LIFE-WORK ENDED?

‘Eating’, he went on, ‘was a most enjoyable affair ... I remember one long table and two or three smaller ones. Mr Buchman sat at the head of the long table, some ten of us in a row down either side, and delightful Miss Ward sat at the foot. The meals were very simple, of course, but well-cooked, and there was always plenty of everything. Much was made of every occasion of note. Fourth of July, a distinguished guest, a birthday: all were made an excuse for some slight celebration at table. After breakfast, there were family prayers in the parlour.’37

‘One sensed at once the spirit of the hospice,’ wrote John Woodcock, a minister who lived there for a time. ‘It was not an institution. It was a family. There were few rules beyond those in any well-ordered house-hold.’

‘If one of the young men went out for the evening he knew that, after a certain hour, he would be admitted only in response to his ringing the doorbell. But, however late the hour, Frank was invariably there to open the door with never a sign that he had been put to any trouble, nor by any look that might embarrass the young man; but rather to invite him to share ….something to eat. It is not strange that such an attitude frequently opened the way to further confidences and opportunities to help spiritually.’38

By the beginning of the following year, Buchman felt it was time for the hospice to extend its activities. He was much taken with the work being done in London at Toynbee Hall, a settlement in the East End founded by Canon Barnett in 1884. Barnett's idea had been to strengthen the mission work being done in the slums by setting up ‘a resident club with a purpose’, which would be run by a group of people who came to live in the slums and rehabilitate them from within. Instead of holding religious services in the settlements, he expected every member of the resident team to be a shining example of the Christian life. Faith, in other words, was to be caught, not taught. Buchman's ideas were modelled precisely on Barnett's. Having founded a hospice for poor boys, he wanted ‘to keep them from becoming selfish through only receiving’ by persuading them to care for people even poorer than themselves.

In the spring of 1906, therefore, he founded a settlement in one of the grimmest areas of downtown Philadelphia, on the corner of Callowhill and 4th Streets. According to a contemporary account it was a neighbourhood where immigrant families lived ‘amid filth and squalor ….under moral surroundings and influences that almost compel the angels to weep’. Here, Buchman persuaded a brewer to lend him a room above his stables where youngsters could meet on Saturday nights. Soon, immigrant children had begun to pour in from the streets - Polish, Italian and Turkish as well as German and Scandinavian, from Jewish and Catholic as well as Protestant families. On hot summer nights the ammonia stench from the stable straw came up through the floor. Buchman's home-town newspaper wrote, ‘The Settlement House is thronged with children from the streets who find a warm, happy home. Boys learn carpentering, girls learn sewing, cooking and other domestic arts.’39 When asked by some business friends what he was doing for these youngsters, Buchman replied, ‘Well, I'm just teaching them how to live.’*

(* Gus Bechtold became director of this settlement from 1914 to 1923.)

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