I was born Ann Margaret Baker in 1950 in Sheldon, Birmingham. My parents weren’t particularly religious, though I think they both believed in God. Religion was never talked about in our family, except my mother once told me that she used to go to a nonconformist church when she was young, but left because they only seemed to be after money (which was strange, as she didn’t have any!). Both my parents were very poor as children, but our life became generally more comfortable as my father worked his way up through the Post Office in Birmingham.

As was the way in the 1950s, I was taught about Christianity at school in “Scripture” lessons, which mainly involved stories from the Old and New Testaments. I always believed in God and in Jesus and at the age of eight I asked my parents if I could go to Sunday School at our parish church. One of my friends already went. I loved the hymns and prayers but was bored with the Bible stories as I knew them already, so eventually I left, probably after a year or two. I continued to be a follower of Christ and found religion very helpful to me over the next few years as I started to grow up. I had a code of behaviour and a spiritual aspect to life. I always wished I had lived in the time of Christ, though I was realistic enough to know that I probably wouldn’t have had the courage to follow Him!

At grammar school in Solihull (Malvern Hall) we continued to have Religious Education lessons, all about Christianity, except that we had one lesson on each of the other main religions. I remember that the RE teacher (a keen Christian) just made fun of Muhammad and Buddha and we actually learned very little, but later on I went to the local library (a frequent haunt) and borrowed lots of books about different religions. I read through them and decided that although it seemed to me that there was truth in every religion, Christianity was the one I thought was right. I then read through lots more books about the different denominations of Christianity and decided that Methodism was the one I wanted to get involved with. At that time they didn’t believe in smoking, drinking or gambling, and this attracted me. I always was a bit of a puritan! At the age of 15 I decided I wanted to go to church. I have always been very shy, so the prospect of just turning up at a church terrified me. One of my school friends happened to be a Methodist, so I stayed overnight with her one weekend and went to their church on the Sunday morning. I liked it, so then I plucked up the courage to go to my local one, about 10 minutes’ walk from our house. I enjoyed the simplicity of the church, the variety of preachers, and I gained a lot from it, though I never actually became a member, i.e. confirmed.

When I was almost 17 I met Paddy Vickers (later to be my husband) at a school dance. We bumped into each other again soon after, at a Christian Unity service at Solihull School. We both felt it was wrong that Christians were not united. After that we started to go out together. We had similar ideals, especially a concern for the world, and Paddy was also a Christian, but he went to his local parish (Anglican) church.

We went to each other’s churches on alternate weeks, but I really didn’t enjoy the “High Church” kind of worship at his church and we eventually stopped going to either, though we carried on going to a Christian youth club in Solihull. I gradually drifted away from God, largely because I didn’t understand why the innocent suffer. Strangely enough, many years later I wrote a leaflet on this very subject following an article by our local vicar in the parish magazine, who obviously hadn’t got a clue either, but of course by then I had understood Bahá’u’lláh’s explanation and wanted to share it!

We got engaged on my 19^th birthday and that summer, Paddy, who was training to be a teacher, went for a few weeks to France as part of his course; for details see his story.  Whilst there, he wrote me a letter telling me all about this new religion he had found, called the Bahá’í Faith. I wasn’t impressed. As far as I was concerned, it was his third craze that year – the previous ones being flying saucers and the Loch Ness monster! However, this craze lasted longer, and when he came back we started going to Bahá’í firesides in Hall Green (Birmingham) at the home of Patrick and Patricia Green. The people were all very nice and many of the teachings were attractive, though it did all seem quite strange and foreign. There were many strange sects around at that time (e.g. Children of God, Divine Light Mission) but these Bahá’ís seemed genuine enough. The explanation of progressive revelation particularly made sense to me as to how all the religions could be true. It explained the history of the world. I had never been very convinced by Christian theology such as the Trinity or Original Sin, or even the Resurrection. It seemed rather irrelevant to me. It was Christ’s teachings which were important, so that side of things wasn’t a problem. However, I was puzzled why I had never heard of the Bahá’ís before, as I thought I had investigated all the religions, and for a long time I was hoping I would come across a reference to the Faith from somewhere else other than the Bahá’ís, so I could cross-check it. Unfortunately for me it never happened!

At that time most people had never heard of Iran and Iraq (how things have changed since!), but at school we had learnt a little about most of the countries of the world and I remembered those names because they were only one letter different, and we had learned about their earlier history as Persia and Mesopotamia in our school history lessons. The Israeli city of Haifa was also unknown to most British people, but the name was very familiar to me, as my father had been stationed there during the Second World War. He was in the RAF, working with radar, and stayed near the Stella Maris monastery. I have several photos of him and his friends while they were there, showing the typical bare rocky ground of Mount Carmel, but no other features. When we first went on Bahá’í pilgrimage we were taken to the area near the monastery, which was an interesting experience.

