Oldershaw Old Boys Football Club played in Wallasey, Cheshire, UK. You could tell that Wallasey was one of the posher suburbs of Liverpool because the club did not feel the need to insert the word âRugbyâ before âFootballâ. Rugby is, after all, the only game which young Wallasey gentlemen would play.
The club was enjoying considerable success in the season 1930â1, and by 21 March, its record was: Played 24, Won 13, Drawn 7, Lost 4. Contributing to this sterling performance was my father, Frank Henry Herriot, then aged 22, who played in the scrum half position. However, on his copy of the fixture card, the results for the remaining three fixtures of the season remain blank.
The explanation for this omission possibly lies in an event which immediately and completely changed the course of his life. As he strolled along the promenade at New Brighton after the match, he spotted a knot of people down on the beach. Curious as to what they were doing, he went down to find out. They turned out to be members of a fundamentalist Christian sect known popularly as the Plymouth Brethren,1 and they were very persuasively seeking to make converts, so persuasively, indeed, that my father, a polite and obliging young man, got converted.
From then on, his life was dominated by his adherence to the Brethren. Soon after my father joined the local Brethren âassemblyâ [church congregation], the Great Depression ravaged the nationâs economy, and he had to move to London to find a job as an accountant. The Liverpool Brethren found him lodgings with a hospitable Brethren family with eight children, four boys and four girls, in Hackney in the East End of London. The inevitable happened and Frank and Ada fell in love. Of the eight siblings, my mother was one of the six who continued to share their parentsâ religious allegiance; the two oldest brothers rebelled. And so another Brethren family began. The first verse of the hymn which concluded their wedding service ran as follows:
This marriage union now complete,
The twain are one in wedlock sweet;
Oh, guide them, Father, with Thine eye,
Until they reach their home on high.
Soon after my birth, as their first and only child, the Second World War disturbed the fledgling familyâs equilibrium. On being conscripted, my father was faced with a dilemma. He was a conservative, conscientious, and patriotic person who took seriously his obligations as a citizen. Yet at the same time, he was convinced that his allegiance to the Brethren required him to obey the biblical commandment not to kill. His solution was to register as a conscientious objector, but only in so far as active combat was concerned. In its wisdom, the Royal Air Force commissioned him as an accountant officer whose task was to pay the airmen their wages. God and nation were reconciled, but at the cost of paying others to do what he was unwilling to do himself. However, this apparent moral difficulty did not seem to trouble him, perhaps because he could construe conscription as a requirement of the powers that be, whom Scripture enjoined him to obey. Anyway, he accepted and retained his service medals. I have them still.
Such dilemmas were not to recur with any regularity during the rest of my fatherâs life. This was because his time was spent almost entirely in three social situations: his work, his immediate and extended family, and his local Brethren assembly. The latter two were related, in the sense that his family in London consisted of his in-laws, who were nearly all Brethren (and Sisters). His own family remained in Liverpool.
At work, he was the ideal employee for a traditional and hierarchical firm of merchant traders in the City of London: reliable, honest, loyal, and a team player. He remained with the same employer until he retired. The same virtues characterized his life in the Brethren, to the extent that before long he was invited to become one of âthe oversightâ, that is, a small group of male Brethren who direct affairs within each local assembly.
This prominent position resulted in a major sacrifice of his time and effort. First, there was the expected attendance at Monday eveningâs Prayer Meeting, Wednesdayâs âMinistryâ Meeting [teaching from the Bible], the occasional conference with other assemblies on Saturdays, the âBreaking of Breadâ [worship and Holy Communion] on Sunday morning, and the âGospel Meetingâ [preaching for conversions] on Sunday evening. Then there were the meetings of the oversight, together with the leadership responsibilities attached. And finally, there were evangelistic efforts to which my father felt obliged to contribute, remembering perhaps the nature of his own conversion. These included such events as the provision of âthe gospel messageâ and a meal (in that order) at hostels for impoverished men in the East End of London, or the conduct of open-air services in public places.
As a consequence of his demanding role, my father had little time for any sort of social or cultural life. Many cultural forms, such as cinema, theatre, concerts, and dancing, were disapproved of by the Brethren anyway, but he found time to watch the occasional sporting event, while my mother found solace in the Romantic poets. All social activities and nearly all friendships were Brethren-based. Where they were not, the conversion of the âunsavedâ friends was always lurking somewhere on the agenda.
