In the spring of 1929 Buchman sailed for Europe en route for South Africa. His only travelling companion was a Yale graduate called McGhee Baxter. Baxter was an alcoholic who had already been divorced, but he had met Buchman the previous autumn and resolved to make a fresh start. While only too aware of his continuing problems, Buchman had the highest hopes for him.

'M.,' he noted one morning, 'could step forward into triumphant leadership. What is needed is God's clear light into every nook and cranny of our lives. The sub-cellars and the coal-bin need cleaning out. Never lose God's care for M. Have M. share with you any of his lonely, waking hours . . . M. a witness of the Spirit.'

He took Baxter with him wherever he went that summer, to house- parties at Wallingford and Scheveningen in Holland, to Baden-Baden and the Hesse home in Germany. For much of the time, Baxter stayed sober and, when Buchman sailed for South Africa a fortnight before the main body of his team, Baxter again went with him.

It was an extraordinary decision. This was the first time Buchman had taken a team abroad under its new Oxford Group label. A great deal of criticism had already been levelled at him, and he knew perfectly well that he would again be the focus of considerable press and public interest when he arrived. He seems to have been ready to take risks which anyone intent on building a prestigious work would have thought reckless.

On the Arundel Castle Baxter was faced with all the delightful temptations of life on board ship. 'M. difficult,' Buchman noted one morning. 'Be prepared for the worst.' At the same time he knew that he would never help Baxter by trying to cramp and confine him - and had no intention of doing so. 'In all actions with M. the sky is the limit,' he wrote in a time of quiet.

The evening before they landed at Cape Town, Baxter slipped into a last-night party and, by next morning, was helplessly drunk. Buchman struggled to get him dressed before the ship docked and, while Baxter was led quietly from the ship by Loudon Hamilton, who had remained in South Africa from the previous year, he answered questions from the press. Even then he did not lose faith in Baxter, who in fact proved to be an effective, if erratic, member of Buchman's team throughout the three and a half months in South Africa.

One of the party of twenty-nine who joined Buchman was Eleanor Forde, whom Baxter had for some time been pursuing with proposals of marriage. Just after the main party arrived in Cape Town, they went for a walk on a beach together. An alert newspaperman photographed them; the picture appeared in his paper. Eleanor feared that the picture would give a wrong impression, at the outset, of Buchman and his group, and retired to her room in tears. An hour later, there was a knock at the door. Outside was Buchman, with a single red rose which he gave her without a word.

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Photo: In South Africa, 1929. McGhee Baxter (2nd left), Sherwood Day, George Daneel, Lily van Heeckeren (7th left), and Buchman (right).
©Rand Daily Mail