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Right. This is a recording with the Reverend Margaret Joachim on the 22nd of March 2023 in London. Margaret, thank you very much for agreeing to give this interview and I hope that one way or another we shall be heard for posterity. Can you kindly tell me your full name and when and where you were born? My full name is Margaret Jane Joachim

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and I started as Margaret Jane Carpenter and I was born in Brighton in 1949. Do you know where your parents went to school, your mother for example? My mother went to school in I think High Wycombe, I think High Wycombe. And did she go on to further or higher education or vocational training? No, she would have loved to but the war got in, the war broke out more or less

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at the point where she would have gone to, you know, she would have gone to some sort of further education and so she stopped and got a job, clerical job, in the civil service. Right. And did she continue with that till she married? She continued with that until she got married and then of course she had to stop because you couldn't carry on. But she was

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evacuated with the civil service to various places like Bath during the war, carried on with the job throughout the war and married I think pretty very shortly after the war. After you and any other children were born, did she work outside the home, either paid work or voluntary? Not that well. She didn't do any paid work until I was about 16 or 17 and my sister was

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three years younger so she was effectively a full-time housewife until then. She did odd bits of assisting with, you know, the odd parish bazaar and stuff like this but no sort of committed voluntary work. As far as I could tell, but of course I was at school for most of the time, so precisely what she did while we weren't there I'm not certain. And your father, do you know

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where he was educated? Yes, he was educated in Brighton. He was born and grew up in Brighton and effectively stayed in Brighton for the whole of his life. And did he have any particular training? No, he also left school I think at, I think it was 16, it might have been 18. He wanted to be a naval architect. His maths weren't good enough to enable him to be a naval

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architect. He was fascinated by ships from a very, very young age and he was a member of the Royal Naval Reserve, well it was the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve in those days, from sort of about, you know, sort of boyhood almost, as young as you could join. So that when the war broke out he was called up into the Navy. Indeed. I'm not sure whether he had started, but again he

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went into the civil service in a sort of clerical position. They didn't know each other at that stage, but he went into the Navy initially as a midshipman at the beginning of the war. I'm going to ask, has anyone in your family before your generation or in your generation actually gone to university? I remember someone I interviewed saying no,

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and then it turned out that they had. Is there anyone in your family? To my knowledge, I was the first in the family to go to university. My sister, three years younger, also went to university. In terms of chronology, my mother also went to university, starting at the University of Sussex as a mature student after I had graduated.

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So I'm the first, but in a sense not the youngest, not the oldest or the youngest. What did you study and where? I went to Oxford and studied geology, hence all the rocks over there. Which college? St. Hugh's. No serious choice in those days, five women's colleges and twenty-something men's colleges, so much less choice.

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Was your family a church-going family? Half of it was. Which half? My mother went to church. My father would have absolutely nothing to do with it, but tolerated her going to church. Did you all go every Sunday and did you go to Sunday school? Broadly speaking, yes. I and my sister, our mother sort of did the whole nine yards and I was a brownie and a guide and I

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went to Sunday school and I sang in the church choir. I don't know how people think about things, but it was just what we did. It never occurred to me not to. Were there any clergy in your family? No. Oh, hang on, no, that's not true. Blood family, no, but my mother's sister, so my aunt, who was six or seven years younger than

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she was, so there was a significant gap. Actually, yes, she did go to university. Where the hell did she go? She went and read English somewhere or other. I think it may have been one of the London colleges, so yes, she did. I've forgotten about Audrey. She married a young clergyman. Did they live nearby? No, they were always a considerable distance away

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and he went from parish to parish, so they moved quite a lot. We stayed absolutely put in Brighton and they sort of commuted round various... They got as close as Southampton, but not very close, no. And your parents' friends, were they churchgoers, do you think, or were you not? Broadly speaking, no, no. All right, thank you. Now, very often, speaking personally,

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attitudes to religion change in adolescence. Did yours change? No, not until I went to university and then it wasn't so much that my attitude to religion changed as I just got terribly busy with everything else. And then I met a young man who had grown up in a very fiercely Quaker family. His parents were what they call weighty friends, sort of really senior Quakers,

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and he had been to a Quaker public school and he had gone off the whole idea at the age of 16. He was an out-and-out scientist. He was reading chemistry and he went off it because people would not answer the questions that he was asking. He wanted to know how and why and what not, and they just said, oh, you just have to believe things, and he wasn't going to do that.

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So he had gone off it and so I couldn't, I mean, he was really rather nice. So I sort of quietly stopped doing anything and ultimately, reader, I married him. And so when we started off, that was not part of our lives. Was that Mr Yerkim? Paul, he's on the wall up there.

