Nick Stacey Page 1 C1155/07 Track 1 IMPORTANT Every effort is made to ensure the accuracy of this transcript, however no transcript is an exact translation of the spoken word, and this document is intended to be a guide to the original recording, not replace it. Should you find any errors please inform the Oral History curators ([email protected]) Nick Stacey Page 2 C1155/07 Track 1 BRITISH LIBRARY SOUND ARCHIVE NATIONAL LIFE STORIES INTERVIEW SUMMARY SHEET Title Page Ref. No.: C1155/07 Wav files Refs.: C1155-07-0001.WAV to C1155-07-0005.WAV Collection title: Pioneers in Charity and Social Welfare Interviewee’s surname: Stacey Title: Reverend Interviewee’s forenames: Nicolas Sex: Male Occupation: Clergyman, social worker Date of birth: 27.11.1927 Mother’s occupation: Father’s occupation: Banker Date(s) of recording and tracks (from – to): 17.07.06 (track 1-2); 04.08.06 (track 3); 17.08.06 (track 4-5) Location of interview: Interviewee’s home, Faversham Name of interviewer: Louise Brodie Type of recorder: Marantz PMD660 Total no. of tracks: 5 Reading Format: Wav 16bit 48kHz Mono or stereo: Stereo Burned to DVD: Duration: 7 hours 12 minutes Additional material: Documentation: summary on disc; ‘The Reverend Nicolas Stacey’s address to mark the 50th anniversary of his ordination to the priesthood’ (booklet 2004) Copyright/Clearance: open interview Interviewer’s comments: Nick Stacey Page 3 C1155/07 Track 1 [Track 1] This is the seventeenth of July 2006, Louise Brodie talking to the Reverend Nicolas Stacey. Could you tell me when and where you were born please? I was born in, on November the twenty-seventh 1927 in Elizabeth Street, which is just off Eaton Square, and I am a twin and I should have been born first but my twin sister, who sadly died - wonderful person – a few months ago, pushed me aside and I came out feet first, which is not where you do want to come out, but I think the gynaecologist we had – I was born actually in the house – was the same gynaecologist the Queen had. So although I think I was nearly given up as dead, I survived and here I am today. Good, thank you for that. What do you remember about your childhood? Did you live in Elizabeth Street? Well very terribly little. We were brought up by nannies and a nurserymaid really, as people sort of in, my parents who were – as I said in my autobiography – they were part of that restless gay set, in the old-fashioned word of the gay, in the twenties and thirties. And my father was in the City and did very well. He was at Eton, then was at Christ Church Oxford, a sort of typical sort of upper middle class upbringing and we were really brought up by nannies, but then he lost a great deal of his money in the Crash, in the Wall Street Crash – was that 1929? In fact he was on a boat going to America and of course then they didn’t, he wasn’t able to sort of sell, or perhaps he wouldn’t have been [laughing] able to even if he’d been in England, but he arrived in America really a comparatively poor man. And by the time I sort of knew what was going on, he’d sort of recovered his financial position, to some extent. And we lived in a house, I remember, called Bletchingly Manor until the Crash and then we moved to London, to north of the park, in a sort of slightly less fashionable part of the park, and I went to a pre-prep school which was sort of, again, people one’s own sort of social background. One of them was the son of the British Canadian High Commissioner in London, Vanier, who went on to be the first Canadian Governor-General, and his son is Jean Vanier who amazingly was at Dartmouth with me Nick Stacey Page 4 C1155/07 Track 1 and then became I think one of the most distinguished people of my generation, by founding L’Arche and… Sorry, what is L’Arche? Oh L’Arche is, he was the man who lived with mentally handicapped people and founded all sorts of homes for mentally – and he discovered that they were capable of doing much more than people thought and he set up these homes which would have volunteers, people sort of in their gap year coming and living with them. He’s a saint and enormously significant. He’s in Rebels and Reformers, the book we were talking about, and I think in this series you might well want to do – he’s never been, he’s a Roman Catholic, obviously, has never been a priest, now goes round I think looking after his L’Arche places all over the world, and taking retreats and… How do you spell L’Arche? L apostrophe A-R-C-H-E. Oh right. Anyhow, I remember that he was at that pre-prep school. Anyway, forget what it was called. Then I went to Wellesley House which was in Broadstairs, and the really posh prep school was St Peter’s Court. There were a lot, about ten prep schools then, I think eight or ten, and Wellesley House was a slightly less posh one and we were evacuated in the war to Rannoch because one of the boy’s fathers was a Cobbold of Cobbold’s Brewery in Suffolk and he had an estate in Rannoch – Loch Rannoch, Rannoch Moor. And we were evacuated up there, at the beginning of the war. I must have been about eleven, just, probably just twelve when the war started, and instead of playing football and cricket we stalked stags and fished for trout in the loch. We may even have shot grouse as well, or tried to shoot grouse. And there was a brilliant headmaster, or he was a sort of assistant headmaster. There was one headmaster, a fellow called John Boyce, who was terribly good with the parents and he had an amazing amount of flannel. And this other one, Willie Williamson, who went on to be headmaster after Ashdown, at Ashdown Forest Nick Stacey Page 5 C1155/07 Track 1 where Princess Margaret sent her son there. He was a genius with bright, attractive thirteen year old boys, to who I think – and absolutely never did anything that was the least bit improper – but I mean he was really an example of people who are attracted to boys of that age, are the most brilliant teachers and we all got, or practically everybody got scholarships to Eton and the school then, then the Duke of Gloucester – this was after my time – the Duke of Gloucester sent his children there and then it overtook St Peter’s Court [laughing] as the sort of posh, the poshest – there are practically no prep schools in Broadstairs now at all because it’s not a good catchment area for day children, so it was all people sort of sending their children down from London. Anyway, I didn’t get a scholarship but I took remove, which is as you know, the top sort of non-scholarship and I was all planned to go to Eton and I suddenly said to my parents, I want to go to Dartmouth - the Royal Naval College Dartmouth, which in those days you could go to at thirteen. That of course has all now been abolished. And various heirs to the throne, you know, went to, it was a sort of fairly normal sort of pattern for them. We had absolutely no connection with the navy at all and my parents were really rather disappointed, they’d rather have liked me to have gone to Eton. It’s where my father had been and my grandfather and my great-grandfather had been and so on, long sort of tradition of going to Eton. And I now know, I’m pretty sure I know now why I wanted to do that. It was the quickest way to getting into the war, because I left Dartmouth, I was seventeen on November the twenty-seventh 1944 and I went to sea in mid December when I was seventeen and two weeks old. And I couldn’t, I was so surprised when my mother at Paddington Station went to see me off to go – it wasn’t my first ship because I went and did Atlantic convoys, waiting for my proper appointment as a midshipman to HMS Anson, but I was going down to pick up HMS Anson, a great King George the Fifth battleship. And my mother cried saying goodbye to me and I thought this was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever come across in my whole life. My God, my eldest grandson is practically seventeen and the thought of him going off to the war, I mean leaves me sort of breathless, I mean there was I with of course all the other Dart… I was actually the youngest in my particular term so none were – well it was a three, they had three, so we were all within four months of each other, but I was actually, happened just by chance to be by a week or so the youngest. So I then went to Dartmouth. Dartmouth, I did four terms at Dartmouth down by, in Dartmouth, you know down in Devon overlooking the sea, which I really enjoyed very much. And then it was bombed and this was a sort of miracle – there’ve Nick Stacey Page 6 C1155/07 Track 1 been a number of sort of things in my life where if things had been slightly different I would now be dead.