For some the method seemed too slow, yet it had the virtue of facing both personal and social problems, of filling, in Day Lewis' words, 'the hollow in the breast where a God should be'6.

The majority of those who composed the Oxford Group had not experienced Elliott's dilemma. The relative morality which had pene trated the Oxford poets was only beginning to affect the average undergraduate. Many had become agnostics - or nominal Christians - because they had never seen Christianity whole-heartedly lived out, but had been held back from 'the moral slum' of which Spender wrote concerning himself by the standards of their parents or a sneaking feeling that Christianity, if it were possible, was the right way to live. Most Oxford undergraduates had read the Bible - all at that time had to pass an examination on the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles - and many of those who responded to Buchman's ideas saw in his Oxford friends the nearest thing to the Acts which they had encountered.

So, between 1931 and 1935, about a hundred and fifty undergraduates (myself among them), together with the Chaplains of Corpus, Hertford and Lincoln Colleges, and an occasional professor, met at 1.30 each day, between a hurried bread-and-cheese lunch and the afternoon's sport. The variety was wide though, from the nature of Oxford then, mainly middle-class. Harry Addison, the son of a clerk in a small coal agency in Sunderland, came from Newcastle University with the best classical degree of his year: painfully shy, a passionate scholar, wholly apolitical. Ray Nelson was the ebullient leader of a jazz band, with a penchant for railway timetables. Charis Waddy was the first woman to study oriental languages at the University. John Morrison had already studied theology at New College, Edinburgh, and in Germany under Barth and Bultmann. Kit Prescott, a rowing member of a famous rugby football family, narrowly collected a pass degree and left a string of transformed lives behind him.

The whole mobilisation, though very much in earnest, was conducted with a certain humorous abandon. In one college there was a sweepstake initiated by the 'unchanged' as to who would be 'changed' next. Prescott, spying an Oxford Mail poster 'Oxford Stroke Changed' in the weeks leading up to the Boat Race, acquired half a dozen and nailed them on the doors of his rowing friends in college. One young man who had heard that Roland Wilson was trying to be 'guided by God' followed him for a day to see where he went.

Paul Petrocokino, a faintly Wodehousian figure, who sported a leopard-skin waistcoat and composed in the manner of Handel, remem- bers the rumour in Exeter College that a certain high-spirited maiden, who always toured Oxford on a bicycle with a dog attached, had succumbed.

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