The Rt Rev Guli Dr Francis-Dehqani, the Bishop of Chelmsford, who arrived in the UK as a refugee in the wake of the Islamic Revolution of 1979, is among the candidates being considered to be the new Archbishop of Canterbury. She was born in Isfahan, Iran, in 1966. Her father Hassan Dehqani-Tafti (1920–2008) was the Anglican Bishop in Iran from 1961 until his retirement in 1990 who married Margaret Thompson, the Persian-born granddaughter of missionaries and daughter of Hassan’s predecessor as bishop. The couple had four children. Guli, the youngest, remembers a hospitable home and a happy if, in her words, unusual childhood.

Their former house is to be turned into a museum, according to the state-funded Mehr News Agency. As Article18 reported last year, the house was confiscated by order of an Islamic Revolutionary Court judge in November 1979 and stood empty for decades until it was taken over by a state organization in the past couple of years, and restored. Mehr says the museum will be “for public use and culture lovers” and will display “the art and history of the country”.

Reacting to the news, Guli Francis-Dehqani told Article18: “If it is to be a museum, I hope it will in some way reflect its history, which was that it used to belong to the Persian Christian Church. I had a very happy childhood in the Bishop’s House, which was my home and where I spent my formative years,” she said. “I have countless memories of so many people who passed through the doors – colleagues of my father, friends and many, many guests."