Writer, broadcaster and  Vice-President of the British Humanist Association Claire Rayner explains why Miss Peach, her teacher at school, is her humanist hero.

Claire Rayner OBE

Her name was Miss Peach. I’m sure she had another name to go with it but that was all I knew. She was my Fourth Form Mistress. As such she always took the first period of the day, which back in those very unreconstructed early nineteen forties was always RK. Religious Knowledge, the boredom! We all hated it when we first started it with a different teacher who went on and on very boringly about the Acts of the Apostles. I used the time imagining my grandmother’s teaspoons bobbing about the shores of the Mediterranean.

But then Miss Peach took over and it was a real revelation. She talked of morality and what it was and best of all, let us talk about it and tell her what we thought. She told us about great men (much more interesting than boring old Apostles, we thought!) such as Tom Paine; and she quoted his wonderful reply to someone who quizzed him about his religion and his patriotism. He said ‘My country is the world, and my religion is to do good’. I fell in love with the corset maker of Thetford on the spot and read all of his books that Miss Peach could get for me. And yes, she encouraged such reading, even if some of her colleagues in the staff room would no doubt have accused her of teaching eleven years olds sedition.

She told us about Mary Wollstonecraft (I never could spell it without looking it up and I still can’t!) and her follow up to Tom Paine’s Rights of Man with her own Rights of Women. She told us about the clergyman’s wife, Mrs. Gaskell and her amazing books which made a great many Victorians sit up and think as she depicted life for girls who became pregnant outside wedlock, and the misery of the existence of ordinary Midlands people. She gave me the poems of Walt Whitman to read, and I found the line that made me into an atheist and anti monarchist in the same moment (a line in Whitman’s poem Leaves of Grass reads “I think I could turn and live with animals; they are so placid and self contained. They do not bow down and worship one of their own kind–” I knew at once that the God pushers and King Worshipers were all wrong, wrong, wrong.)

When it came to the end of term test on RK she was wonderfully shameless. She told us never to tell anyone about it, and trusted us to not to, and spent the last lesson before the exam telling us exactly what answers to give, so we all got Alphas, except for one or two with bad memories who got Beta plusses which was considered fine.

Miss Peach taught me that there was another world to the conventional worlds we lived in with its conventional thoughts and conventional beliefs. She taught me how to be myself, and I shall always be grateful to her.

This post is part of a series written by members, friends and Distinguished Supporters of the British Humanist Association about their own “humanist heroes”.

You can find out more at www.humanism.org.uk/humanism/humanist-tradition/heroes

Claire Rayner was President of the BHA from 1999 to 2004, and has been a Vice-President since 2004 and is a distinguised supporter. She is also an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Association. From knowing little about organised Humanism, she became a vigorous advocate of humanist philosophy and causes.