Reporting for duty: Rebecca Hardy talks to the Swarthmore Lecturer, Thomas Penny

‘I’ve only felt called to spoken ministry maybe a dozen times in forty-plus years of going to Meeting for Worship, so writing more than 20,000 words was quite a challenge.’

How long have you been a Quaker and how were you introduced to the Society?

Most of my life. My Mum’s family were Quakers and, after a spell going to the Church of England Sunday school in the village where we lived, I grew up in Gloucester Meeting. There was a fantastic Children’s Meeting there, run by Gwen Bagwell, a wonderful retired teacher. She told us stories from Quaker history and encouraged us to think about our place in the world.

I went to Leighton Park, the Quaker school in Reading, and became increasingly involved in Young Quaker activities, starting with Junior Young Friends in Warwickshire and continuing through Sibford Summer Gathering and Junior Yearly Meeting. It was that feeling of a wider community and a network of friends across the country that kept me engaged with Quakers. It was the 1980s, long before mobile phones, and we used to write to each other and meet up at Young Friends General Meeting.

The national aspect of Quaker youth activity was much more important to me at that time than going to my Local Meeting, though I did attend Coventry Meeting when I was a student and set up a midweek Meeting for Worship at Warwick University. I met Annie Thornley, who would later become my partner, at a young Friends event and when we had children we wanted to raise them among Quakers because for both of us it had been such an important and positive part of our lives.

Have aspects of your faith changed over the years?

Yes. For me, being open to continuing revelation is a key aspect of Quakerism, and that makes change almost inevitable. We used Quaker Life’s ‘Quaker identity and the heart of our faith’ study guide in our Meeting and that was very important to me. It helped me to a better understanding of the diversity of belief in my Meeting and also liberated me in exploring my own faith.

While I would describe myself as a Christian, I have greatly valued the experience and insights of atheists in my Meeting in a way I might not have done in the past. I suppose you could say I’m much more ‘open to new light, from whatever source it may come’ than I was.

In the book and the lecture I talk about the importance of doubt for me, and Quakerism speaks to my instinctive suspicion of certainty. It allows space for exploration without the threat of any consequences for sometimes not believing. Central to my Christianity – and my Quakerism – is a belief that the power of love can transform the world, and we need to strive to be agents of God’s love in the world. I also feel more clearly about the resurrection than I used to. For me it is something that happens in our hearts every day and is a powerful source of hope, encouragement and renewal.

How was the process of writing this book for the 2021 Swarthmore Lecture (Kinder Ground: Creating space for Truth) for you? Can you talk us through the process? How long did it take to write? Did you find it came together quite easily or did it take a while to take form?

I was first approached about the lecture in autumn 2019, so it was quite a long lead-in. I decided quite early that I wanted to try to be positive and constructive. One could easily spend an hour talking about lies and misinformation without getting to what we might do about it, and I didn’t think that would be helpful. I read a lot and it gradually came together – with notes written on scraps of paper in the middle of the night, on the back of train tickets and in emails to myself. There were a few epiphanies, when I had a sudden realisation how I could make something work or the right story to illustrate a point, which helped shape it.

By the time I started writing I had fifty pages of notes and thoughts, which I then ordered into a series of themes. I finished the first draft at Christmas – writing in the evenings, at weekends and while we were on holiday. The lecture committee gave me helpful feedback and the book was finished in February. The final days of writing were after I’d had my first Covid vaccination, so were written in a slightly disembodied haze. If I hadn’t had a deadline to meet I probably would have been lying down instead.

The editing process was fairly smooth. Because I spent most of the last twenty-nine years writing for newspapers, I tend to write in short paragraphs and feel uncomfortable if they are longer than two sentences, so part of it was learning that in books it’s OK to have longer blocks of text.

The first two chapters of your book are about Quaker history, which you have studied extensively. Is there any particular period of Quaker history that most fascinates you, and why?

