My name is Peter Stratton and these are some of my memories of when I was of Baháʼí in the 1960s and 70s.
Introduction to the Baháʼí Faith
I was first introduced to the Faith almost by accident. I was doing my college industrial training in Wiltshire, in Chippenham. And whilst there, a guy came to work for the same company for just about six weeks, and he was a friend of Jill Pearce and she’d met the Baháʼís and introduced him to them in Chippenham, and he asked if I wanted to go over. It was quite interesting because at that time I’d been trying to pass my driving test with very little luck, and I was about to take my fourth driving test and the evening before I met him, in very infrequent prayer I said, “God, if you really do exist, let me pass my driving test and I’ll do something for you.” … Never make a bargain with God!! Anyway, because I passed my driving test, I was able to drive over to Chippenham, where I met Terry and Barbara Smith. Many of you will these days know David Smith, who is one of the sons of Terry and Barbara, and they told me about the Faith.
During that time, however, I’d been very fortunate, in as much one of the first places I went to was Bristol, where I met Hand of the Cause Mr. Faizi, who was staying with his relatives in there. I was introduced to him and we obviously chatted a little bit. At the second meeting I went to, I met Enayat and Pixie Rohani, and Enayat was the first non-English person I had ever spoken to, which was quite interesting because I’d been brought up with quite a prejudiced view of life.
One of the people I met at Terry and Barbara’s was a lovely lady called Prudence George, who was the mother of one of the Pat Greens (I can’t remember which one). She had pioneered all over the place and I was talking to her one day and I said, “ I can’t possibly become a Baháʼí because I don’t believe in God.” And she said to me, “No, I don’t believe in the God you don’t believe in. Why not think of another God that you can believe in?” So that was a way of breaking down barriers.
During the period I was learning about the Faith, which was only about six weeks, I also went to a meeting and met William Sears. And that set me off reading Thief in the Night and God Loves Laughter. It’s basically at the end of reading those books that I decided that I would become a Baháʼí – this was in May 1971.
Unfortunately, shortly after that, my industrial training finished and so I was no longer in the Chippenham area. I went back up in Pershore where there were no other Baháʼís. I was studying horticulture at college there.
Living in Pershore
But I learned that near Pershore there was Kidderminster and at the time Christine Rushton was pioneering there. And so we started having some meetings in Kidderminster, which was very interesting because … what do you do to get people to come to meetings without any money? But we hired a hall in one of the housing estates and just prayed there. The children started coming in to find out what we were doing. And of course, when the children came in their parents followed, trying to find out where their children were.
And so we had a few meetings where we had quite a number of adults come along. Christine then had a very small bedsit, and yet somehow we were squeezing 10 or 15 people in it to listen to Baháʼí talks and firesides in this little bedsit.
I also got to know the Baháʼís in Birmingham where I went to a few of the Holy Day celebrations and 19-day feasts. At the time, that was quite a big community. I remember meeting Pat and Pat Green, and also Wendy Scott. Wendy Scott had lived in Winter Hill, which is part of Maidenhead. So when I was back at home in Maidenhead, we used to meet up there too.
Time Spent In Malta
Following my days in Pershore and to-ing and fro-ing to meetings in Kidderminster, I left college and went travel teaching to Malta, where I was privileged to meet Knight of Baháʼu’lláh Olga Mills, who was very old by then. We had quite a lot of meetings over there. I’d gone travel teaching initially with Bob and Margaret Watkins, and then, when they went home, I stayed and lived with some fairly new Baháʼís – the Crockfords.
During my stay in Malta, I made a lot of friends, including a Dominican monk. I used to go to the monastery and talk to some of his students. Even after I left Malta, he used to write to me occasionally to ask me to write to one or other of his students to show how different faiths can have the same Source. We also met up with a Jesuit priest and held some Baháʼí meetings in his study, which was fascinating.
While I was there, we got up to nine Baháʼís and thought we’d formed the first local assembly. Unfortunately, I had to leave Malta because they wouldn’t renew my visa. I had got a job but I hadn’t managed to get a work permit for it, so I had to leave, which meant that the assembly was never recognised because I wasn’t there long enough.