Meanwhile, Paddy became a Bahá’í very quickly. I am much more cautious and it took me more than 2 years. I kept setting myself goals that if I still wanted to be a Bahá’í in, say, 3 months, then I would declare. I wanted to be sure with my head as well as my heart. Unfortunately something always happened to put me off! When Rocky Grove became a Bahá’í, I felt very pleased that he was joining us – then I suddenly realised that I still wasn’t actually a Bahá’í myself!

I had set myself another of these goals, that I would declare on my birthday (which was a Bahá’í Feast day) if I still felt it was right. On the 8^thand 9^th January 1972 the National Teaching Conference took place at the Midland Hotel in Birmingham. Paddy and I had got married about 6 months before and still lived in Birmingham (in Quinton). Paddy sold Bahá’í books locally on behalf of the Local Spiritual Assembly so he was asked to run the conference bookstall. This was a different affair in those days. There were only a handful of books available and I think we had 2 or 3 small tables in the corner of a side room. Actually getting the books was the difficulty. I don’t remember the details now but I do recall being distinctly unimpressed with the arrangements. There was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing. Someone was supposed to be bringing them down to us but they didn’t arrive until fairly late on the Friday evening. Then we discovered the books had no prices marked, so we set to work making little stand-up price signs out of bits of cardboard. I remember thinking “This lot need organising!”. Being a very organised person myself, I never understood why other people weren’t. I have mellowed (a bit!) over the years. So anyway, I helped sell the books over the weekend. During the Saturday, people went out teaching in the Bull Ring, in the centre of Birmingham, and in the evening there was a public showing of the film “It’s Just the Beginning” at Dr Johnson House (owned by the Society of Friends). I went to see the film and decided there was no reason for me to wait the 11 remaining days till my birthday, and declared my faith that evening. One of the reasons I took so long to enrol was that I knew it would have to be a complete commitment, so I had to be absolutely sure.

I was elected to the Spiritual Assembly of Birmingham fairly quickly. Paddy was the secretary of the Assembly and I was secretary of the local teaching committee, Paddy sold books and I looked after the lending library. Together we produced a monthly newsletter on an old Gestetner copying machine which someone gave us. We took part in various teaching projects in Birmingham. The first unit conventions took place in the February after I became a Bahá’í. Ours was at Dr Johnson House. Before that, apparently, the delegates had been chosen by the members of the Local Assemblies rather than elected at Unit Convention.

We went to the youth conference in Padua in Italy, to another conference in Paris, and on our first pilgrimage in 1974. I remember clambering up to the top of the gardens on Mount Carmel, which was quite a steep climb. It’s now much easier, as there are steps! We went again in 2001 and it all looked very different from our first visit. No more bare, rocky ground, but beautiful gardens everywhere. We also attended the second Bahá’í World Congress in New York in 1992. My most precious memory of that is hearing the recording of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá chanting a prayer.

As part of the first Five Year Plan (1974-1979), Birmingham Bahá’í Community was given the goal of forming an Assembly in the Warwick District. Paddy and I had been trying to pioneer overseas, but nothing had worked out, so we decided to move to Leamington Spa (in Warwick district) instead. We could do that quickly just by moving house, as we could commute to our jobs for a while until we found new ones. We chose Leamington because it has a busy train station, so I would be able to get to work in Solihull, as I didn’t drive. I had no idea what the town was like. So one Saturday when Paddy was at a meeting of the National Teaching Committee, I went to Leamington on the train to visit estate agents and find out about the place. I was astonished to find how beautiful it was, with the Georgian architecture and parks and gardens in the middle of the shopping centre. Much nicer than Birmingham – it was no sacrifice at all!

Two years later, in 1977, the Warwick (district) Assembly was formed. We were all pioneers from elsewhere, but we gradually found new Bahá’ís to join us. We were mostly young and so were able to do many things, including taking part in the Leamington and Kenilworth carnivals every year in a variety of costumes! Meanwhile Paddy started selling books on behalf of Warwick Assembly, which is how the Warwick Bahá’í Bookshop began, and gradually became our main life’s work. We moved a few miles away to Southam in 1983, as Warwick’s goal was to form an Assembly in Stratford-on-Avon district. When this eventually happened I became the Assembly secretary. Despite no longer living in Warwick district, we kept the Bookshop name the same to avoid confusion. Around that time, Paddy and I served on the Bahá’í Publishing Trust committee for several years. My job was to assess the manuscripts which had been submitted for publication.

