THE CLOTH AND THE CAP

When, at the end of the London campaign in 1934, Buchman took a major team to America and Canada, the vicar from Poplar went with him. Another who went was George Light, a leader of the unemployed in Warwickshire. Light had come to the Oxford house-party in 1933 full of bitterness at his own unemployment and that of the men he represented. He described his meeting with Buchman there: 'I never met a man who had such faith, or such a genius for turning up at the right moment. One day I ran into him and he asked me to join him in his room. He asked me what I thought about the Oxford Group. I said something polite. Then he asked, "Do you know anything against us? We'd be glad to know."

'I had just been to a socialist conference and one woman had said, "I have just heard on good authority that someone has given Buchman .£50,000 to carry on his work."

'I told Frank this and he said, "It is very queer, George. I have heard the same but you look at my bank book." He put it open into my hands. I think there was a balance of £9. "That is my whole bank balance," he said. Then we chatted of other things. "Where are you going now, George?" he said. I said I had a return ticket and a few shillings. Frank looked into his pockets and said, "I have £9 in cash besides what is in the bank. Here's £9. We both have the same amount. That makes us both socialists now."

'This was the second talk I ever had with Frank. He did not know me. I might have been a twister or anything. I went home and told my wife and family. That £9 was very useful, but it was not a fortune. Yet my family was so overjoyed at anyone taking such an interest in us that they just wept. Frank never postponed an act of unselfishness on his own part because a far greater one was needed on the part of society. What he did and what he fought for had in it elements of true revolutionary action.'42

On the final day of the London campaign, speaking in the Metropole Hotel in Northumberland Avenue, Buchman commented upon a newspaper's assertion that Oswald Mosley had 100,000 followers in his British Union of Fascists and that two million Britons were 'fascist-minded'. 'Have you got two million people in Britain who are Holy-Spirit-minded?' he challenged. 'You need what Gandhi says he misses in Christians - being "salted with the fire of the discipline".* I had some people to dinner last night,' he added. 'Some were pro-Hitler. Some anti-Hitler. I told them we were pro-change in everyone.'

(* Mark 9, 41. According to Buchman, one of Gandhi's favourite texts.)

Amid the welter of letters appearing in the press throughout that autumn was one from the distinguished missionary and ecumenist J. H. Oldham, who noted that a correspondent had suggested 'the Group movement is the expression in the religious sphere of the modern ideas and movements in the political field'. 'I wonder', wrote Oldham, 'whether what the Groups are reaching after, and in their measure discovering, is not something which is the complete antithesis of both Fascism and Communism. May it not be that they are rediscovering the truth that the meaning of life is found in the relations between persons? True community consists, not in the subordination of persons to impersonal ends, as is demanded by both Fascism and Communism, but in the unrelieved and joyfully accepted tension between contrasted and complementary points of view ….

189