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Hello, this is Rosemary Seaton. It's the 11th of July, 2023, and I am about to interview the Right Reverend June Osborne at NOKE in Oxfordshire. Can you tell me, Bishop June, your full name and where and when you were born? June Osborne is my full name, and I was born on the 10th of June, 1953, in Manchester, in inner-city Manchester, at St Mary's hospital.

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Right, and do you know where your mother went to school? Yes, I do. She went to the same primary school that I went to in Hume, what people now know as Moss Side, so a very poor inner-city primary school. Did you go on to further or higher education or to a vocational training?

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No, not at all. My parents were both relatively uneducated. After you and other siblings were born, did she work outside the home? She did. She had a secretarial post, a fairly lowly administrative post in the civil service. Were any aunts, female cousins, female relatives in full or part-time work?

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I think my grandmother was a dressmaker. She worked in a machine factory, and my aunt, my mother's only sister, also worked in a factory. Do you know how your father was educated or trained, and what work he did? I don't know where his education took place. He was an immigrant from Ireland at some stage.

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He was completely unskilled. He spent a bit of time as a window cleaner, but no, he had no training whatsoever. Right. And had anyone in that generation of your family been to university? No.

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Moving on to your siblings, did you have any brothers or sisters? I do. I have a younger brother who's five years younger than me. He did go to, he went to art college and on to the Royal College of Art. Right. And where did you go to school?

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I went to the local primary school in Mulberry Street in Hume, and then I passed the 11-plus and went to grammar school, to Wally Range Grammar School. And because of that, I then went on to university. I actually stayed in Manchester and went on to Manchester University. And were your family happy for you to do that?

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They had no idea what it meant. They had no inclination at all that I had either studied for A-levels or that I was intending to continue study. It meant virtually nothing to them. But they didn't oppose it? No. No, it was always about, I mean, the decision to go to grammar school, I can remember,

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caused my mother considerable anxiety because she didn't think we could afford the uniform. But having passed the 11-plus, I put my foot down with great obstinacy and said I was going. Yes. And then, so after that, well, you've told me you went on to university. And what did you study there?

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I studied social sciences. Officially, I have an economics degree from Manchester University, so I did a mixture of social administration, philosophy, economics, anthropology. Gosh, covered a lot. Yeah, it was a very good choice. I suppose when I chose it originally, I wondered whether I might

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be a social worker, but that idea quickly disappeared. And the range of academic interests was just a wonderful liberal education, really. Yes. And so you went to do it at that, at the age of 18? Did, yeah.

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Were you a church-going family? And if so, which church? No, my parents were absolutely not a church-going family. I have a suspicion that my father, having been brought up for some of his life in Ireland, probably had encountered the Roman Catholic Church there, but he never talked of it. And certainly by the time I came on the scene,

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neither of my parents could see the point in church-going. They had had me baptised when I was an infant, when I was a few days old. But beyond that, they could see absolutely no point, and it was never discussed at home. Religion and politics were seen as dangerous topics. And so when I began a personal journey of faith, when I was about eight or nine,

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it caused a certain degree of uncomfortableness, let's say, at home. And I took myself off to a number of churches, trying to find the way of Jesus, and did it entirely on my own, though. What led you to do this? I can remember a particular experience when I was about eight or nine, which I don't think is

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unusual, which is the world seemed so awesome and vast and wonderful, and the night sky seemed to wonder. And yet with all of the scale of the universe, the individual meaning of life seemed so personal. I think behind that as well, I had one or two teachers at school who were clearly Christians. This was at the primary school?

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This is at the primary school, yes. And I think they just encouraged those kinds of explorations, spiritual explorations. And it was very clear to me that the answer to the questions that I was asking was a personal faith in Jesus Christ. It got more complicated when I started going to churches, because my encounters with them weren't

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particularly encouraging ones, but I quite accept that a random little person turning up. We had a Zion Congregationalist church not far from where we lived, and I joined the Sunday school there. And I can remember saying to them after a while that I didn't want to play games, and I was looking for spiritual nourishment, as it were. I'm sure they thought that was very

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precocious. I tried the Roman Catholic church because my two friends who were neighbours, their family were Roman Catholic, and they did go regularly to church, so I attached myself to them. Almost the first Sunday I went to the Roman Catholic church, as I came out, I must have been chewing gum, because the priest said to me in a very brutal way, it's a sin against Mary