When our daughter Helena (now Hastie) was 12, she joined the national Youthquake dance group and then went on to form a similar group in the Midlands. Paddy and I found ourselves organising tours in the UK. I remember hearing how one similar group had gone to Eastern Europe and I was lost in admiration. The following year we found ourselves doing the same thing! We went to Poland that time, the other adults with us were Rocky Grove and Brigitte Beales. The next year we went to the Czech Republic, swapping Rocky for Arthur Kendall. On both trips we stopped en route at the Bahá’í House of Worship near Frankfurt. Paddy and I have also been lucky enough to visit the House of Worship in Wilmette, Illinois on two occasions.

In 1998 Helena returned from a Year of Service in South Africa with great enthusiasm for teaching. We had a week-long project for junior youth in Southam and 5 girls aged 13 to 14 became Bahá’ís. Over the next couple of years we had quite a few people become Baha’is – adults, youth and children – from Southam and the surrounding villages. Despite our best efforts, Paddy and I were unable to properly deepen them all. Some drifted away, but most actually moved away before we were able to really deepen them. That experience made us realise how necessary the Ruhi and junior youth books were when they arrived sometime afterwards. We also had the benefit of the experience of Helena, who was by then living in London, where they had much more of a vision of what the Ruhi books were trying to achieve.

Shortly after, I was appointed to the Training Institute for England. I was told that this was largely because of our experience with junior youth, plus the fact that I was familiar with computers. I had trained as a computer programmer after leaving school and I spent my entire working life in the profession. The Institute had just been told to merge its own courses with the Ruhi ones and so we spent a lot of time on that process. Unfortunately it was a very frustrating time because no-one really knew what we were supposed to be doing. This was because it was a time of transition, culminating in the introduction of the Ruhi system. When my service on the Board finished, I then spent a much more productive and satisfying year helping the Board by keeping computer statistics on the people who were being trained to be tutors!

It was probably because of that experience that, when clusters were first set up, I was appointed as area co-ordinator for our cluster of Solihull and South Warwickshire, and also for that of the neighbouring cluster of Coventry and North Warwickshire. At the time there were no other cluster agencies and my main task was to match tutors and participants from amongst the Bahá’ís in order for people to go through the sequence and become tutors. I also organised cluster meetings and kept statistics on core activities. When the clusters were made larger, I became the area co-ordinator for the West Midlands cluster, which included Birmingham and the Black Country plus the two areas I had previously served. I eventually gave this up several months after the Area Teaching Committee was appointed. At this stage, the emphasis for my role was on encouraging the use of the arts in core activities and I realised that different skills were now needed, which someone else could provide much better than me!

We held children’s classes in Southam for some time, later we had a junior youth group for several years as an after-school club at the local secondary school (where Paddy taught). Our daughter Helena was the national co-ordinator for children’s classes and junior youth groups at the time. This was in the early years, and she started this after-school club, which we continued. However, because the students came not just from Southam but from the surrounding villages and even further afield, this was never really able to be a proper community group. We did take them on a camping weekend a few miles away and we do believe that we were able to help their progress to some extent. It was all part of the learning of the time.

We held weekly firesides throughout our married life. These became devotional meetings which continue to this day, although as I write they are online because of the Covid19 pandemic. We have also tutored many study circles, these have paused temporarily for the same reason. Much of our teaching work is online anyway as we don’t get out to see people much nowadays. Paddy has a Bahá’í blog (which I edit) and runs a number of groups on Facebook.

I had to give up work at the age of 52 because of a back problem, which continues to make many things difficult, but so far we have managed to carry on with the Bookshop, having branched out into publishing – first leaflets, then games and small books. I love nothing more than writing (or compiling) fairly simple books and leaflets, in the hope of trying to convey the message of Bahá’u’lláh in words which the average person can understand easily. I also enjoy the artistic side, designing the covers. When I was young I used to be a volunteer helping adults who had never learned to read properly, and then those for whom English was a second language, so I have always realised the importance of simple, straightforward language. I also recently remembered that when I was a child, I loved reading classic novels, particularly Jane Austen, and I always wanted to be an author. It’s strange how life turns out – that so much of my time has been spent in writing, editing, publishing and selling books!

I am just very grateful that I came across the Bahá’í Faith at a young age. I missed Christ coming again by a few decades but it has been a great privilege to be a part of these relatively early and exciting years. I am also very grateful to have shared my Bahá’í life with Paddy, my wonderful husband of nearly 50 years now. We make a great team and I hope we can continue to serve together throughout all the worlds of God.

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Ann Vickers

Warwickshire, November 2020