Excommunicated: Two Centuries of Complicated Family History
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Craig Hoyle, author and journalist, August 2025. Image: Michael Jeans
Family history is rarely tidy and Craig Hoyle shows just how much the past can shape the present. In his memoir Excommunicated, the journalist does more than recount his painful departure from the Exclusive Brethren; he explores his grandfather George Hayward’s diaries and letters, tracing echoes of faith, control and belonging that span generations.
Hoyle shared these insights with a large gathering of Friends of Cambridge Museum and U3A members at an event held at Te Awa’s Woolshed last Friday. His talk wove together personal testimony and family archive, offering a rare glimpse into how silence and survival travel down bloodlines.
Craig recalled the powerful moment of first hearing his grandfather’s voice on an old family recording. On the tape, his grandmother Lottie and a man named George sang together.
“As I grew older, I started to connect the dots,” Craig reflects. “The man we’d heard in Grandma Lottie’s recordings was the mysterious George, the same person I’d been compared to as a child whenever I was rebellious.”
That discovery opened a window into the past, linking Craig’s own struggles with those of a man whose presence had been erased.
This quest to understand his grandfather’s experience played a significant role in Craig’s memoir Excommunicated, where he stitches together both their stories and the broader history of their family’s involvement with the Exclusive Brethren. Craig eventually met George for the first time in 2009 at a McDonald’s on Jervois Quay in Wellington. It was a poignant reunion, years after both had been estranged from their family by the brethren.
Their relationship became a pivotal reconnection. Craig’s discovery of George’s personal documents and their eventual meeting bridged a broken family connection through words and shared experience.
The result is a memoir that goes beyond personal confession. Excommunicated is an intimate study of how religion shapes identity, and how private voices demand to be heard. By placing past and present side-by-side, Hoyle reveals a continuum of survival, resilience, and the human need to be acknowledged.
For the Cambridge audience, Craig’s talk was a reminder of the value of preserving family histories, no matter how fragile or uncomfortable.
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