Retirement to the South Coast of England did offer a degree of opportunity for leisure, bowls for my father and painting for my mother. But the local assembly continued to make demands, especially of the former. Brethren worship is conducted not by a minister or priest, but by the men in the congregation, who preach or pray or choose a hymn âas the Spirit leadsâ. There were soon only two or three elderly brethren in the ageing and dwindling congregation. My father touchingly notes in the margin of his Bible next to the book of the prophet Zephaniah, chapter 3, verse 17: âLen Wicks ministered on this verse after the Lordâs Supper [Holy Communion] on 30.6.1991. He was called home [died] the next dayâ. Fatherâs contribution was thus essential for the assembly to continue to function.
While the other brethren spoke spontaneously and without feeling the need for specific preparation, my father lacked the confidence to do so. He also liked structure and predictability, so instead of sharing his impromptu reflections with the congregation, he used notes when speaking which he had previously written in his Bible. Together with the rugby club fixture list and an autographed scorecard of the 1948 Australian cricket tourists, this Bible was one of the very few documents which I inherited from him. His handwritten notes in its margins provide the impetus for the rest of this book.
So, how can one possibly make sense of the story I have just told? My immediate response was to revert to my own formation and experience, and apply a systematic social psychological analysis, resulting in an academic text. But I soon realized that I had already crossed a line in the academic sand. I had already used the first-person singular in telling the above story more frequently than in my entire career in academia! There was now no possibility of following the rules. I would simply have to find a more inclusive and comprehensive way of understanding my fatherâs life and my own upbringing.
I realized that I had been attracted to the story because my attention had been caught by the mementos which I had inherited. One of the first principles of any attempt to understand people is to pay careful attention to what they say and write about themselves. If I was to do justice to an account of the Brethren, I would have to read and listen from their own perspective. However, I did not have to implant myself in a Brethren assembly to do so, like some intrepid twenty-first-century Margaret Mead with her Samoan Islanders. Participant observation, in my case involuntary, had already occurred, and a Brethren upbringing never leaves one.
So, the first perspective to be taken was that of the Brethren themselves. What was their view of the world and of their own place in it? How did they think about the past, the present, and the future? How did they seek to understand the transcendent, and what role did they think God played in history and in daily life? I was soon to appreciate more fully the extraordinary influence of the Bible on the Brethren perspective.
But to limit myself to the Brethrenâs own account would be to imitate them in their utter reliance on the Bible: I would be basing my understanding on a single perspective only. I had only to reflect for a moment to realize the profound effect which my subsequent academic formation as a psychologist has had on my own narrative. A social scientific perspective would impact on my attempts to understand my own upbringing and my fatherâs life whether I wanted it to or not. And I certainly wanted to understand.
I also recognized that a third perspective would affect my narrative as well: my own subsequent religious development and current adherence. As a liberal Methodist, I am, to put it mildly, at a considerable theological distance from the Brethren. However, the journey from there to here and the distance travelled provide another vantage point from which to view them.
As a result of these reflections, I ventured on my exploration of my fatherâs Bible, recognizing that my own experience, social science, and theology were inevitably going to affect my conclusions about what I found there. This recognition resulted in a novel structure for this book, which I will outline below.
So what did his Bible look like, and what clues would it give regarding my fatherâs, and the Brethrenâs, beliefs? It certainly is a handsome thing. It sports a soft leather cover, with a gold title on the spine, overlapping edges, and turned-over corners, made by William Yapp, Brethren publishers (founded 1853). It is, of course, the Authorised (or âKing Jamesâ) Version, strongly favoured by the Brethren over other more recent translations. All 1500 pages are printed on wafer-thin India paper, and have wide margins to facilitate notes. In addition, there are 24 lined blank pages bound into the text at front and back.
This design was entirely suited to the way a brotherâs Bible would be used. It had to be frequently transported from home to assembly and back, so it had to be as small and light as possible. Moreover, when âtaking partâ, a brother had to stand up from his seat, holding his Bible open in one hand so as to be able to refer to the passage being considered, and in my fatherâs case, to his marginal notes. The overlapping edges of the cover protected the pages, although many Brethren used a Bible bag to transport their copy. Others carried it uncovered, believing that this was a âwitness to ...