I’m not sure extensively is the right word, but I did study a lot of Quaker history while I was a student and have tried to keep up with it. I also inherited my grandparents’ Quaker books, which offer gateways to some fairly obscure areas of our history as well as its main themes and characters.

I think I’m most drawn to the early years because of the vibrancy and excitement of the time, and the organisation and dynamism that allowed Quakers to survive while other sects melted away.

One of my ancestors, a man called Roger Prichard, makes an appearance in the book and I’ve been thinking of writing more about him as his life would be a good way of telling the story of the political and religious upheavals of the seventeenth century. He started as a priest in Wales, but lost his living after falling out with his parishioners over the prayer book. He was then involved in manufacturing in the midlands, before popping up as an officer in Cromwell’s army in Ireland. He seems to have made money out of that and bought himself a farm in the Welsh borders. He became a Quaker and built a Meeting house on his land. But then he was arrested, had all his animals seized, and was jailed for his faith. The Meeting house, at Almeley Wootton [now Grade II* listed], is still there.

When considering the role of truth in Quaker history, were there any particular periods that seemed to dovetail nicely with our current concerns? Or were there any lessons that we could learn from now?

You’ll have to wait for the lecture for that, but I think John Woolman has a lot to say to us today and there are challenges we share with the first generation of Friends. Quakers have used their networks and platforms to help spread the truth and to support campaigns for change, for example over slavery, and I think we can learn from that – playing to our strengths and working with others in a common cause.

There’s a story in Duncan Simpson’s fascinating biography of Jack Catchpool [Youth Hostel Pioneer: Peace, travels, adventure and the life of Jack Catchpool] which illustrates this. In 1916 Catchpool set up a card index to keep track of where refugees passing through Moscow were heading, so their relatives arriving later would know where to look for them. It’s not directly about truth, but was a simple piece of bureaucracy which reunited families and is a wonderful example of the kind of work Friends have often quietly done in the background to improve the world.

What do you think is the greatest challenge facing the future of Quakerism at the moment?

I don’t know if it’s the greatest challenge, but I do worry about the financial difficulties caused by the pandemic. I hope that we come out of it with our central work intact and precious places like Woodbrooke, Charney Manor and Swarthmore Hall still economically viable. Fantastic work was done in the years before lockdown to make money out of hospitality at Friends House and I hope that can be revived.

Now is a good time for Friends who are lucky enough to have spare cash to think about giving more to the Society if we want it to survive in its current form. It saddens me when I see letters in the Friend from people saying they won’t be financially supporting Britain Yearly Meeting: If we don’t, who do we expect is going to?

Journalism is a notoriously hard-headed profession where if something isn’t evidence-based it can easily be dismissed. How has your faith sat with your profession? Have you found it a challenge at a time to wear both ‘hats’?

I’ve always been open about my faith at work and I think it’s helped me rather than hindered me. I see journalism as a quest for truth and haven’t felt under pressure to compromise that in the interests of a story. Above all, if you want to do journalism properly, you need to be interested in people and to try to understand why they say what they say or do what they do. I think the belief in ‘that of God in everyone’ helps with that.

The most important skill in journalism is listening, and a large part of Quakerism is a lifelong quest to be a better listener, so I think the two work hand-in-hand.

Having faith also sometimes opens doors. I remember once interviewing an imam at a mosque and the fact he knew religion was something I took seriously helped us have a much deeper conversation than might otherwise have been possible.

You have spent twenty-nine years working as a news reporter, including for the Daily Telegraph and most recently as political correspondent for Bloomberg. In recent years, you have primarily focused on Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic, turning over stories very swiftly. That must have been a hugely-pressured environment. Has your Quaker faith helped you cope with these pressures? How does it align with your work?

It was relentless. I was working for a 24/7 international news service and the appetite for news on both Brexit and the pandemic was never satisfied. We could see how readership spiked for stories on both subjects – and before them on the Scottish referendum.

