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Unsung Heroes
David and Alma Pinkney, who celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary earlier this summer, have been responsible for recording and reproducing talks from the very earliest days of the CCR.
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“I have never given a talk myself,” says David Pinkney, still agile and humorous despite his 94 years, “but I reckon over the years I must have recorded, duplicated or sent out 180,000 tapes of talks!” He and his wife, 91 year Alma, probably not known to many people, have for over 40 years, run a tape recording and duplicating ministry first from a caravan in their garden and then later, from their small retirement home in Harpenden, only stopping permanently a few years ago. Now there are many established tape ministries helping to promote and spread the insights of the charismatic renewal, but it was all very new when the Pinkneys first began. David had given his life to the Lord when he was 58. “Before that I wasn’t interested. I thought it was a lot of rubbish and hadn’t been to church since I was confirmed. But then I got renal TB and had to spend five and half months in hospital. I started reading the bible a bit and got fascinated by it. He then was also very struck by listening to the radio recording of Dorothy Sawyer’s play, “The Man Born to be King”, which had a profound effect on him. He formally gave his life to the Lord at a day led by Michael Harper, (then a charismatic Anglican curate now an Orthodox priest), and insisted on being baptised again in the local swimming pool by their parish rector Reg East. It wasn’t until a couple of years later, though, he explains that he was baptised in the Holy Spirit. “ Alma and I had come back from a conference at Brunel Manor and I was absolutely exhausted by the driving, so Alma drove our guest home and I went to have a bath. And Jesus baptised me in the spirit in the bath.” Jesus dunked me in the Holy Spirit and He has never taken me out When Alma came home he waltzed her round and round the dining room in excitement. She comments, “If I hadn’t known better I would have thought he was drunk.” “Yes,” adds David, “Jesus dunked me in the Holy Spirit and he has never taken me out. It’s right there in all the four gospels and in the book of Acts and all the churches have picked it up.” He credits giving his life to Jesus and baptism in the Holy Spirit as the secret of his longevity. “It was like a load coming off my shoulders. I was at the end of my tether with business and home and everything.” Alma had been baptised in the spirit herself at another meeting about a year before. Here she had received the gift of joy. “I couldn’t stop laughing,” she remembers. “David was very embarrassed and tried to hustle me out of the hall and back home.” When they became committed Christians their marriage received a new lease of life. At a retreat at High Leigh they were given a scripture that has remained special for the rest of their married life. This was Ecclesiastes 4.12 “A three ply cord is not easily broken.” David comments, “I never realised before that you can’t plait two cords together because they unravel. You have to have 3 cords and that is the secret – to have Jesus in your marriage.” And in an appropriately romantic gesture, his 70th anniversary gift for Alma was a three cord chain, which he had especially made for her. At the beginning of the charismatic renewal, people were hungry to know more and Michael Harper had begun recording a lot of the early talks. At the beginning it was all done on reel. David remembers, “Then he wanted to go onto cassettes and asked us to help, as I have an engineering background. He bought an American copier.” The first conference they recorded was in 1960 at High Leigh and it went on from there. In the beginning they recorded first on reel and then made copies on cassette. In the middle of recording a conference, David got the sack from his work, so he was invited to join the team led by Reg East at Balcombe House conference centre, where he ended up being general fix it man, rewiring the house, and carrying on the recording and duplicating ministry in the basement. Anti-Catholic background Initially this was a very long process, as the copiers were very slow. Things were revolutionised when Michael Harper bought a high speed copier from the USA. This they borrowed on several occasions but when there was a clash between an event that Michael Harper was organising and one organised by their friend Bob Balkam, they decided to buy their own high speed copiers and thus began their special relationship with Catholic Charismatic Renewal, for whom they recorded many of the early events. David comments, “It’s ironic really because both Alma and I come from very anti-Catholic backgrounds, but it has been a real blessing for us and we love the Catholic Charismatic Renewal and the people we met in it over the years.” This led them all over the British Isles and over to Ireland where they had many misadventures and generally learnt their trade. “We soon learnt,” says David that it was better to have a cheap directional microphone to record the talk as the good quality microphones picked up too much background noise.” Their most ambitious recording event was one in Cardiff where they found themselves having to record 10 talks simultaneously and having to make their own microphone stands out of sticks and pudding bowls fi lled with concrete. Not only this, the conference was on three floors and they were in the basement and, with the only lift constantly in use, they were exhausted. To make matters worse of the 520 copies they made, only 40 were sold. David recalls, “ Normally we always asked the Lord which conferences we should do, but with this one we hadn’t. This really taught us a lesson and afterwards we were much more careful about saying “yes” to things. You only have one chance to record something They had various misadventures including David finding himself locked in almost the whole night in one of the college buildings they were duplicating in, when he had to work late one evening. Because of the dangers of mechanical failure or other technical hitches, they always made two recordings of any talk. David comments, “You only have one chance to record something. If something goes wrong, that‘s it, it is lost forever.” This proved invaluable on several occasions when things did go wrong. But even then the Lord often helped. David recalls one particular event when they were recording Jean Vanier in the early days. They had carefully set up a microphone near the chair from which he was due to speak, but at the last minutes, Jean gallantly gave it to someone else and sat on the floor with his back to the microphone. “Amazingly,” David recalls, “ the sound was perfect, even though he was sitting with his back to the microphone.” They did experiment with videoing talks but this was not a success. David comments, “We didn’t have strong enough lights, so the quality was often not good enough and in the beginning very few people had video recorders to watch them on”. Eventually they gave up recording talks because of the weight of the equipment and their advancing years, but continued the duplicating side, only giving up doing those for the London Day of Renewal a few years ago, but they still maintain an interest in what goes on and are as on fire with the gospel as they always were, and a wonderful example of how those who love God never get old, but remain forever young.
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