John Toye
Profile
John Toye joined our congregation in 2002, soon after he moved to Oxford with his wife, Janet. Most of his professional life has been spent in the UK Treasury, in academic posts concerned with development studies, consulting in the private sector or working for the UN in Geneva. From 2000 to 2003 he was the Director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies, and Visiting Professor in the Department of Economics, at the University of Oxford. Then he transferred to the Oxford Department of International Development, which is right opposite Harris Manchester College.
John was born in 1942, at a time when many were brought up to feel guilt about ‘the starving millions’ in India for whom little could be done. But his parents focused on practical social issues at home. During the war, his school teacher father was dispatched (with his family) to Wisbech with his class that had been evacuated from London, and was later called up to serve in the RAF. After the war, with the family back in London, his father continued to teach in a deprived school in London, while his mother worked as a child-care officer (one of the first to be trained for this job, under Atlee’s Labour government). As a working mother, she broke with existing convention, but she was an American, which seemed to be an acceptable excuse.
John attended the local grammar school, but here too there was a difference. Before and during the war there had been a substantial settlement of Jewish refugees, from Germany and Poland; and a school that was Anglican in ethos had to learn to accommodate Judaism. This encounter with a different socio-religious tradition made him aware of the richness of Jewish culture. Identified as a potential high-flyer by his History teacher, John was prepared for the Cambridge scholarship examinations, where he went on to read History. From there he won a fellowship to Harvard for a year. And it was there that he first encountered Unitarians.
John’s family was not religious. His father was a lapsed Catholic and the family never went to church. But in Boston John started to look around. The Catholics seemed detached from the real world, with their high ritual and services conducted in Latin. The Episcopalians too were bound up in a theology that John knew, from his reading at Cambridge, to be more the product of medieval political disputes than gospel truths. But the big Unitarian church off Harvard Square in Cambridge, near Boston was a new experience, with its freedom from dogma and its commitment to a development project in India. He felt at home there.
A second influence that was to bear on John’s future career came during a brief trip that he made to Mexico before returning to England. This was the first time he saw real poverty, and the memory stayed with him. Back home, he spent three years as a civil servant in the Treasury, but missed academic life and returned to Cambridge to complete a doctorate in the Economics of Poor Countries. He was by now married to Janet, and they had their first child. Money was tight, so he took a university teaching post, but it allowed little time for his thesis, and the latter was not completed until 1978. Then John took on consultancy work for a London company dealing with metals and minerals (a matter of great importance to many African economies) and the family fortunes improved. By this time he and his wife had two children, Eleanor and Richard.
His return to academic and development work was partly influenced by Janet. She brought to bear some of the moral issues of the dissonance between the world’s rich and poor. At the University of Wales, as Director of the Centre of Development Studies, John led a team of experts to Hyderabad, in South India, to advise on a housing project in a slum area. The scheme’s success demonstrated the effectiveness of a system that combined local work and leadership with foreign expertise. People built their own homes, while basic provisions like clean water were laid on. At the centre of this success was one dynamic and charismatic Indian man with endless energy and ability to motivate people. This, John commented, has been common to many successful projects: it could hardly be planned for, but did seem to happen quite often.
Following his achievements at the University of Wales, John moved to Sussex University as Director of the Institute of Development Studies. This was when, the children grown up, John and his wife started investigating local places of worship. Janet attended the Brighton Friends’ Meeting. John accompanied her occasionally, but preferred the more structured Unitarian way of worship, which for him combines well with the freedom from dogma. He became Chair of the Trustees at the Brighton Unitarian Church in New Road and a lay-preacher there and in Worthing. It is still important, he points out, to be clear about the values that a church stands for, even though it does not prescribe a set of doctrines. These values give a congregation its ‘unity in diversity’.
.So what practical contribution can Unitarians make to poverty reduction in developing countries? The most useful thing that members of the congregation can do, John suggests, is to support fair trade. Spread awareness of how unfair rules of world trade can damage local producers in the poorest parts of the world, and support organisations like Oxfam and Christian Aid who buy direct from local producers.
Rosemary Neale (September 2003, updated July 2009)