I’m not sure I did cope very well with the pressures, but the support from my Meeting was absolutely immense. Meeting for Worship became an oasis in my week – and a time when I could turn off my phone and be unreachable – and the care and support of Friends at Blackheath was wonderful.

Working on this lecture was a welcome respite as well. I was writing in a very different style and the research and thinking allowed me to step back and reflect on some of the pressures and contradictions that made my day job so challenging.

I think my Quakerism also played a part in my role within our team of reporters. At times of stress there’s often conflict in workplaces and I spent a lot of time listening to my colleagues and trying to restore cordial relations and bridge divisions.

News reporting requires almost a kind of ‘disappearing’ of yourself as you have to detach from the story. It’s not about your opinion, but the facts. I wonder how easy it was shifting from so many years writing like that to suddenly having to write about what you think. Did you find it a shock, or difficult? Or did you find it liberating to finally be able to write about your opinion?

Yes, in some ways it was difficult to shift style. I’m quite old-fashioned when it comes to news reporting and I don’t think journalists should be part of the story.

There’s a fair amount of me in this lecture and it’s an exposed position to be in. It’s not somewhere I’m used to being and it’s some way outside my comfort zone.

Having said that, it is very different from news writing as this is meant as a piece of ministry, so my approach to it was completely different.

I know how to write news, and there are formulas I can fall back on if I get stuck, but I didn’t have a similar set of guide rails for this sort of writing. It was more about trusting the process and opening myself to the direction it was taking me.

I’ve only felt called to spoken ministry maybe a dozen times in forty-plus years of going to Meeting for Worship, so writing more than 20,000 words of ministry was quite a challenge.

The lecture is described as partly addressing ‘truth in the era of fake news’. It’s often said now that we live in a ‘post-truth’ world. Writing about politics means you must have often bumped up against the implications of that. Without wanting to give too much of your lecture away, what are the influences that you think are contributing to this post-truth world?

The military historian Michael Howard has observed that ‘deception can never be effective either in love or war unless there is a certain willingness to be deceived’ and I think that is part of the problem. We see what we want to see.

I do think there’s also a resurgence of the tendency to try a lie to see if it will fit. In some respects, deception and being deliberately misleading feels like it has become more brazen in recent years; a ‘can we get away with it?’ attitude among those in positions of power. There’s also a trend among politicians to go along with what they perceive to be the public view on an issue and that hasn’t helped.

The Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev advised Richard Nixon that ‘If the people believe there’s an imaginary river out there, you don’t tell them there’s no river there. You build an imaginary bridge over the imaginary river’. To me that line, and the attitude it signifies, helps to explain a lot about recent political tectonics.

You say that Quakers can help create space for truth. How do you think we can do that? Is this something you are personally committed to?

There’s lots in the lecture on that. But broadly, yes, it is something I’m personally committed to. We run the risk of disappearing into a cul-de-sac in the pursuit of truth and need to commit ourselves to travelling on the open road. I’m sorry if that sounds a little gnomic, but I hope once people have heard the lecture or read the book they’ll have a sense of what I mean.

Do you see any signs of hope in the world right now? On a personal level, what helps you feel hopeful about the future?

Yes, I do. If you spend any time with young people, as I’m lucky enough to do, you realise that the coming generation is more engaged, articulate and clued up about the challenges the world faces than any I can remember in my lifetime.

Whether it’s issues around climate change, equality or justice, they are better trained to spot people trying to mislead them and are ready to stand up for what they believe to be right.

The England football team persevering with its stand against racism in the face of hostility also filled my heart with a pride I rarely feel for my country. For me it was an important beacon of hope in a hard year – and much more important than whether they won their games or not.

Thomas will give the 2021 Swarthmore Lecture – Kinder Ground: Creating space for Truth – on 31 July at 19:30, as part of Yearly Meeting Gathering. Rebecca is the journalist at the Friend.

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