Chérisy Oram was born in London during the First World War. She was named after the French village of Chérisy, near Arras, where the regiment of her father Roy Oram, an army doctor, had been fighting on the day of her birth. Much of Chérie’s early childhood was spent in India, where her father was sent by the Royal Army Medical Corps before further postings to China, Palestine, Egypt, and Singapore. Chérie’s formal education was often interrupted, and included spells at boarding school in both India and England. After school she studied languages in Germany and Egypt, and quickly became fluent in French, German and Italian. In Egypt Chérie first met the Oxford Group, through which she found a new spiritual faith and sense of direction. She took a secretarial course and started working full-time for the Group at its London headquarters. After the outbreak of the Second World War, she moved with many of her co-workers to Tirley Garth, a country estate in Cheshire, where she joined a team of land girls growing vegetables by day, and helping run the relocated wartime Oxford Group centre at Tirley Garth in their time off.
In 1946 Chérie married Bill Conner, whom she had met when working together in London before the war. Both had already committed themselves to the mission to ‘remake the world’ through Moral Re-Armament (the name now given to the Oxford Group). Initially they lived in London and then Bristol with their two children: Patrick born in 1947 and Judi born in 1952. But once the children were school-age they travelled widely. Chérie’s language skills were useful across Europe, supporting the work of reconciliation between Germany and France, and in helping develop the international MRA conference centre at Caux in Switzerland. With Bill she helped prepare the way for a large MRA team to tour countries in the Middle East with the musical show The Vanishing Island. They visited the USA many times, and spent two years in Brazil, where Chérie quickly picked up fluent Portuguese.
From the mid-1960s onwards, Cherie was wholeheartedly supporting Bill on his mission to build bridges between the Arab countries and the West. Chérie playing a key role facilitating meetings, dinners, receptions and other events that helped bring people together. She was a talented cook and imaginative hostess. In the MRA centre in London she was known for preparing large weekly receptions for diplomats, cooking delicious Middle Eastern tagines for 50 guests all day, and then speedily changing into elegant evening attire to warmly welcome the guests. She could perhaps be regarded as typical of her generation of capable, energetic MRA women: proud of their role supporting and enabling their husband’s work, without regarding themselves as in the least submissive, exploited or unequal.