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to chew gum in church, so don't come back until you've stopped the habit. So I didn't become a Catholic. And eventually, as so often happens, I attached myself to a church. Once I'd gone to secondary school, once I'd gone to grammar school, several of my schoolmates were regular attenders. In fact, the person I'm still in touch with, the friend I'm still in touch with, her

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father, I think, was vicar at Didsbury in Manchester, in the rather middle-class area. And down the road from where he was vicar, there was a free evangelical church where two of my chums were the daughters of the pastor there. So I finally found a context. It's very amusing, really, because much of what was offered by the church was to do with

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middle-class mores, rather than faith-related. I was reciting to my husband just this weekend, because we were sitting in a train station and watching somebody with curlers in their hair travel. And I said that when I joined the Girl Covenanters, which was the kind of teenage club at the free evangelical church, one of the things I was taught was that,

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absolutely, that I couldn't wear curlers in public. And in fact, I'm pretty sure that on one occasion I was stopped from going into Sunday worship because I had Wellington boots on and it wasn't deemed to be appropriate wear for the house of God. All of that meant that by my early teens, I mean, I was bright enough to see that this was social pressure rather than

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anything to do with the gospel. And I changed and started attending Holy Trinity Platte in Rushome in Manchester, simply because they had a very vibrant youth club, and I attached myself to that. And that was where I really became an Anglican and found a strong community which nourished me, which was much less conservative about class and about behaviour. But through all

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of that period, to answer your question, through all of that period, my family was suspicious of this behaviour and this habit. But interestingly, eventually, both my mother and her sister became very convinced Christians. And the last 20 years of my mother's life, perhaps a little bit longer, last 30 years, she was a regular churchgoer.

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And so you led your mother, really? I would suppose so. You were the influencer. Yes, there was a model. There was a model there.

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Yes. Unusual. Yes, I suppose it is really, though, doesn't Isaiah say, the little child shall lead them? And sometimes I think, I mean, it's one of the reasons why, this is a digression, but always seeing children and young people through the lens of them belonging to a family

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has a lot of merit, but it's limited, because certainly, I could not have found a church if I had to wait for my parents to... Yes. So you're referring to your own family. I was wondering about the church as a family. Yes, and I, you know, my family context was quite turbulent and

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my parents separated when I was 15, and it had been an unhappy marriage for the years before that. So I give a lot of credit to the nurture and care of, despite what I say about the church's poor response to the questions of class, actually, it was a surrogate community. It was a safe place for me to be.

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And you say they nurtured you, so, and did they encourage you to take part in discussions? Yes. Yes, I was probably a fairly impossible teenager and, or young person, and they, no, no, no, they were very kind at times, you know, there were families within and people, individuals within those churches, who I owe a great deal to.

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And did they ask you to take on roles? No, no, I don't. Like a Sunday school teacher or something like that? No, I don't think in any of, not any of the churches that I was a regular attender of until,

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until after university, not, I, no, I wasn't given any responsibilities. Okay. So I think I can skip some of these, such as, were there any clergy in your family? And so, were your parents' friends churchgoers at all? No.

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Right. So let's get on to the next section. Did your attitudes to religion change in adolescence? Oh, they've changed constantly. Absolutely. It, in adolescence, it became increasingly an intense part of my life.

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It became a very formative part of my life. But, you know, one of the, the things that it's really important to do is to keep changing your attitudes to religious experience and religious institutions, isn't it? I mean, I still, I'm still on that journey today.

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So yes, is the answer. Right. Oh, you said you, you went to university in your hometown. Were you still living at home at that point? No, my home had rather left me because, as I say, my parents separated when I was 15.

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And in order to be able to carry on my education, I went and slept on my grandparents' settee. They also lived in the, in Greater Manchester. And so I spent the two years of A-levels living with my grandparents in order to facilitate me staying at school.

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So should we bring these, your grandparents, into the discussion here and the influence they had on you and all the support they gave you at that time? Yes, it, I mean, when we lived in Hume, my grandparents, parents and my aunt and uncle all At least your maternal parents.

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Yes, they were. I only know very little of my father's family. And I don't think I ever met my paternal grandparents. Yes, I thought that just to clarify. So they'd all, they all lived virtually within sight of each other.

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And then what they like to call slum clearance happened. And I don't know how the system worked, but they were all offered accommodation 20, 30 miles away from each other. So this kindred group was separated.