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So when you were at university, you didn't join OIQ as it was called, which I remember. Right, may I ask a bit about politics? You may. Were either of your parents interested in politics? Did they talk politics? This is quite funny. I don't know how much you know about my subsequent career, but

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we were always a family with a lot of lively discussion going on. I never knew what my family's politics were because they would argue anything from any perspective and they certainly trained me in argument. And I remember vigorous discussions with my father when I was a teenager who would interrupt in the middle and say, right,

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now let's have that from the other side. And it was deliberate. Anybody who came canvassing from any party was more or less taken to bits on the doorstep. It didn't matter who they were. So there was a lot of thought and discussion, but it wasn't in the least clear to me. They would never say how they voted. If you asked, that was personal. Your vote was private

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and secret and no, they weren't going to say. And it wasn't until I first stood for parliament, quite a lot of years later, that my father came and helped and confessed that he had been a liberal all his life. And, you know, looking back on it, of course they were because of the way they behaved, but it was only afterwards that I could see how it fitted in.

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Did they take the News Chronicle? Yes, they did. And I read the News Chronicle from a very young age, spread out on the floor, I crawled over the News Chronicle. And I can still remember the day when I read something in the News Chronicle and rushed into the kitchen and said, mummy, the News Chronicle isn't going

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to come out anymore. And she said, don't be silly. And I said, no, it says in the newspaper, it's not going to come out anymore. And it was a tragedy. It was a sad day. So we moved to the Manchester Guardian, which was probably equally predictable.

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But right. Yes. Well, you know, the News Chronicle was the only liberal newspaper, and we remember it very well. I do. And sadly.

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I do. I do. Remember Colonel Pewter. And James Cameron, I think. Yes. And all sorts of things. But yes. What year did you stand for parliament?

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I stood in 1979, 1983 and 1987. Right. Well, there's a lot to fill in before that. How exciting. Can you say something of your experience of being called to ministry?

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Yes. And when was that? Right. How did that come about?

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Well, it came about. I was married and I wasn't going to church or anything. And I had my daughter and we moved down here and I started trickling back to the church, sort of not quite across the road, but in the centre of Acton, just quietly.

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And for no particular reason, it just seemed a sort of thing to do. And I became a sort of very ordinary churchgoer. I used to go to the eight o'clock Sunday morning service so that I had the rest of Sunday with us,

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because it didn't seem reasonable because Paul didn't want to go to church. We had decided that we wouldn't have our daughter baptised until she was old enough to decide for herself whether she wanted to be baptised. So, you know, I was just sort of disappearing to a service before breakfast.

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And that carried on for quite a long time, a number of years. And I gradually got drawn a little bit more into what the church was doing, but not a lot, and started to sing in the choir, which desperately needed a few more people in it.

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The organist was absolutely gruesome. It didn't really go very much beyond that for quite a long time. Outside that, I've been doing all sorts of things. I mean, I was very active in the 300 group way back when.

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I helped to set up and lead Women in Public Life. I've been virtually a lifelong member, well, certainly since my 20s, of the Fawcett Society, and I chaired the Fawcett Society,

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and was then on its executive committee, and then a trustee for a considerable period of time. And I was sort of focusing on getting women into things, because, going back a long way, reading geology.

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I went to the sort of school that told me that anything you wanted to do, you could do. Girls were not to be restricted, you know, if you could. Was it a girls' public school trust?

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It was, yes, it was the one in Brighton, Brighton and Hove High School. And got into Oxford to read geology. Slightly surprised to discover that there was one of me

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and eight men in the year, but okay, you know, that was all right. And it wasn't until I actually got to effectively graduate, on the point of graduating and starting to look for jobs, that anything got in the way.

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Are you okay down there? I'm just going to fit that in. Right, anything got in the way. And I wanted to be a field geologist.

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I wanted to take my hammer and I wanted to go out into the wild and map and discover things. So I applied to the British Antarctic Survey, because I would really have loved to go to the British Antarctic Survey,

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and they interviewed me and they said, we can't take you because there are no ladies loos on the boats, which would take you down there. Now we're 1970.

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Okay, no Sex Disqualifications Brackets Removals Act or anything like that at all. So they could say this stuff. No ladies loos, British Antarctic Survey.

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I applied to the British Coal Board and women didn't go down coal mines. I applied to the oil companies and if they employed a woman, it might upset the Arabs. And it sort of went on like this.

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And for the first time, I came up against, you can't do this simply because you're a girl. And that got me rather annoyed. I mean, I went and did what you do

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when you can't find anything else to do and went and did teacher training and taught for a few years, which was not a good thing, but I managed to get out of it. But by that time, I had got launched into equality campaigning.

