045 Ronnie Bray Oral History

RONNIE BRAY ORAL HISTORY
© RONNIE BRAY 2003

54,000 words
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: 21st 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.
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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
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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 was in one house, 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
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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?
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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
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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
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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,
1
He was a dentist.
2
In Blackmoorfoot Road, Crosland Moor.
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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
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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
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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
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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 myself as
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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,
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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 elder3 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 later4. 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
3
Elder Hone from Pleasant Grove.
4
Ringwood Crescent and Ringwood Road.
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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 really 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.
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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.
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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 forget 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.
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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
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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
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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
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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 becomes 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]
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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?
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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
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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
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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 sometimes 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.
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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.
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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
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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 roe, 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
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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.
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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So good things are coming of it. I think it's really part of something 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 maestros, 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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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 Street5.
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.
5
He did return to Spring Street.
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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.
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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!
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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.
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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 Hospital6 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.
6
The Royal Victoria Military Hospital where Barrie, a National serviceman,. Was in the RAMC.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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 everyone 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
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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.
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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."
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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
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"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
89
© RONNIE BRAY 2003
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 attended 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
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© RONNIE BRAY 2003
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
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© RONNIE BRAY 2003
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.
92

045 Ronnie Bray Oral History

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045 Ronnie Bray Oral History

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RONNIE BRAY ORAL HISTORY

© RONNIE BRAY 2003

THE CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF LATTER-DAY SAINTS

THE JAMES MOYLE ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM

INTERVIEWEE: RONNIE BRAY

J: As his daily costume?

J: This was still your grandmother’s house?

J: What kind of work was that?

So I left there and I went to be an apprentice in a heavy iron foundry. I went to be an

J: These were all evangelical Anglicans?

J: This was a section of Bristol?

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

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

J: So sometime close to 1970, probably.

J: What kind of help did you get?

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

J: That was when you went to the marriage?

J: From '82 to '87.

J: You wrote a book?

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

J Well, it's a never-ending battle.

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

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

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.

B: Yes, it was. That's right.

B: No, they just released me.

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

B: The kind of things?

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

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

J: Robert Larsen, I think.

B: Thank you. I've enjoyed it.

1. FURTHER COMMENTS ON BRAY FAMILY BACKGROUND

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

7. COMMENTS ON HIS ACTIVITIES SINCE JULY 1987

FURTHER COMMENTS ON EXPERIENCES FOLLOWING HIS BAPTISM

My mission journal records:

In June Elder Sherman A. Johansen became district president.

PRESIDENT T. BOWRING WOODBURY

THOUGHTS ON HIS MARRIAGES, AND ON HIS EXCOMMUNICATION

July 6th, 1989

God bless you.

Yours son. Jianjun.

15th January 1989."

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