Paul Hodder-Williams, the son of the Dean of Manchester and later chairman of the family publishing firm, Hodder and Stoughton, attended the house-party in 1932 and recalled, in 1980, that it made 'the spiritual knowledge I was brought up with come real for the first time - practical rather than theoretical'. He persuaded his uncle to carry a weekly column about the Oxford Group in the British Weekly, and an eight-page supplement of the same paper on the subject ran to an edition of 119,000 copies.15

In 1932 Hodder and Stoughton also produced a racy account of Buchman and his work by A. J. Russell, a former literary editor of Beaverbrook's Daily Express and managing editor of the Sunday Express. The book, titled For Sinners Only, went through seventeen editions in England in two years and was translated widely, the French edition being even more provocatively titled Ceci n'est pas pourvous. The book brought in a flood of letters. George Bernard Shaw's niece read her uncle's copy. She wrote to a friend, 'G.B.S. met the Group in South Africa and felt they had got "the right thing", even if not altogether keen on some frills attached in the way of phraseology. He told me to get in touch and even offered to pay for me at a house-party.' He also urged his secretary to do the same, characteristically suggesting that, as she was the daughter of a clergyman, she needed to seize the chance.16

In 1934 the house-party ended with a meeting in Oxford Town Hall. Its principal interest, as far as Oxford was concerned, was the speech of the Provost of the Queen's College, Dr B. H. Streeter, an outstanding New Testament scholar with wide knowledge of world affairs and especially of the Far East. He said he had been watching the Oxford Group for two and a half years and compared his attitude to 'that taken towards the early Church by Gamaliel, that most amiable of the Pharisees'. 'The reason I have come here tonight', he continued, 'is to say publicly that I ought now to cease from an attitude of benevolent neutrality towards what I have come to believe is the most important religious movement of today. . . . The movement seems to be able not merely to change some bad people into good, but also to give new heart and a new courage and a new sense of direction to those who are already men of goodwill. That is why I have come to the conclusion that in an age of growing world despair it is my duty to associate myself with it.

'May I add,' he concluded, 'that I come to the Group, not as a person with some little reputation in his own sphere of study, or as the head of an Oxford College; I come as one who has already learned something from the Group, and hopes to learn more.'17

160