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And particularly with Fawcett, but also quite a lot of other things. So there I am several years later, having run some of these organisations and got to know quite a lot of the sort of campaigning women around at the time.

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And a very sort of neutral, ordinary, relatively the sort of person who is C of E on forms, you know, but nothing very much more than that. And I got, somehow or other,

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I got elected to the parochial church council, which is one of those things for which there are never quite enough volunteers. So if anybody looks sort of half willing, they tend to get on it. Now, in the background, at the same time,

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the beginnings of the pressure to ordain women in the Church of England were sort of building up. And it was, as far as I was concerned, it was another of these things. It was kind of another area in which women were excluded.

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And, you know, ought to be there. It had never occurred to me when I was younger that women could be pre-ordained. There weren't any women who were pre-ordained. It wasn't something that women did.

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And I never had the slightest desire to be one. And I still didn't have the slightest desire to be one. But what I noticed was that, I mean, I obviously was sort of listening to the arguments because they were interesting.

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And I realised that a lot of the arguments that were being used against ordaining women were awfully like the arguments that have been used against giving women the vote. They're very, very similar and stopping women doing other things. And the other thing I realised was that most of the people who were arguing for women's ordination

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were women who actually wanted to be ordained. And so you could, you know, in this sort of argument, you could turn around and say to them, well, it's just because you want that, you know,

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you're making this fuss because it's something you want. And I thought to myself, what the movement for the order, well, what this campaign needs is some people to speak for it. Because there were meetings being organised all over parishes and things,

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people to speak for it who don't have any other skin in the game, who aren't people who want to be ordained, who are actually, so to speak, neutral from that perspective. So I joined the movement for the ordination of women

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with the explicit intention of speaking for them. And I did do one speech for them, it's quite interesting, somewhere around here, I forget exactly where it was.

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Now, in the parish, we had a then, I think she was, no, she had been ordained deacon by then, but a woman on the staff, lovely lady, still a friend,

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actually went to see her last weekend. And one evening, I gave her a lift home from the PCC meeting. She didn't drive. And we were driving along Avenue Road down in South Acton,

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and I was explaining what I was doing with movement for the ordination of women, and I'm driving. And she says to me, yes, Margaret, one of these days, you're going to have to think about getting ordained.

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And I nearly went into a tree. I had never heard anything so ridiculous. And here I am, because once that suggestion had been made, I could not get rid of it, it would not go away.

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So the whole thing actually grew out of all this other stuff I've been doing, not church stuff at all, other stuff that I've been doing. Did you fight against it consciously,

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fight against the thought of being ordained? Yes. Well, I sort of had several conversations with one or two carefully chosen people.

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Look, this is ridiculous. You know, here I am. I've got, you know, I've got a husband who probably doesn't believe in God

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and certainly doesn't go to church. I've got a, what was she in that stage? Probably an eight or nine year old, fairly rebellious daughter. I've got a full time job sort of managing projects

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and programs and so on in the IT industry, which is, you know, pretty, pretty intensive. I actually quite like it. I do not want to be a, you know, I don't want to be a vicar.

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That would be, you know, that would require, apart from anything else, it would require the rest of the family to sort of accede to this, which didn't look in the slightest as though they were going to do.

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So it just didn't seem practical. So how did it happen? So what happened was that I gradually went to see various people about, I mean, there is a whole process that you go through.

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I went to see my vicar. That's normally where you begin. And I was expecting my vicar to say, yes, you are quite right. This is absolutely ridiculous.

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Go away and never darken my doors again. And he didn't. And he introduced me, as I say, through the process to somebody called a director of ordinands,

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who these are the people who sort of put you through your paces and check you out and decide whether or not you might be the right sort of person to be recommended. And so, OK, this was sort of staggering along.

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And all I could think of was I can't make this ordination idea go away, but I don't want to give up the day job. And I didn't know of anybody who was both ordained and doing a an ordinary secular job.

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It didn't seem to be possible. Can I ask you, when the suggestion was first made that you should be ordained, I mean, did it make you spend more time meditating or in prayer or thinking?

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About things you'd taken for granted, perhaps? I wouldn't put it exactly like that. I think I've always, you know, thought about what I'm doing. It was certainly making me think about slightly different things.

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And I did at one point take myself off on a retreat and go and talk to some nuns and odd things like this. But all this was happening alongside, you know, me being doing all the other things and, you know,

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the politics and the job and all the rest of it. Because in ordinary citizen-like life, we don't spend much time talking about God or about God. Or about spirituality, do we?

