Richard Jolly

Jolly interview 20-21 July 2005 FINAL TRANSCRIPT UNITED NATIONS INTELLECTUAL HISTORY PROJECT The Graduate School and University Center, City University of New York 365 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10016 TRANSCRIPT OF INTERVIEW OF RICHARD JOLLY BY THOMAS G. WEISS New York, 20 July 2005 Transcribed by Ron Nerio Jolly interview 20-21 July 2005 FINAL TRANSCRIPT THOMAS G. WEISS: This is Tom Weiss interviewing Richard Jolly at The Graduate Center on 20 July 2005, the penultimate of our interviews that began in 1999. Richard, I am going to start at the beginning. We have known each other for a long time, but I don’t know anything at all about your parents’ background and what their own religious values and employment backgrounds were, and how those sifted themselves into your life today. RICHARD JOLLY: Let me start with my father. My father was an accountant in England, of a long line of seafarers. Except for my father and my grandfather, the family, as far as we know, were captains at sea. We have a picture in the home of the early nineteenth century of their brig Shannon sailing from Genoa, with Captain Richard Jolly at the helm. But my father’s own father died when he was thirteen, so that was the termination of any hope of university. So my father became an articled clerk and went into accountancy all his life. I suppose relevant for the sort of values I may have absorbed, my father was very much into local community service in Hove. He was chairman of this, chairman of that, chairman of the bench, chairman of the Youth Advisory Council, founder of the Rotary Club, all these sort of things, always at the scale of the town. As far as I know, there was very little international, except he did attend one or two international conferences for Rotary. But the idea of service, and voluntary service, to the extent that accountancy enabled him to do that, was very much my father’s life. He also helped build the local church. He was a keen Presbyterian. My mother—the thing that makes me extremely proud of my mother is that at the beginning of the First World War, my mother, who already knew how to drive, drove a Daimler lorry down from London to Cornwall. For a woman in her early twenties to drive a lorry at that point was extraordinary. She apparently found it difficult even to climb up to the top. She went 1 Jolly interview 20-21 July 2005 FINAL TRANSCRIPT with her sister. She drove at that time and subsequently she taught everyone in her family to drive. She was much more earnest in her religious beliefs. She was involved with Moral Rearmament (MRA), which is interesting because, as I’ve learned, some of the members of MRA, as it was called, had quite a lot to do behind the scenes at the time of the San Francisco conference. Archie MacKenzie, a British diplomat, is one example. From my parents, I absorbed certainly a sense of service and a formal Christian religion, and I became very earnest about that later, at least for three or four university years. Other than that, it was growing up in Hove and going to school in Brighton when I was ten. But as you may know, during the war, I was evacuated along with 16,000 or 17,000 other young Brits to Canada, though I ended up in the United States. That perhaps has a link with my father, because he played such a prominent role in Hove. There were questions, I think, in his mind about what would happen if the Germans did invade Britain, which was very much on the cards in 1940. And if they had, might the Germans have used his three children as leverage in one way or another, as now emerges was done in the Channel Islands? I mention this because my two sisters, both slightly older than myself, and I found it difficult to understand how our parents could send their children so far away during the war to live with people without any family connections. We went through the Rotarians, but we didn’t have any links beforehand with any of the people we went to live with during the war. TGW: Did you feel abandoned? RJ: I don’t remember any of that myself. I remember living with this couple. They didn’t have any children. They’d always wanted children. I very rapidly started calling them “mom” and “dad.” If there is any real surprise, I think it is how quickly in April/May 1945, when I went back to the UK, how quickly I adjusted back to the family in Hove and lost my 2 Jolly interview 20-21 July 2005 FINAL TRANSCRIPT American accent—within two months. I know that because the school wrote a little play for us 10-year-olds to take part in, and I was cast as the American. When I joined the school I had an American accent. But by the time the play came along two or three months later, the other kids were having to teach me to talk “American” because I didn’t know how to do it. TGW: What was it like getting back together with your sisters? You hadn’t seen them for five years? RJ: No, I had seen my sisters about once a year because they lived in Canada, as I did when I first was evacuated to Windsor. But my uncle, who was a very successful Canadian chemist in a pharmaceutical company, was promoted, so we went within three months to Detroit, to Gross Pointe, and three years or so later, to Bronxville, New York. He was employed here in New York. TGW: Did you have any sense for Detroit’s, what later became, racial problems? Or was Grosse Pointe so isolated from everything else? Did you run into any black people while you were there? RJ: Well, we had a black maid—Beulah, I think. I vaguely remember at the time of the Detroit riots they sort of entered my consciousness. But I don’t remember my uncle nor my aunt—as I now call them—nor Beulah making me aware of the sort of issues that now I would be much more concerned with. TGW: I am going to skip ahead a little bit to come back to something you mentioned earlier. You used the word “earnest” in relationship to your father’s Christianity and your mother’s clear devotion, I suppose, directly through Moral Rearmament. But your own religion, I intuit from what you said, is more sort of formal and not deeply felt. But you then said later, during university years, it became much more intense. 3 Jolly interview 20-21 July 2005 FINAL TRANSCRIPT RJ: If we take that as a whole, I used to go into Bible classes and things like this when I was a teenager. I taught Sunday school—lots of things which the mainstream in the Presbyterian church did. We used to have a very good discussion group with the young guys and the young girls on Sunday evenings and things like that. So the church provided very much a frame for life. But I became much more serious about Christianity in the university, Cambridge University. There was what was known as CICCU, the Cambridge Intercollegiate Christian Union, which at that time had something like 10 percent of the university undergraduates, and had a very strong tradition. I got very much involved, so much so that virtually every Saturday evening I would go along and participate in CICCU meetings rather than other activities which young people, even in those innocent days, might embark on. And that continued right the way through my university career and led indeed to my deciding that I should become a Christian pacifist. With hindsight, it was the decision to become a Christian pacifist that sowed in it eventual disillusionment with Christianity, at least in terms of a formal faith. I found myself making the decision to become a Christian pacifist and going to court, which was required at that time if you said you were becoming a conscientious objector (CO). You had to get court permission. The permission I had—there is much more to be said on this, but the decision of the court was to support me going to work in Kenya. I went to Kenya and found myself working in an area where the Christian missions were evangelical fundamentalists. Seeing them at work in a totally different cultural environment—Baringo District in Kenya—made me question this sort of faith. I saw my own Christianity and the Christian operations of the mission society and everything else in totally cultural relative terms. I wasn’t particularly won over by them. Far from it, it led me to question all sorts of things. 4 Jolly interview 20-21 July 2005 FINAL TRANSCRIPT I also started reading Bertrand Russell’s Why I am Not a Christian. And after about a year or a year and a half, certainly, I found myself no longer a Christian believer. It did raise a question in my mind. Having gone to court, should I go back to the war office and explain that it was all a big mistake? By then, Britain had invaded Suez, so I was not feeling that I had made a mistake. I was rather saying that by the grace of God, might I have gone to fight in Suez.

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