Standing: Peter Stratton, Mrs. Alá’i, Bill Taylor, Shahnaz Alá’i, Jean Campbell.
Seated: Marion Bradley, Mrs Crockford, Knight of Baháʼu’lláh Olga Mills, Mr Crockford.
Kidderminster
I came back to England in the middle of winter, which was horrible. This was around 1972 or 73. There was a national teaching conference and I pioneered to Kidderminster. I was living with Barney and Erica Leith for a while and we managed to keep an assembly in Kidderminster. Meanwhile, I was actually working in Tenbury Wells. Driving backwards and forwards to Tenbury Wells is quite a way. It got to the point where Erica was about to give birth, so they wanted the spare room, so I moved to Tenbury for a short time, but that didn’t work out. Whereupon, I came back to Maidenhead.
Maidenhead
Meanwhile, during all this time, I was coming down to see my parents who lived in Maidenhead. I was spending time with Mary Hardy and all the people that were becoming Baháʼís in Henley. I remember Trevor Finch. Becky Finch, Charles Boyle, Richard Boyle, Phil Koomen and there were two Brian Stones. And one of the Brian Stone married Kathy Sheppard, and Hugh Fixen. Then there was Dobby (Steven Robinson) and then, then of course you had people like Robert Parry, Steve Lamden and Tawfiq Rushdy, who were actually Reading Baháʼís, but who spent a lot of time in Henley and of course all the Hardy children.
I remember Enoch Olinga being there and the talks he gave. There were lovely talks there. I remember the Holy Day celebrations over there, and one particularly one which was the ascension of Bahá’u’lláh – the one that’s at three or four in the morning, and there was only Mary Hardy and me there, and we were both falling asleep.
I had some lovely discussions with Mary. One was about where in one of the pilgrim’s notes it talks about oranges growing in Iceland and Greenland being truly green. And we discussed this and wondered how that would happen, whether the earth would tilt on its axis. I think now we know how it’s going to happen.
They had a garden party with Seals and Crofts. There were just so many things. Ted Cardell used to come down. I went to a couple of the picnics at Ted Cardell’s farm, because I can remember Ted Cardell taking a big photograph with everybody in the garden.
Then, then I moved down to Maidenhead permanently and worked in Reading for a short time and then went to work at Jealott’s Hill where I ended up for the rest of my working life. I sort of opened up Maidenhead to the Faith, although we’d had an earlier believer, Honour Kempton, who had declared to her daughter some years before I was there, but she had died by the time I moved there. So Maidenhead grew. At one time we had 17 Baháʼís there. We did a lot of teaching work in collaboration with Henley.
Encounters with Rúhíyyih Khánum and Other Hands of the Cause
During the 1970’s, I was then invited to serve on the International Travel Teaching Committee, which then became the International Goals Committee. I was also appointed to serve as secretary on the the Committee for the Care of the Guardian’s grave at that time.
Shortly after being appointed onto the Committee for the Care of the Guardian’s Grave, I was fortunate to be invited for pilgrimage starting on the 6th of January 1975. As it happened, it was a rare 10-day pilgrimage because of the celebration of the twin holy days of the birth of Baha’u’llah and the Báb, and whilst on pilgrimage, which as always was wonderful, I was privileged to be invited by Rúhíyyih Khánum to have tea with her in the House of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá. So I went to see her and we had tea in the back room just off the main entrance foyer. She talked a lot about how she wanted the Guardian’s Grave looked after, but also she had been writing “The Priceless Pearl” at the time, and she related a lot of the stories in that to me. A couple of amusing incidences happened during that meeting:
She’d got a new mantilla (head covering) at the time, and she’d been used to the one that she’d had for years which was much finer. This new one kept slipping off her head. Eventually she took it off, screwed it up in her hand, and said, “Sorry Shoghi Effendi, but I can’t bear having this on any longer”, and threw it into the corner of the room.
