Bob and Cecily Redpath
Profile
It’s hard to pin Bob down. Is he American, British, or European? A banker, a social anthropologist, or a professional counsellor? Unitarian Christian, Quaker, or Universalist? The answer is that he is all of these things: in matters of nationality, profession, and religion, he is a pluralist, with a rare ability to cross boundaries and feel comfortable on both sides of a border. It’s no coincidence that his favourite hymn (sung to the tune ‘Finlandia’) is This Is My Song, O God of All the Nations, with its dual perspective on the world and its vision of the peaceful co-existence of opposites.
Born in New Jersey in 1931, Bob has liberal religion in his bones, with both Quaker and Unitarian traditions in his family. He still occasionally attends Friends’ Meeting at Jordans, the village where he and Cecily live in Buckinghamshire; and until recently they belonged to Essex Unitarian Church in Notting Hill.
In the summer of 1951, while a student at Yale, Bob took a cycling trip through Germany, France, and England. Intrigued by the different languages and cultures and shocked by the after-effects of the two world wars, he decided to make his career in Europe. In 1960 he was sent to work in London by an American bank; but in 1962 he left that job and embarked on a diverse and challenging career with local and central government and academic organisations in the UK. He specialised in sample surveys, carrying out studies of traffic generation, shopping patterns, and communities for the Greater London Council. For 15 years he ran central government’s Family Expenditure and National Food surveys, besides conducting surveys for the Department of Education. Like Cecily and Ian, their son, he holds both UK and US passports.
Bob felt privileged to represent the UK on a committee of the European Union in Luxembourg for ten years, sensing that the terrible wounds of World War II were being healed in some way by the presence of member countries around the table. But the high point of his career came during 1993-1998, when he was sent as a survey expert to Bucharest to help the Romanian National Statistical Office to meet the survey standards required for entry into the EU; subsequently he was sent by the United Nations to help the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the states of the former Soviet Union with their survey methodologies.
In contrast to the sweeping scale of his social surveys, Bob has worked as a qualified counsellor since 1992, bringing to his private practice a passionate belief in the potential of his clients to resolve their own problems, once they have been fully heard. He is due to give some seminars in counselling to ministerial students at MCO this term. … Which brings us neatly back to Bob’s involvement with our congregation, dating back to 2002, when he and Cecily began to attend Sunday services at Oxford, which they do whenever their frequent trips to the USA allow. Bob finds our services spiritually and emotionally nourishing: he loves the hymns in the green book, which he describes as ‘often sermons in themselves’, as well as Peter’s gift of being able to knit together prayers, readings, hymns, and sermons into an emotional and spiritual unity.
Like Bob, Cecily would describe herself as a citizen of the world. She was born Cecily Slade in New York City, of Anglo-Saxon stock with Mayflower forebears. Raised as a nominal Episcopalian, Cecily encountered other faiths and cultures first at her predominantly Jewish secondary school and later at Vassar, a women’s college in upstate New York, where she studied Art History and Italian. In Florence, where she lived for a year with a Marxist atheist family, she received her political education. After graduating from Barnard College, NYC, she worked for the Italian Line, and for the Institute for International Education. It was their shared love of Europe and their taste for adventure that first attracted Cecily and Bob to each other when they met at a party. They married in 1959, and moved to live in England in the following year.
At first in London Cecily lived the conventional life of a banker’s wife, but she also worked as a volunteer for a charity offering support to survivors of the Holocaust. Before long, her love of children and her interest in education secured her a job (untrained, initially, in those days of teacher shortages) at a school in Kentish Town. From that inner-city, multi-cultural school with its large classes of Irish children and Greek Cypriot refugees, Cecily moved to teach in a rural school in the depths of the Fens when Bob went to study at the University of Cambridge; and from there, when his work took him to Manchester, she taught first in Lowry-land and then in a middle-class suburb of Sale. When they returned to London, Cecily studied at Froebel College for a B.Ed. degree. Ian was born in 1976.
On moving with Bob to live in Buckinghamshire, Cecily ran a local playgroup for five years, which led to the most challenging job of her career: supporting children from unsettled communities – Roma, Irish Travellers, and circus and fairground families – and helping to integrate them into local schools, if only for short periods. For eleven years, Cecily acted as a bridge between the schools and the travelling families, persuading the (often reluctant) school authorities to accept the children, and the (often reluctant) travellers to see the benefit of education. She says that the Romani families, in particular, were wary of assimilation into the mainstream culture, which they perceived as alien to their own values and morality. She was able to make some progress in integrating the children of travelling families into Buckinghamshire schools, but she says sadly that conditions for them are generally worse now, because the law requiring local authorities to provide settled stopping places has been relaxed: travelling families are forced to be on the road much more these days than they were ten years ago.
Since retiring from paid work six years ago, Cecily has been much occupied with supporting several members of her family in the USA. She retains her links with children by serving on the governing body of a local primary school and convening Sunday School classes in her local Quaker Meeting, in the historic meeting house in the village of Jordans. For relaxation she enjoys walking in the Chilterns, practises yoga, gardens, reads, and paints and draws. Like Bob, she values her membership of the MCO Chapel Society. She describes Unitarianism as "the religion of the future". By this I think she means that ours is a faith that is inclusive rather than exclusive, and flexible and adaptive to change. Now I come to think of it, these adjectives apply very fittingly to Cecily and Bob themselves. Catherine Robinson May 2004