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No, no, no. But somehow you were on a path. Somehow I was. And the people I was, some of the people at least I was talking to,

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it was basically their role to talk about it. So the director of ordinance is a clergy person whose job is, or part of whose job is, you know, to work with people who think they might be called to ordination.

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So they're sort of familiar with it. And some people come along who have been, you know, steeped in church and ecclesiastical language from the word go. And some people like me come along who've had really very little to do with it

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and possibly know one end of a church from another and, you know, can find their way around in the prayer book. But it probably didn't go very much further than that. Yes, because some women did start as readers or deacons, as you said.

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Oh, deaconesses particularly. I mean, it was possible to be a, it's all, for a long time it's been possible to be a stipendry deaconess and actually be paid for quite some time back.

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So when were you ordained? How long did the process take? Well, I started doing anything seriously. Basically after the general election in 1987.

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And at that point, there was actually a very serious decision that had to be made. And it wasn't, am I going to give up work and be a vicar? It was going to be, am I going to give up politics and be ordained? Because at that stage, the law of the land was such,

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and we have some wonderfully absurd laws in this country, that an ordained member of the Church of England could not be a Member of Parliament. The law actually said, not that you couldn't stand for election, but that if you were elected, you couldn't take your seat,

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which rather made standing for election pointless. But, you know, so it was, that was the actual choice that I had to make. Did I want to go on as a campaigning sort of person and hopefully become a Member of Parliament?

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Or was I going to go down this other route, which would effectively prevent me from becoming a Member of Parliament? And that was a much more difficult choice. Yeah.

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Well, if you were me, it was a much more difficult choice. Yeah. So that was where the thinking went. And so when you took the decision?

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When I, when I, well, when I took the decision. It was 1987, I suppose. Yeah, well, yes, roughly. And what year were you ordained?

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I was ordained, I was a year after the first people. So I was made deacon in 1994, when the first women were priesthood, who were deacons already, and priesthood in 1995.

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So I'm just a year behind the first ones. But I was the first cohort of people who followed the sort of traditional male path of being a deacon for a year

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and then being priesthood immediately afterwards. A lot of the women who were ordained, who were priesthood in 94, had been deacons for years before they got that far. So I went straight through.

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But when I started training, I didn't know that I could be a priest, because the vote happened while I was actually in the middle of the training period. That was 1992, I think.

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I think so, yes. Can you remember? Three. Can you remember?

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Oh, yes. What you were doing that day? Well, what I was supposed to be doing was working. And I worked in London, I work in London.

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I more or less managed to, I was actually, you know, I was actually in ordination training at that time. So I was sort of doing stuff. I more or less managed to keep it together until lunchtime.

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And then I thought, this is just no good. I cannot sit in the office for the rest of the afternoon. Unfortunately, I had the sort of job which meant I had a certain amount of control over my own time.

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So I just bumped off and I went down to Westminster. And I couldn't get into church house, obviously, but I sat in, was it Central Hall, where there was a sort of overflow of people.

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And I went and sat there and listened and talked to people and so on until, because I just couldn't not, until the vote was done. And we were all doing frantic mental arithmetic

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to try and work out whether there was a necessary majority in all three houses. And it was all mental arithmetic. And there were only sort of two or three votes in it.

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And people's calculation was of the proportions. So we're all absolutely on tenterhooks. And then, of course, it was declared. And as they say, there was much rejoicing.

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And I went over to, you know, to outside church house with everybody else. And that was really rather good. But then what I did, because Westminster Abbey

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had stayed open for those people who wanted to go and say a prayer, and they'd kept a chapel open just inside the main door. And I went in there,

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and it was a chapel with a memorial to Melisande Fawcett. And that was just like everything coming together. Somebody had put a bit of thought into it. I don't know whether these things happen on purpose

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or by accident, because it's the first chapel on the right when you go in the main door. So somebody probably thought,

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well, that's the easiest one for us to keep open. We won't have them tramping around in the rest of the Abbey when it's sort of supposed to be shut. But it's the one where every year, for years before that,

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the Fawcett Society had gone and laid a wreath on the memorial to Melisande Fawcett. And I just sort of went, oh! So that was really rather good.

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It is said that bishops told women not to rejoice too much. Did you hear about that? We never got to do any real rejoicing until quite recently. I think the 10th anniversary,

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we got to do a little bit of rejoicing. But we were always required to behave and to consider the feelings of others, as women so often are, of course.

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In the years before the vote went through, did you have contact with women clergy in other countries or hear women clergy of other denominations? Not really, no.

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No. I've been given a list of things. Did you participate in any acts of witness or wilderness liturgies?

