Growing up in a sinister doomsdaycult
No pets, no friends, no TV – and a drunken sexual predator as a leader. A new memoir reveals the secrets of a sinister religious sect
‘Eventually, the cult leader was outed as an alcoholic sex-fiend, much given to groping’
In The Days Of Rain Rebecca Stott 4th Estate €16.04 ★★★★★
Peter Cook once invented an exclusive religious sect called the Seductive Brethren. ‘The exact number of the Brethren at any given time is always hard to calculate,’ he said, ‘but it can be safely said that a figure of two would be exact. It is our proud claim that we are far more exclusive than our religious competitors.’
Rebecca Stott, now professor of English literature at the University of East Anglia in eastern England, was born into a not dissimilar sect called the Exclusive Brethren. She describes it as ‘one of the most reclusive and savage Protestant sects in British history’.
Her great-grandmother, Ada-Louise, a member from birth, had been placed in an asylum by her fervent husband because she was an epileptic and ‘too wilful’. She emerged 40 years later talking incessantly, singing hymns at the top of her voice, ready to alert local shopkeepers to the perils of the Whore of Babylon.
Like many sects, the Exclusive Brethren defined itself by what it forbade. Under a new, even more hardline regime in the Sixties, the list grew longer with each passing year: no television, no newspapers, no radio, no cinema, no wristwatches, no meals to be taken in restaurants, trains or canteens, nothing to be eaten or drunk in the company of nonBrethren, no membership of any sort of external organisation. At school, the young Rebecca was banned from learning science, music and philosophy or taking part in gym or sport. Halfway through the Sixties, the new leader issued an edict that pets, too, were now forbidden, and that anyone who already had a pet must either give it away or have it put down.
Those who refused to conform to these rules were to be expelled and prevented from making any sort of contact with their families. They were, in the leader’s stark words, to be cut off ‘as if they were bits of surplus flesh’.
According to the theology of the Exclusive Brethren, the rest of the world was operated by Satan, who controlled everyone who was not a member. Some day soon, an event called the Rapture would dawn. The worthiest members would all be swept up to Heaven, leaving the more slovenly or wicked members, and all the rest of the world, to descend into Hell, where weeping and gnashing of teeth would be considered a luxury. They could look forward to the Lake of Fire and the Bottomless Pit, which entailed falling down a hole for ever and ever. Aged six, Rebecca Stott spent her time listening for the sound of Satan’s hooves on the paving stones. Before he died, her father Roger, who spent his life veering between fanaticism and scepticism, recalled returning from school, aged 10 in the early Fifties, only to find the house deserted. ‘As I looked up at the golden scatter of clouds in the sunset, a horror crept up on me. The Lord had come. The Rapture had happened. I’d been left behind.’
In fact, his family were out shopping but, from then on, Roger Stott took this temporary absence as a warning from God about what would become of him if he continued along his disobedient path.
Philip Larkin famously wrote that ‘they f*** you up, your mum and dad’. To this, Alan Bennett later added the coda: ‘But if you are planning on writing and they haven’t f ***** you up, well, you’ve got nothing to go on, so then they’ve f ***** you up good and proper.’
From this point of view, neither Rebecca Stott nor her father Roger has much to complain about. Both of them, in their turn, wrote about their years within the Exclusive Brethren, and other writers, from Edmund Gosse to Jeanette Winterson, have created autobiographical gems from similar experiences. Roger worked on a semi-fictionalised autobiography for eight years, never quite managing to knock it into shape. Before he died in 2007, he asked his daughter to help him finish it. In The Days Of Rain is thus a sometimes uneasy amalgam of Rebecca’s autobiography and her father’s, a family saga, a history of the Exclusive Brethren with all its multiple schisms and schisms within schisms, stretching way back to the early 19th Century. It is long, and dips to and fro in time. Perhaps a shorter, more forceful narrative would have made it as compelling as its subject matter. On the other hand, it is written in clear, graceful prose, and lacks any trace of self-pity. In these days of religious extremism, it also has an eerie relevance.
The tale of Rebecca’s father is dominant. His own devoutly Exclusive father – a travelling salesman for French soapmakers Roger & Gallet – had relocated the family from Scotland to southern England in 1927. He was such a religious fundamentalist that he once summoned the family and made them watch as he took out a knife and cut the D for Darwin section out of their new Children’s Encyclopaedia.
The young Roger’s first crisis of faith occurred at primary school. Having asked his teacher the exact distance of the children of Israel’s flight from Egypt to the
promised land, he found it baffling that a trip of 105km should have taken a full 40 years. ‘And they were supposed to be travelling day and night. It made no sense. How could people walk that slowly?’ he wondered.
For many years, his faith wavered to and fro, though for most of the time he was careful to keep any doubts under wraps. In the Fifties, the Exclusive Brethren were, if not easy-going, at least more relaxed than they soon became. Roger was even allowed to study A-level English and then to attend Cambridge University.
But in 1959, there was a coup, and the Brethren were taken over by a man called Jim Taylor Jr, whom Rebecca Stott accurately describes as ‘an aberration, a monster’. Within five years the Brethren’s list of prohibited activities had grown five times as long; within 10 years, it had increased by 20 times. By the end of the Sixties, there were bans on, among much else, trade unions, universities, working wives, modern novels and women wearing trousers and sporting short hair. Little Rebecca even had to drink her school milk in an area away from non-Brethren.
Along with a lot of younger members, Roger Stott became a zealot and began assisting in the persecution of the old guard, cross-questioning old codgers in order to force them to confess to having improper thoughts. The same sort of raiding of guilty secrets goes on in the presentday Scientologists. All the while, the inner guard of the Brethren spent their time sifting through the Bible for quotations to support their new disciplinary procedures.
These grim days only came to an end when, in true pantomime fashion, Jim Taylor Jr was outed as an alcoholic sexfiend, much given to groping. More schisms ensued. In the process, Roger lost his faith, and transferred his energy towards amateur dramatics and roulette. In 1981, he was jailed for a year for fiddling the books to finance his gambling addiction. For the rest of his life, he attempted to work out a foolproof system for roulette, a substitute, perhaps, for a religion that once offered him a foolproof system for the world.
Like so much in the world that it affects to despise, the Exclusive Brethren has since undergone a PR rebranding. Under the leadership of Jim Taylor’s nephew, it now calls itself the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church, and its Australianbased website makes it sound as sweet as cherry pie. ‘As a community we’re caring and respectful of others,’ it says. Others beg to differ. In 2009, the Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd called it ‘an extreme cult that breaks up families and is bad for Australia’. He seems to have a point.
Just a thought but, at some time in the future, might public relations come to be regarded as the most sinister cult of the 21st Century?