We then continued talking, when there was then a ring at the front door. It was two pilgrims who were moving from Botswana back to Canada, and this was in the middle of winter, so they didn’t really have the appropriate clothing for wintering in Canada. So Rúhíyyih Khánum, who organised the local jumble sale, got boxes out from the jumble sale door to see if she could find some warm clothes for them. We were sitting in the antechamber (the little hall immediately in from the front door) going through these clothes All of a sudden she pulled out these enormous ladies bloomers and she held them up in the air, right in front of my face and said, “Peter, you really shouldn’t be looking at these!”, which made me realise that we all saw her very seriously in meetings, but she did have a wonderful sense of humour.
One of the things I learnt from her was that the room in which ‘Abdu’l-Bahá died was not the one where he normally was. He had died in the front room, not the back room. (At least, I think that’s right. If it wasn’t that, then he died in the back room rather than the front room.) He had been moved just shortly before his death because the room had more sun.
That was my first meeting with Rúhíyyih Khánum, which was wonderful but scary at the same time.
On the birth of the Báb, the pilgrims were all going into what we then knew as the Eastern Pilgrim House, the one by the path that leads down to the shrine of the Báb. A couple of us had gone out and bought roses to give to all the pilgrims and Hands of the Cause, the members of the House of Justice and the other people who were there, as they went in. When we gave one to Rúhíyyih Khánum, she said, “You know, this is something that Shoghi Effendi used to organise.” Of course, we hadn’t realised this, which was quite special. And then, of course, I was the last person to go in, and the only seat left was the one by Rúhíyyih Khánum. I hesitated, but she patted the seat and made me sit next to her.
The next day, we had prayers in the Shrine of the Báb for the Holy Day celebrations at which Rúhíyyih Khánum said the Tablet of Visitation. And again, that is quite an experience.
At that time, you could go down early in the morning and say prayers in the Shrine of the Báb. I was there praying on my own when Hand of the Cause Mr Furútan came in to say prayers. When I finished, I went outside and when he came out we spoke. I said to him, “Mr Furútan, why is it that when I try to meditate, I get all the bad thoughts in my mind rather than the beautiful thoughts?” And he said to me, “You have to look at meditation as a clear blue sky with clouds going past. If you concentrate on the clouds, then all you get is clouds.” Which I thought was a lovely way of looking at it. Obviously, on Pilgrimage, we had many meetings with Mr Furútan and with various members of the House of Justice, mainly with Ian Semple and David Hoffman as the English-speaking members. Obviously, there’s an awful lot more to say about Pilgrimage, but not in these notes.
When I got back to England, I carried on serving on the Guardian’s Grave Committee and Rúhíyyih Khánum started contacting me when she was in England and wanted to go to pray at the Guardian’s Grave and I would meet her and take her there. And so, I was very privileged to be there when she was praying. You always let Rúhíyyih Khánum go on her own first to say her prayers, and then she would signal for you to go and say some prayers with her.
I can’t remember which time we said what. They all become one event almost, but there were various things I remember.
One was when I was leaving the Guardian’s Grave, I walked backwards from the column to the gate. She looked at me and said, “Peter, why do you walk backwards from the shrine?” And I said, “Because that’s how I’ve seen other people do it.” And she said, that’s the way the Persians tend to do it. There is absolutely no need, and if you walk backwards over these broken bricks, the likelihood is you’ll fall over and then you will look really silly.”
Another time we went there and it must have been raining very hard and there was dirt all up the column and over the plinth. And so she sent me off to get a bucket and cloth. I was standing on the path, leaning across trying to get at the column to clean it. She looked at me and said, “Peter, what are you doing?” I said, “Trying to clean.” She said, “You know, it’d be much easier if you just walked on the plinth and then cleaned the column. Shoghi Effendi won’t mind you walking on the plinth.”
She was evidently practical, and did show how one has to be practical, and that you don’t have to take the spiritual side so seriously.
Which reminds me, one of the things I asked her was, “When do you think that the Baháʼís in the United Kingdom will have mass declaration?” She looked at me and said, “You know, it will be when they learn to not take themselves so seriously. If they went out and had fun, they would attract many other people to them, some of whom may become Baháʼís and that would lead to greater numbers in the faith.” Which again, I think was very interesting. Go and enjoy yourself and you will see that your sheer enjoyment will attract people.