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But anyway, and it took some time before my mother could find accommodation after the breakup of the marriage. So my brother stayed with her and found a home with my aunt and uncle for a while. And I stayed with my grandparents.

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And God bless them. They weren't very well set up for looking after a mid-teenage child. But my grandmother particularly was steady and we got on very well, like often grandparents and grandchildren do.

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And so I finished and I felt almost independent at that stage. I felt as if, you know, I was living independently. So when I had to choose university, I got an offer from Manchester and decided to stay at Manchester.

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So, and I don't regret that decision really. Manchester University was a good experience. But did you live in a hall of residence? Well, it's interesting.

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It was only in recent years that I've realised that because I was on my own applying for university, I mean, nobody in my family understood what was going on. What I neglected to do or what the system,

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because I had a Manchester postal address, the university wouldn't give me accommodation in the halls of residence. That's changed now. And I should have been able to explain to somebody in the system

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that I had no support systems, you know, I had nowhere to stay. I couldn't live at home. So I found a rather miserable little bedsit that I stayed in for my first year. By my second and third years, I joined with some chums.

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And indeed, in the building where I was, I had a bedsit. Downstairs, there was a South African woman who was doing a master's in community development. And we became great friends.

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And so I don't need to feel very sorry for myself. But I do remember that there were lots of ways in which I just simply didn't have the support systems that now, you know, I look at my children,

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they're on the phone every other day, wanting to know what the answer to something, you know, they're in their early thirties, and I'm consulted about almost everything in their life.

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And I just didn't have that. No, no. Yeah, I can understand that. Yes.

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So if we now move on to family political views. Yeah. So were either or both of your parents interested in politics? No, they treated politics as they treated religion

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with great suspicion. I have an instinct, I mean, the newspaper that landed in our home every weekend was the Sunday Express. My father would have read the Daily Express

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and the Sunday Express, which means that when Winston Churchill got voted back in, in the 1950s, I suspect that they were working class conservative voters.

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But they'd have taken a fairly sceptical view of politics. I didn't. Interestingly, they thought it was dangerous. Yeah.

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Yes. And so they didn't talk about it. So don't you suspect they voted conservative? I suspect my father did, if he voted at all.

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I mean, you know, I doubt that my parents ever voted. But they would be the kind of people who would have been working class conservatives, I think. Yeah, yeah.

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Now then, the next sheet, the next section, God and spirituality. Um, can you describe your experience of being called to the ministry? I think I missed something.

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Yes, I have. What was your first job? I could say, I could say that I've never had a job, really. No, I am.

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Well, after leaving university, I mean, I did things like I worked at the post office at Christmas and I had summer vacation jobs and things like that. But, um, I went, I went to Nottingham to do a year's theology.

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Purely out of interest. I, I was set... Was that immediately after leaving? Yes, I got myself set up with, um, articles at a solicitor's firm

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and a place, I was in the process of applying to law college at Chester to become a solicitor after university. And one of my friends, uh, who's still around in my life now, said I would make a terrible lawyer.

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He was probably right. And suggested that I go and, um, do some theology at, um, funnily enough, he's, I think he's pretty steadily against the ordination of women. But anyway, it was through him, his enthusiasm, that I, um,

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went off to St John's, Nottingham. From there, I went to do a couple of years with Michael Green at St Aldate's Oxford as a lay pastoral assistant. Uh, a bit like somebody might do some VSO, uh, work at that stage.

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Um, and I never looked back really. I, um, I'd had, I had jobs to earn money in the vacations. But, uh, after St Aldate's for two years, I then worked for UCCF for a year whilst I was going through vocational discernment.

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UCCF? Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship. Right. Um, uh, but it was really a stopgap.

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It was while I was, um, uh, going to selection conference and the like. So, um, uh, the decision to go to St John's, Nottingham, and study theology was not in itself a decision to go and work for the church. It wasn't.

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Um, uh. It was out of interest, or? It was just out of interest to, to do. Knowledge of, yeah.

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Yes, and, um, uh, it was a developing photograph. So, but certainly by the time I went to, uh, Wickliffe to train as, as a candidate of the Oxford Diocese, uh, which would have been 1978. Um, um, I was on the track towards full-time ministry, accredited ministry.

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Yes. But I'd already had three years of working for, you know, parish Christian organisation. Yes.