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Doesn't sound... No, I was busy training. And doing a part-time training course alongside a full-time job and a family,

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you do not have very much time to do anything else. If you're writing 2,000-5,000 word essays a term and all the rest of it, then that's what you do.

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Indeed. Do you have any views as to why the Church of England, in England, was so much slower than Canada and the US

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and Hong Kong and New Zealand? I could be very cynical and I won't be. I think, probably, that because the Church of England in England,

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certainly then, it's falling away a bit now, but certainly then was the core of the Anglican Church, it probably needed,

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it probably felt it ought to be even more cautious than some of these other sort of colonial fringes that were doing stuff and attracting quite a lot of opprobrium as well.

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Yes, they were testing the water, really. Absolutely. And, I mean, there were then, and actually are now,

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some very strong factions within the Church of England who, you know, really don't like this type of thing at all, some of whom, many of whom, were in positions of very considerable authority.

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Yes. How do you feel about the considerable provision that's been made for the opposition, so to speak? I think we initially accepted it

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because we actually thought that the opposition would literally die out and that down the road, it would, you know,

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because you would not be able to come in at the bottom, so to speak, opposed to women's ministry and priesthood, you know, women's priesthood,

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because that wouldn't be, you know, for new people. We could understand the provision for people who were already in,

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but that wasn't going to be applied to people who were coming in for training, was it? So after time had elapsed, and I mean, the Church of England is wonderful

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at waiting for time to elapse, the, you know, the opposition would quite literally have died off. And so if we sat around and waited,

00:34:08.500 - 00:34:16.560

it would be okay. What we didn't realize was that the opposition was going to do its best to breed more opposition.

00:34:17.720 - 00:34:28.800

And there still are places which nurture young, you know, anti-women curates or ordinands and curates. We not only have bishops

00:34:28.800 - 00:34:38.400

who minister to the congregations who won't have women, but, you know, they carefully ordain these people

00:34:38.400 - 00:34:51.220

so that they're not in any way tainted. And that sort of thing makes me absolutely furious. Yes, I should think so. What would you say women have contributed?

00:34:51.480 - 00:35:05.500

What differences have they made in the church? What specific gifts did they bring? Have they brought? That's a very interesting question.

00:35:07.720 - 00:35:18.940

What they have done is ensure that the other 51% of the population finally sees itself as a full part of the church

00:35:19.540 - 00:35:27.720

in every possible way. And I wouldn't want to pick out, I don't want to say, you know, they are terribly good at this

00:35:27.720 - 00:35:39.020

or they are terribly good at that. It's not specific to the church. When you start including women, you just broaden everything.

00:35:40.480 - 00:35:51.140

I think, simply because of the way things are, they've brought a much stronger understanding of how you actually sort of live life and cope with children and, you know, family stuff.

00:35:52.880 - 00:36:08.120

They've largely put paid to the stereotypical vicar's wife. There is no stereotypical vicar's husband. But they've just, you know,

00:36:08.240 - 00:36:22.420

increased the range of humanity that is now in this thing. Do you think that there is a feminist theology as such? Is that something that

00:36:25.040 - 00:36:37.640

the movement has promoted, has brought into the church? There is a whole shelf of books down there on what I think would conventionally be called

00:36:37.640 - 00:36:48.620

feminist theology. What it is, again, is looking at the Bible, looking at the church fathers,

00:36:48.780 - 00:37:01.060

looking at theology generally from the perspective of half the population, the other half of the population. Now, I mean, it sort of upweld

00:37:01.060 - 00:37:10.080

at the same time that all sorts of other feminist things, feminist in inverted commas. I mean, I would call myself a feminist. Oh, I'd call you a feminist.

00:37:10.080 - 00:37:25.780

But I think it's very often a badly applied label. So yes, theology from the perspective of women, by women and from the perspective of women, has had an enormous flourishing.

00:37:25.900 - 00:37:37.600

I mean, there were female theologians beforehand, but not many, or not very obviously. And there were fantastic people way back. I mean, one of my heroes is Maude Royden,

00:37:38.740 - 00:37:50.640

who, you know, sort of really tried hacking it a long, long while ago. So it was there, but it was very easy to ignore. So it's opened up,

00:37:50.660 - 00:38:03.400

and all of a sudden people would publish it and people would listen to it and consider it. And interestingly, more or less at the same time as that, was the upwelling of liberation theology.

00:38:03.960 - 00:38:16.900

And I think the two are connected with each other, actually. They're pretty closely connected. Well, can I ask, how did your family get on with all this? You don't have to ask.

