From Poplar they reached into East Ham and Hackney, and a team 144-strong, mainly from the universities, spent Easter there. Much of this work was pioneered and followed through by a student from Regent's Park College, Bill Jaeger, the only son of a widow with a tiny millinery shop in Stockport. Jaeger conceived a passion to reach the people of East London. 'I was off there before the rest of the college were awake,' he recalls. 'Within eighteen months we had a team of 500 in the area.’ When he left college in 1936 Buchman set him to work in East London full-time on 'faith and prayer', and his mother, Annie, sold her shop for £40 and went to work with him. He got to know some of the gangs who centred in the local 'caffs', and many civic leaders. Bill Rowell, who was to represent 250,000 London unemployed at the Trades Union Congress of 1936, was enlisted by one of Jaeger's team, the son of a peer, six foot four tall, who slept for much of a winter on two chairs in the Rowells' kitchen. 'I can't help thinking of the peace platforms I have spoken on, telling the nation how to live together, and yet going home to a continuous war in my own home,' Rowell wrote. 'After twelve years of married life, I suddenly discovered I'd got a new wife and family. I gave up being a dictator, and immediately new love sprang up between us.'41

It was sometimes risky work. Emerging from the house one morning, one of Jaeger's team saw a belligerent little group of men waiting for him. 'You rat! I've half a mind to break your jaw!' said one of them, seizing him by his lapels.

'My friend, if that is going to help you at all and make me less of a rat, go ahead and break it,' said the young man.

The jaw was not broken, and the group dispersed.

Buchman gave Jaeger his head. 'He never told me what to do, but he always wanted to know what I was doing,' Jaeger says. 'He wanted to know who I was seeing and what I'd said to them. Then he might throw in some insight, some word of advice. He would bring business men and titled folk, who had found new motives, down to help me, and I would take my friends up West.'

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