‘Everybody has a story to tell’
Former BBC newsreader Debbie Thrower tells why she swapped the high-powered world of news to become a chaplain for the older generation
As she sat watching a snail crawl across a window in the middle of the afternoon, Debbie Thrower’s mind was thrown back to the life she’d just left. only months beforehand, she’d been in the fast-paced world as a BBC broadcaster who interviewed famous people on radio and TV. Yet here she was, in her new role as the UK’s first Anna Chaplain, chatting over a cuppa with the elderly residents of a sheltered home in Alton, Hampshire. “How my life has changed!” she found herself thinking back then in 2010, when she admits she was still missing the demands of 24-hour news. “Then a voice came into my head…” recalls Debbie. “Are these people less important than the celebrities that you used to interview?” it asked, and Debbie found herself answering, “of course they aren’t. everybody is important, whoever they are. everybody has a story to tell.” Seven years on, Debbie (now 59) believes that more strongly than ever. For after taking that moment to “recalibrate” herself watching the snail, she moved on with the different career task ahead of her – encouraging spiritual growth for people in later life as an Anna Chaplain. The community-based ecumenical chaplaincy service is for older people of strong, little or no faith aimed at affirming those in later life, while not underestimating the difficulties associated with growing older. Although it was a departure from the journalistic career she was destined to follow from being a child, she already had the spiritual credentials. Born in Kenya, she’d returned to the UK by the age of ten to attend a methodist boarding school in Devon, which is where the “foundation stones” of her Christian faith started. After university, she trained as a local newspaper journalist before moving into broadcasting, where she read the national BBC one, Six and nine o’Clock news, presented
Songs of Praise and hosted her own afternoon BBC Radio 2 show, succeeding Gloria Hunniford. Despite “lapsing a bit” in her 20s, Debbie’s faith returned after becoming mum to daughter Bryony and son Sam, who are now in their 20s. While still working full-time in television, she became a licensed lay minister. But it was seeing her own parents, Peter and Pamela, face the challenges of ageing that she had the epiphany moment leading her to the work she does now. Her father became a carer
for her arthritic mother and buckled under the strain. After developing cancer, he died first. Pamela followed him two years later. Both were in their 80s and, for the last two years of their lives, had lived in a care home near Debbie’s Hampshire home. “I could see them becoming more dependent on their faith and, by watching them cope, it dawned on me that it was a spiritually fertile period of our lives. Through suffering and the challenges we overcome, we grow spiritually.” Close to the end of her life, Pamela was reading a prayer book instead of one of her usual novels. “Only the Psalms cut it now,” she told Debbie. The poignancy wasn’t lost on her and she thought of her parents when she saw an advert for a Chaplain to Older People in Alton, ten miles from her home. After thinking it was what her parents could have done with, she decided she’d love to do the job herself. Debbie, who was appointed to the post in January 2010, believes it’s tougher to grow old today than it was for previous generations, as we’re living longer in a more insular age and can be lonelier. Calling on her journalistic skills as well as her Christian faith, she developed the blueprint for the service which is available in parts of the North, Midlands and Wales. In 2014, she was appointed team leader for the Bible Reading Fellowship charity’s The Gift of Years initiative, which includes Anna Chaplaincy. “All of us have a sense of what a hospital or a school chaplain does, but this is very different. It is about being visible in the community,” Debbie explains. Named after Anna, the Biblical widow who appears with Simeon, the chaplaincy takes a unique approach to helping people navigate the choppy waters of
‘Being with older people has made me realise that by the time we get to that stage, our masks have come off’
growing old. Encouraged to tell the stories that have shaped their lives, older people can then explore the past and the future to make sense of their identities and discuss any of life’s big questions that may be troubling them. Relatives and carers can also benefit from the service. “Being with older people has made me realise that by the time we get to that stage, our masks have come off. The communication you have in later stages is more authentic, more honest.” With so much of the Anna Chaplaincy work being about story telling, Debbie’s job – apart from the set change from studio to community – is not entirely dissimilar. But does she miss the glamour of her previous life? “There’s not a lot of glamour!“she laughs. “It’s an industry where you need a lot of stamina. They were 30 great years, but I don’t miss them.” She has no regrets about choosing a journalistic path, though. “No experience is ever wasted. Sometimes it can just be preparing us for the next stage,” she says.