Another time, we’d already been to the Guardian’s grave and had left. I can’t remember where we were going, but it was a Sunday. This was back in the days when there weren’t that many restaurants around, and certainly not open on a Sunday. Rúhíyyih Khánum wanted to have lunch before going very far, and eventually she said to me, “Peter, why haven’t we stopped for lunch yet?” And I said, “Because I haven’t been able to find a restaurant. She said, “Well, you’ve driven past all these pubs, and I’m sure they serve food.” And I said, “But I didn’t think you’d want to go into a pub.” She said, “If Shoghi Effendi and I hadn’t gone to pubs to eat, we’d have starved in England.” Again, very practical.
At another time, I’d been to the Guardian’s grave with her and Violette Nakhjavani, and afterwards, they took me around the Victoria and Albert Museum, because she (Rúhíyyih Khánum) particularly loved Chinese art, and they’ve got a wonderful display of it. She was teaching me all about the different Chinese pottery and stuff. That day, we spent virtually the whole day together, which was really lovely.
I was invited to dinner with her and the National Assembly (of the United Kingdom) on one occasion. I can’t remember why in particular. She was taking the mickey out of Philip Hainsworth unmercifully, particularly about when he first turned up to Haifa in his military shorts, and how shocked the Persian Baháʼís were. She was also telling a lot of stories about Shoghi Effendi: Once she wanted to cook Shoghi Effendi and the pilgrims a meal and most of the food they had there was Persian food, because Shoghi Effendi had a Persian chef. But she decided she was going to do an American dish, which was turkey with all the trimmings, which in America included corn cakes. I don’t really know what a corn cake is, but I understand it crumbles quite easily. At the end of the meal, Shoghi Effendi had left his corn cake, and she said to him, “Are you not going to eat your corn cake?” And he said, “I’m not going to touch anything I can’t control!”
I think I was very privileged to see her as many times as I did.
On another occasion, she wanted to go for a Persian meal, and at that time, there was a Persian restaurant in Knightsbridge. It was right on the corner of the road and it was all glass fronted. We sat down at the table and ordered. When we looked out the window, and there were three teenage Baháʼís walking down the street, including Roxanne Djalili. Rúhíyyih Khánum looked up and said, “I think we’ve been seen … I’d better wave them in.” So she waved them in and spoke to them, I can’t remember saying what, and then sort of said, “Now, we must get on with our lunch.”
On the last day of the Paris convention, I was sharing a room with Keith Monroe at the time. The telephone rang and I presumed it was for Keith as he was on the National Assembly. It wasn’t. It was Rúhíyyih Khánum asking for me, and asking if I would like to accompany her around Paris the next day. Unfortunately, I couldn’t change my arrangements, so I couldn’t do that. But it was a lovely thought.
I was talking to her about how difficult it is to understand and accept all the teachings. “Well, Peter,” she said, “I don’t understand why we have to be buried.” She said, “I would much prefer to be cremated, and my ashes floated down the River Ganges. However, I will have to obey.” She also said, “If I happen to die within the distance of the Guardian’s grave, I would like to be buried under the step leading up to the plinth.”
At one time, it was after she’d had a meeting in London and I was with her, I just mentioned that my mother would love to be able to come and see her at a convention, but because of the situation at home, she couldn’t. The next day, my mother got a phone call from Rúhíyyih Khánum to wish her luck and generally had short chat with her, which shows how much she cared about people on an individual level.
I got letters from Rúhíyyih Khánum to let me know that she was in the country and would like to go to the Guardian’s Graves Committee. There was always a paragraph saying, please don’t let other people know where I am staying. These letters are now with the National Assembly.
A lot of the letters were just saying, I think I would prefer geraniums to begonias and things like that. Practical things. Very practical. She didn’t want the wall scraped of all its moss with wire brushes, just to gently flick it away, so that the wall had texture to it.