00:38:17.200 - 00:38:32.700

How did my family get on with it? My daughter was furious. She was, you know, she was getting to the awkward stage by then. And her reaction was,

00:38:33.040 - 00:38:53.120

huh, I suppose you want even more letters after your name than you've got already. My husband did the absolute classic liberal thing of saying, I do not understand why you're doing this.

00:38:53.340 - 00:39:04.020

I don't want to have anything to do with it. But if that's what you want, then I will support you. That was where he started. Fair enough.

00:39:04.520 - 00:39:34.460

You know, back in 1987, 88, 89, that was fair enough. Um, we did baptise him by full immersion at the Easter Vigil about 15 years later, but that's a whole other story. Well, can I ask, if you've never wanted to be a vicar, where have you ministered?

00:39:35.080 - 00:40:00.700

I have always, I discovered that there were things called ministers in secular employment. Now, again, this is a piece of history. Back about 60 years ago, Mervyn Stockwood, who was Bishop of Southwark, started a training course for men to be ordained, but to stay in their workplaces.

00:40:02.000 - 00:40:16.260

Ah, worker priests. Worker priests, worker priests. He didn't call them that, but I mean, there is a long tradition of worker priests on the continent. The French one in particular, and there are in other European countries as well.

00:40:17.280 - 00:40:33.020

But Mervyn Stockwood started it up over here. There had been some real worker priest experiments. The Mayor of Oxford, well, he became Mayor of Oxford, a chap called Tony Williamson worked in the car factories in Oxford, and he was ordained.

00:40:33.680 - 00:40:52.720

There were people around here working in various manufacturing works and so on, and they were ordained, and they were very much the worker priest role. But it never took off. Mervyn Stockwood was training professional people, men, civil servants and so on, to be ordained,

00:40:53.720 - 00:41:19.360

but with a view to being priests in their workplaces, not being chaplains or anything like this, and also working in their churches, obviously. And this had gone reasonably well, and somebody pointed me at a couple of people that had been trained on the Southwark course.

00:41:20.760 - 00:41:41.300

You know, there are sort of networks, and I think it may have been one of the directors of Ordinand said, you know, you really need to, you know, if you are so absolutely convinced that you are not going to give up work, you need to go and talk to one or two of these people, which I did, and discovered that, yes, there is a small number

00:41:41.300 - 00:42:05.780

of people who view their ministry not as being confined to a church and a congregation, but basically wherever they happen to be. And I was spending most of my time, yes, I was spending a couple of hours on Sunday at church and so on, but most of the time I was with the people that I worked with.

00:42:08.260 - 00:42:33.680

Now, it began to make sense that the ministry was actually out there with everybody, and not in a church-shaped box with a small number of people who came in. So eventually, it was a bit of a struggle, but I was able to persuade the powers that be that being ordained and continuing to have a full-time job and seeing the people I worked with

00:42:33.680 - 00:42:59.540

as not a congregation, but basically as the focus of my ministry, could be done. And that's what I have done. I've always had a license to a church as an assistant curate, and I've helped, you know, I've helped with services and helped with what I could do alongside having a full-time

00:42:59.540 - 00:43:16.340

job and a family, and still being involved in politics, but now backroom politics, rather than sort of frontline politics. So I have always been a minister in secular employment. I've never been paid for being a member of the clergy, so I'm sort of voluntary.

00:43:16.340 - 00:43:39.380

Some people see that as playing around, or not serious, or whatever. I don't go along with that, but the idea is out there. Do you do much preaching in or outside church? I do, well, I've probably preached once a month since 1994.

00:43:39.740 - 00:43:46.120

In church? In church. You don't preach outside, you talk to people. Indeed.

00:43:47.840 - 00:44:11.860

If I'd gone up in the middle of a business meeting and started preaching, that would have been... I mean, I never wore a dog collar to work, but you talk to people. And, you know, if they're good colleagues, they get to know who you are and what you do a bit. And I mean, you know that they grow tropical plants, or radishes, or play football at the

00:44:11.860 - 00:44:42.480

weekends, or whatever, and they knew what I did. And what I found was that people would come and talk to me about stuff, sometimes. You got rather used to somebody turning up with a crisis just as you got a deadline to meet, you know, life sort of happened. And, you know, it's just what you do and who you are, and how you get on with them.

00:44:42.840 - 00:45:05.220

I mean, there were some lovely moments. Some of the people I worked with at one point knew that I was training for ordination, and I invited two or three of them actually to the ordination service on Sunday. And that was lovely, and we all had a good party afterwards, and then back to work on Monday. And Monday lunchtime, we were heading off to the staff

00:45:05.220 - 00:45:23.100

restaurant, and one of them sneezed, and I turned around instinctively and said, bless you. And he said, that's official, isn't it? And that was the point, actually, that I realised what I'd done. You know, that that reaction. Was an acknowledgement.

