Church is true, and if we could only get the people in something like the same order, we'd be on our way!

The many challenges that face us in the ministry become ever more diverse and compelling.  The challenges become greater and more urgent as the membership absorb more and more of the secular world's declining standards.  Those who lead youth, either as parents or as church leaders, cannot afford to be found wanting nor derelict in their charge.  The concern that inroads are being made into our ranks by ever-relaxing moral standards, by the assault on tradition and custom which once kept the Church strong against these influences, rages yet wilder.  We need men who will not sleep upon the watch tower, but who will toil "upwards through the night" to save what we have and to gain more ground in the fight against the ever-present forces of evil.  I believe that all the persecution that scourged the early church will return, perhaps in more subtle forms, which by their very subtlety will be more insidious and possibly more destructive than swords or guns.  This is a time of high adventure.  I hope to be spared to serve further in establishing the Kingdom and in fulfilling the mission of the Church.

---

[1]   He was a dentist.

[2]   In Blackmoorfoot Road, Crosland Moor.

[3]   Elder Hone from Pleasant Grove. 

[4]   Ringwood Crescent and Ringwood Road.

[5]   He did return to Spring Street. 

[6]   The Royal Victoria Military Hospital where Barrie, a National serviceman,.  Was in the RAMC.