I can’t remember where we were going, but Nara Sherwani must have been driving, and I was in the car, and there was Rúhíyyih Khánum and Violette Nakhjavani, myself. Nara Sherwani was a very active Baháʼí. He had a nice mauve Rolls-Royce. So sometimes we picked up Rúhíyyih Khánum in the Rolls-Royce. On one occasion, we didn’t go in the RollsRoyce, we went in some other vehicle, and she was very disappointed because she had deliberately put on a nice mauve dress to match the car.
Once we were in the car and Violette Nakhjavani said to me, “Peter, when are you going to get married?” And Rúhíyyih Khánum turned around and said, “I don’t think Peter’s the marrying kind.” and left it at that.
I think she realised I was shy, and was a bit overawed being in her presence, and so she was very gentle.
One of the times we went there was just before she went on the Green Light Expedition up the Amazon. She went there to pray for the trip, and got me to say the Tablet of Ahmad for her. And it was special.
We took the King of Samoa (Malietoa Tanumafili II), a very big gentleman, to the Guardian’s Grave, and I was sat between two of his guards. They were very big. It was quite large vehicle, but I was still very much squashed by them. I can’t remember whether Rúhíyyih Khánum was there or not, but it’s quite likely she would have been. Obviously members of the National Spiritual Assembly were there too.
Partly in connection with the International Travel Teaching International Goals Committee that I was on, and partly because of just being invited, Enayat Rohani took me to meet Dr Muhájir for dinner when he was staying in London. But whilst there, Enayat kept saying, “Peter, ask Dr Muhájir what you asked me the other day.” I eventually said to him, not really knowing him, and not knowing his views, I said, “I often go teaching the Faith in the pubs, because in England I can only really think of that as a good place to meet new people. Do you think that’s OK?” And he said, “That strikes me is being very sensible, because in England it is difficult to find groups of people outside of pubs, or outside of areas which sell alcohol, so go ahead, keep doing it … Just don’t tell the Persians!” I really can’t remember much more about that evening, but it was interesting.
Bearwood Summer School
There was something we did which was a bit naughty. Mary Hardy and I, and a number of other people, were preparing the Bearwood Summer School, which was a last minute thing because the Schools’ Committee hadn’t managed to get one off the ground. The two Baháʼí communities in, Maidenhead and Henley, got together and hired Bearwood College.
We thought, “Wouldn’t it be nice to have some Hands of the Cause and members of the House of Justice to give talks.” So, we wrote directly to them instead of going through the National Spiritual Assembly … Slapped wrists all round. But we did invite Rúhíyyih Khánum who did come.
And somewhere, there’s a lovely picture of Rúhíyyih Khánum with everybody around her. She was sitting next to Richard St. Barbe Baker. And I was also sitting next to her, and that was special again.
The two members of the House of Justice who came were David Hoffman and Ian Semple, both of whom were given work duties (everyone attending had work duties). So, there were talks going on while peeling potatoes and washing dishes and things, which was quite amazing. From that summer school, we sent many, many tens of travel teachers out, both nationally and internationally. I think it was a very special time for us.
When we were doing the Bearwood Summer School, Enayat, who was secretary of the NSA at the time, said he couldn’t possibly find time to come to the school because he was much too busy, so we hired a van and it was particularly Dobby (Stephen Robinson) and Richard and Charlie Boyle who did it. They moved various items from Enayat’s office at Rutland Gate, along with his current files, and set him up at Bearwood, so he didn’t have any excuse not to attend some things. I’m not quite certain how well that went down, but he was “bullied” into attending.
On Being Gay
When Enayat Rawhani was secretary of the National Assembly, I was having trouble with the Faith, as were most gay Baháʼís were at that time. We were not treated particularly well by most of the Baháʼí community, and, as I was being put on more and more committees and being asked to do more and more for the Faith, I made up my mind that I should at least let the NSA know.
I had a meeting with Enayat and Philip Hainsworth, and I told them. Enayat had two comments. One was, “What, you don’t like the look of ladies’ ankles?!” And the other one was, “If you can cope with being a member of two persecuted minorities, then we can cope with you.”
When I went on my second pilgrimage, I spoke to David Hoffman and Ian Semple about being gay, and they were quite happy about having gay people within the Faith.