00:45:23.100 - 00:45:46.880

Yes, exactly, from somebody who had nothing to do with the church whatsoever, but just a work colleague. That's official. And I have shown up late on a Friday afternoon for sort of troubleshooting sessions when some system that we've been responsible for has gone wrong. And apparently I'm notorious for the occasion when I said, right now,

00:45:46.980 - 00:46:03.720

come on, we've got to sort this out. I've got a sermon to write. Well, it's just, you can't be a priest unless you're a priest all the time. Indeed. Can't be a priest within set hours. You know, you just are one.

00:46:03.940 - 00:46:30.520

Yes. This is so interesting. What advice would you give to someone who thought she was called to ordination? Well, I will tell you something which I think is extremely funny. Because I've been an MSE, Minister in Sector Employment, all the time, because I've been

00:46:30.520 - 00:46:52.880

non-stipendary and not paid, once it had ordained me and once I'd done this thing called serving my title, which is a sort of three year apprenticeship immediately after you're first ordained. So you get to practice, you know, I mean, I, you know, you could find out how to run a funeral and how to baptise, but the things that people expect you to do. And it was absolutely necessary to

00:46:52.880 - 00:47:14.280

do that, because, you know, people at work would assume if I was a priest that I would know how to do this stuff. So I absolutely had to know how to do it. But the church basically then ignores you. They don't ask you to take on other jobs. They, you know, they don't think about you at all. You're just sort of there being a, quietly being an assistant in somebody's parish

00:47:14.280 - 00:47:41.720

and they're not really interested in anything else. So from 1995 until I got to the age of 70, which at which point they put you out to grass, I was just sort of beavering away, quietly doing my thing and helping out at St Peter's. And when I got to the age of 70, the Bishop got in touch and said, right, you know, you have to surrender your license now,

00:47:41.720 - 00:48:08.320

because we have a retirement age, but I will give you this thing called permission to officiate, which enables you to go on doing stuff if people want you to. OK, I carried on doing stuff up the road at St Peter's. And about nine months later, I got a letter from the Bishop and it said, broadly speaking, dear Margaret, we would like you to become a director of Ordinand.

00:48:08.320 - 00:48:27.100

And I looked at this and I thought, they've sent it to the wrong person. This was the Bishop of London? No, Wilsdon. But they've sent this to the wrong person. People like me, who've never run a parish and are not doing anything conventional, do not become directors

00:48:27.100 - 00:48:51.060

of Ordinand. And I actually rang up the Bishop and said, I think you have sent this letter to the wrong person. And he said, no, actually, he said, we do get, you know, we do get sort of unusual people. And anyway, the experience that you've had working in, you know, big teams and managing people and all the rest of it, we think you will be a good director of Ordinand. So I am

00:48:51.060 - 00:49:07.480

now an area director of Ordinand and people come to me as part of their journey towards ordination. So you're giving lots of advice to different kinds of people. All sorts of different kinds of people. It's too big a question in short.

00:49:07.700 - 00:49:29.860

It is too big a question because the advice that you give depends so much on what they've done, where they've come from, what their experiences are, how they think they're being called, because quite often they come along with some wonderfully detailed ideas about exactly what they're going to do.

00:49:30.860 - 00:49:52.560

You say, well, look, just should we take this gently? So talk about full circle. Are there any specific changes you'd like to see in the church? I would like to see

00:49:55.380 - 00:50:15.520

full acceptance of everybody, no matter who or what they are. And that applies not just to women, but it applies. We have got ourselves so tied up about sex and relationships. It really does not surprise me that there are very large numbers of people who simply

00:50:15.520 - 00:50:32.480

will not have anything to do with it. Because they just reckon we are totally out of touch, totally unwelcoming. And I would give a lot to see that change. I was not particularly pleased with the latest of our fudgies.

00:50:32.680 - 00:50:56.920

I mean, the Church of England is very good at fudge and it's done it all over again. The position we're now in is intellectually virtually untenable. And perhaps as more women come into the church, there'll be more clarity. Perhaps there will.

00:50:57.960 - 00:51:19.240

We are a very significant proportion of it now. Though more of us are unpaid and more of us are in the... I mean, there are now women bishops and that's improving. And there are women archdeacons and area deans and cathedral deans and so on.

00:51:21.500 - 00:51:36.300

It's improved a great deal. This is extraordinarily interesting. I think we could probably go on for several hours more. I think we probably could.

