In the vacations the Oxford students - together with those from Cambridge and other universities - took part in campaigns in East London and other industrial areas, as well as taking initiative in their own towns.

Thus, in Scotland, the North-East, Yorkshire, the Midlands and South Wales teams grew round them, and as in East London they moved particularly with the workers. In Newcastle, Harry Addison enlisted the Lord Mayor, Will Locke, who was a miner, and his friends. In Scotland, the Glasgow students raised a team of unemployed shipyard workers. In Yorkshire it was, amongst others, a group of mill-girls, in Birmingham engineering workers, and in Wales shipyard workers and miners. Oxford students, reinforced by some from other universities, were at the heart of Buchman's large-scale ventures in Canada and Scandinavia in the mid-thirties, and many - for some forty to fifty per cent of the Oxford recruits took on the work full-time - pioneered teams of their own in various countries.

At the same time those who had opted for active moral relativism or Communism, or both, went on to play a major part in the intellectual life of Britain, and of the great majority who had joined the Communist Party and later left it, many looked back to their past with nostalgia, feeling, in Koestler's words, that 'never before or since then had life been so brimful of meaning'.12 Their ideas remained, in certain aspects, the antithesis of those the Oxford Group tried to practise, and in some among them the antipathy was so strong that they became active opponents in the coming decades.

Oxford had also become the centre of Buchman's activities in another way. Each year between 1930 and 1937 he hired one or more colleges for a house-party in the summer vacation. In 1930 it was a comparatively small affair at Lady Margaret Hall and St Hugh's. In the summer of 1933 5,000 guests turned up for some part of an event which filled six colleges and lasted seventeen days. Four main meetings ran simultaneously, with the principal speakers shuttling from one to the other; and a team of 400 met with Buchman at 7.30 each morning for training and to prepare the day. Almost 1,000 were clergy, including twelve bishops.

Even the relatively small numbers of 1930 caused some concern to Buchman's more cautious British associates. On 17 June he wrote to Eleanor Forde, recuperating from an illness in America, ‘I go on to Oxford tomorrow. They are paralysed by the number of people coming, but I am not worried.'13 Ten days later he wrote to her enthusiastically, 'We are now under a genuine avalanche. We have to run two concurrent house-parties to cope with all the numbers. We have wonderful weather, green lawns, sunny skies and everything needed to complete a perfect setting - only we do miss you and wish you were with us.'14

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