11-04 Plymouth Brethren

If there are any terrifying, funny memories of our father, they would be his entry into the Plymouth Brethren. I was about eleven. Mother wanted him to come with her to the United Church so the kids would develop some kind of moral underpinning. He agreed as long as it was to the Brethren, something he understood from his own childhood. His grandfather Devon was Plymouth Brethren, and his father had to change from Presbyterianism to marry his mother.
The founding leader of this fundamentalist Christian sect was John Nelson Darby who was born in England in 1820, and all Plymouth Brethren from around the world used his translation of the bible. They believed in a strict code of conduct based on Bible teaching.
What that meant is that they would have passionate discussions on things like whether a particular portion of a verse in the Bible said that a woman could wear a ribbon in her hair instead of a hat. Heavy.
I became very biblical at age 12 and knew every verse in the Bible where the word "fornication" was used. Most of my less godly friends did not even know what that word meant.
About six months before the family went to Ireland in 1947, we had a visitation from the two elders of the Brethren in Toronto, and we all had to get into our best clothes. There were about 30 minutes of prayer and Bible readings and wee Robert, who was only about four years of age, was trying hard to be good. Suddenly out of nowhere, he shouted out the word, “F___”. Young Robert had no clue as to what he had said, but it sure shut down the prayer meeting.
On the way to Ireland in 1947, we picked up our passage on the Queen Elizabeth luxury liner in New York. We went to have tea with what the brothers and sisters called Big James Taylor and his wife. James Taylor or JT Sr. was the worldwide leader of the Plymouth Brethren. Godly but not bubbly.
The biggest excitement and my favourite Plymouth Brethren memory were women confessing their sins at the “Care Meeting”, that they had fornicated with Jack Ladyman, a young brother of about 22. It went on for months and so many people showed up after the first two weeks of the revelations, they had to bring in more chairs.
A lot of them were “withdrawn from” which was a form of total social and physical exclusion. You could not speak or shake hands with someone who had been “withdrawn from”.
These particular "Care Meetings" dealt with issues like finances, visitations and the strict enforcement of their rules. Usually only small numbers showed up.
I remember going to Belfast with Ian in 1954 and noticing our grandfather Bulloch had been “withdrawn from”. I asked uncle Alex what had happened and he said that our grandfather at age 80 had punched out a brother.
The critical rule with Brethren was that you were not supposed to mix with the world which they considered wicked. Of course, I was not supposed to play football and had to hide my pads at a friend’s house. And I remember climbing through a basement window to go to the Prom in high school and changing my clothes at my date's house.
The Brethren had three meetings on Sundays and three during the week. To get through these boring episodes on Sundays, brother Ian cut comic books up into chunks to put inside his Bible, and being an intellectual, I focused on memorizing my French vocabulary.
Brethren was a tight group and generally a happy lot. But for my brothers and me, it was nightmarish, growing up into adulthood and living such a restricted life. No radio, no TV, no movies. Dad even had to have the radio taken out of his car which left a big hole. The photo shows the size of a typical congregation. There were three about this size in Toronto. I had happy memories going to what they called "Conferences" around North America and always took in the local zoo.
When JT Sr. died and was replaced by JT Jr., they got even stricter. By then I was out of the house. They were then called the “Exclusives”. They passed a decree that you could not even eat with your children unless they were part of the Brethren. And that is when Dad split away from them. He and a group of dissenters started their own little religious offshoot.
JT Jr. was a serious bit of work with a severe drinking problem. And according to reports, he was sleeping with women and telling them they were doing “Gods work”. Amongst my MBA colleagues, we would call this an interesting leadership style.
Mother started going to the People's Church. They had no problem with TVs in the home, so mother hid one in the basement when they lived on 22 Owen Blvd. It was there for a couple of months anyway.