But overall, it didn’t take away the rough edges of trying to live a life within two very diverse communities at the time. When I became ill with very severe glandular fever and had to leave the committees, I took the decision not to be so involved in national items.
Glandular Fever
I was very badly hurt, because I was off sick for nine months from work, which shows that it was quite severe and during that time, not one Baháʼí visited me, not even from my own community. I’m afraid that left a very bitter taste in my mouth. So, I just carried on serving on the Local Spiritual Assembly.
Maidenhead Consultative Community Council
I also helped set up the Maidenhead Consultative Community Council, which was largely an interfaith group, but somewhat more than just that. We did a lot to help keep Maidenhead from becoming an area of prejudice. We organised such things as trips to every religion’s temples and places of worship, including to the Baháʼí Centre in Rutland Gate. And they all said how wonderful the Baháʼí Centre was, and how it felt so spiritual. It was just after it had been redecorated so it had a very smiley face on. I can’t remember which members of the National Spiritual Assembly briefed us, but there were several.
Every year we organised a social event where all the different religions put on some form of singing or dancing, and also then had food laid on. We would have an average of three to four hundred people turn up to the house.
I was working with Shreela Flather, who was then the first Asian lady mayor in England. She was the one that helped us set up the Community Council, and got it agreed that the mayor had an obligation to attend at least some of our meetings. She was then made a Baroness, and we introduced her to members of the National Spiritual Assembly. Because she was very impressed with the Faith, she agreed that, if we ever needed anybody to represent the Baháʼís in the House of Lords, she would do so.
Breakdown
So, I did carry on for a long time. In fact, I carried on until I had a breakdown, because of various things. It was following my breakdown that I was advised by my psychiatrist to leave the Faith, because he saw it as a large part of my stress. But even though you leave the Faith, you don’t really leave the Faith. You carry on believing, you just don’t participate … in my view.
I took part in a lot of the local amateur dramatic and musical societies, where I was involved in on average five shows a year. And of course doing that, you meet people and they get to know that you’re Baháʼí. I was mostly backstage. I didn’t like getting on stage very much. But it was another way of meeting people.
Sports Therapist
And of course I’ve worked. Now, as far as your work goes, I worked at
Jealot’s Hill for 32 years, and then when I retired from there, due to ill health,
(that was when I had my breakdown). I then retrained to do personal training in sports therapy, where I had quite a successful 17 or 18 year period of treating people … some rich and famous, some not so rich and famous, and feel I carried on helping people during that period.
In 2008, I went as the sports therapist with an English team doing the Race Across America, which is a 3000 mile cycle race from Oceanside in California to Annapolis in Maryland. The cyclists on there were Matthew Wilson, Richard Ball, Clyde Middleton and Greg White. We raised a lot of money on that tour for Cardiac Risk in the Young.
Greg is a triple Olympian for pentathlon and the others are medalists in various other sports events. And that was an amazing. We did the trip in ten days. I was in an RV where I was massaging and helping to cook the meals and all that sort of thing.
Cancer
And then, five years ago (2020), I was diagnosed with bone marrow cancer … a very rare form of it, where the genes keep mutating, and more and more genes mutate, until you’re not producing any haemoglobin or any white blood cells or neutrophils. At that time, when I realised that my time was getting shorter, I decided to contact people I hadn’t seen or heard from for many years as part of my bucket list.
The first person that I contacted was Thelma Batchelor, who I knew was the font of all knowledge, and she was able to find some of the people I was looking for. I’ve been able to see quite a lot of them.
I gave up the sports therapy just before the Christmas before last (2023). I was so ill by then that the effort of massaging was making me a vomit over my clients, and they preferred that I didn’t!
I have managed to put together my funeral service, and I’ve got lovely Baháʼís to help me with the funeral, as my immediate executors know nothing much about the Faith.
So I feel that I have committed quite a lot of my life to the Faith.
So now, and that brings us right up to this present day. I’m sure I’ve missed out a lot. I’m going down very slowly, but I am going down.
Peter Stratton July 2025
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