'NORWAY ABLAZE - DENMARK SHAKEN'

The Norwegian Income Tax and Customs Departments began receiving an unprecedented number of overdue and unexpected payments. Supreme Court Advocate Erling Wikborg* stated in December 1936, 'It is unofficially learnt from high quarters that amounts paid to the Government between 1934 and 1936 run into seven figures in kroner and the process continues.'19*

(* Wikborg was a founder of the Norwegian Christian Democrat Party and served briefly as Foreign Minister in 1963.)

(* In January 1939 the Norwegian press announced the repayment of half a million kroner by one individual, and in 1939 Wikborg wrote to a friend, 'Since you introduced me to a new life through the Oxford Group in1935 no single week has passed without my having at least one case on my hands to make the legal arrangements necessary to help someone pay up arrears of evaded taxes.) (Erling Wikborg to Basil Yates, undated, 1939.)

Hambro seems to have become increasingly a bridge-builder in politics. As early as December 1933 Drammens Tidende stated that his London trip had 'lifted Hambro from the ranks of the politicians to the position of a true statesman'. The occasion was a meeting of the leaders of the Conservative Party which Hambro had led 'with his usual outstanding ability. And yet. . . there was a new atmosphere in the whole gathering. Instead of a bitter and stormy post-mortem on the election results, it was a calm consideration of the situation and of what would be most helpful to the nation. It was as though "party tricks" had all been swept away - no outbursts against other parties, no tactical schemings, no upbraidings. It was politics on a higher plane. Some "change" had taken place. And this seemed to reconnect with another "change" of which news had recently come in. The leader of the meeting had just spoken in the House of Commons building in London at a great religious meeting of something known as the "Oxford Group".' 20

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