Andrew Stallybrass writes:
For many years, during the summer conferences in Caux, I worked on public relations and wrote ‘press releases’ and conference reports. In 1985, I received a letter from an Australian friend, noting that for those living ‘down under’, a trip to Caux might be a once-in-a-lifetime experience, due to distance and costs. But that many Australian ‘friends of Caux’ would love to live more closely into what was happening there during the summer, week by week, rather than waiting until long after the end of the conferences to read a printed report. This was the world before the Internet, social media, e-mail, Facebook… So I decided to get up long before breakfast every Monday morning, and to write a newsletter to friends. To have a first draft ready to check with those running the conferences by breakfast time, and then to get a team from the secretariat to send out the photocopied letter before lunchtime.
This became a much-appreciated tradition that continued, it seems, until 2004, latterly including a number of other writers, diarists. A number of copies were distributed around the house to the many ‘workers’ in the different departments who didn’t get to many meetings. And I also arranged weekly lunches with those of the paid staff who wanted to get a picture of who was in the centre and what was going on. I always reacted rather forcefully when people said things like, ‘You tell us all that’s going on.’ Clearly an impossibility in such a large and lively community. It was from the start, and remained, a very personal, partial venture, written with specific friends in mind. And one pretty regular feature of the letters was an up-date on the weather in Caux!
English