00:51:36.760 - 00:51:45.480

But I think this is a good point. I'm going to show you something. Yes, I'll keep the recorder on. I'm going to show you something.

00:51:48.820 - 00:52:14.160

Because something very nice happened a couple of months ago. Let's get the right one. Oh, that's lovely. Is it?

00:52:14.480 - 00:52:25.760

That's an MBE. An MBE. That's an MBE, isn't it? I was presented with an MBE on the 8th of March, International Women's Day.

00:52:26.040 - 00:52:35.960

This year? This year. So a couple of weeks ago. This came out in the New Year's Honours list this year at Windsor Castle by Princess Anne,

00:52:36.280 - 00:52:53.040

who is a super royal, actually. Lots of time for Princess Anne. And I have been having great fun since the beginning of the year because the citation is to the Reverend Dr Margaret Joachim

00:52:53.040 - 00:53:09.960

for services to women in politics. Yippee. So I trotted on, dressed up like the Reverend Doctor, which I very, very rarely do, actually, but fish out the suit and the dog collar.

00:53:11.140 - 00:53:25.140

And they've altered the investiture system. I think it's one of the effects of COVID. So instead of everybody sitting in the same room all the time, you go in effectively one by one with your three guests

00:53:25.140 - 00:53:44.540

and you actually get a couple of minutes conversation with the sort of investing royal. And so as I walked across the huge room towards Princess Anne, they read out the citation, Reverend Dr Margaret Joachim for services to women in politics.

00:53:45.240 - 00:54:05.860

Curtsy in front of Princess Anne. She hangs the ribbon on me and then you can see almost a double take. And she said, I thought they said women in politics. And then she's confronted by a sort of full blown bever of the clergy.

00:54:06.200 - 00:54:14.760

And it's just not quite computing. What did you say? I said, Mum, I'll explain. So I did.

00:54:16.140 - 00:54:35.320

And, you know, just, I mean, we're talking about it. You sort of realise it's 50 years of banging away at this one way or another. It came out as politics because this actually came via nearly 50 years work that I've done for the Liberal Democrats one way and another.

00:54:35.520 - 00:54:50.380

But it has spread very much more widely than just politics. But so nice. Well, that is so wonderful and so well deserved. Well, I suppose so, actually.

00:54:50.700 - 00:55:01.900

Yes. I must thank you very, very much. Well, if you think of further things you'd like to talk about, I am at your service and would happily return.

00:55:02.660 - 00:55:13.280

This is your project. If there are further things you want to know about. We're talking about Worker Priests. The organisation I belong to, which is called PRISM,

00:55:13.460 - 00:55:34.120

which is the English Society for Christians in Secular Ministry. It actually stands for. We meet every year with a conference of European Worker Priests. So I have had quite a lot of contact with the remaining ones in France.

00:55:34.260 - 00:55:49.180

There are some in Germany and Spain and Italy and the Netherlands. And then there are the Catalans who you must not, under any circumstances, confuse with Spanish because they're quite different. And we have these marvellous weekend conferences

00:55:49.180 - 00:56:02.740

where the language that we all try and work in is French. Which is all right for the French. Tough for the rest of us. And they are really very inspiring people.

00:56:03.040 - 00:56:20.620

They've done it differently from us. They, the French, the European model is for people, they're mostly Roman Catholic, people who are seminary trained. Then to go and take very menial jobs.

00:56:20.620 - 00:56:41.000

So to work in factories or on the docks or care assistants in care homes and things like that. And to be alongside people that way. Whereas we stay in the working environments that we were in before we started. Which tend to be professional.

00:56:41.520 - 00:56:53.760

Do the Catholic ones include women? As worker priests, no. But as sort of associates. I mean various religious sisters and things like this do come in.

00:56:54.040 - 00:57:15.680

But the lovely thing about them is that they are perfectly okay with us. And I have celebrated Mass for a conference of European worker priests. Most of whom were Catholics. And nobody has had any problems at all with this.

00:57:16.940 - 00:57:33.920

That is wonderful. I asked about lay Catholic women for a particular reason. But I'll mention that later. Some of them are priests who, so to speak,

00:57:33.980 - 00:57:50.500

have been put outside the fold because they got married. And quite often their wives are Catholic laywomen. But they are also involved. That's more common than actual, so to speak, separate Catholic laywomen.

00:57:50.640 - 00:58:00.460

But that's only just one particular group of people. Well, thank you. I'd be very pleased to hear a little bit more about that as and when. Okay.

00:58:00.780 - 00:58:04.800

Well, thank you. Please come back. Thank you very much indeed. Not at all.