Asked for a New Year message by the Press Association, Buchman tried to put his message in terms understandable to everyone at that particular moment. The initials ARP (Air Raid Precautions) were by now familiar to everyone in Britain, as trenches were dug and shelters installed in parks and back gardens. Someone had suggested that Moral and Spiritual Re-Armament was cumbrous, and might be shortened to MRA. Buchman at once accepted this idea, just as he had taken the original phrase from Blomberg. 'MRA', he began his New Year message, 'is the answer to the dark forebodings and fears for 1939. MRA is as essential as ARP, and takes away the fear. MRA is a commodity for every householder ... It is God's property ... It means God in control personally and nationally. It means the knowledge and exact information that God's guidance brings.'29

MRA was also being promoted in Britain by Bunny Austin, Britain's current tennis idol.* Austin had first met Buchman six years before, while playing tennis in the South of France. He became convinced that Buchman's ideas were the best hope of maintaining peace in Europe, something which he had been much concerned about, though unable to find any practical form of action. When he had returned to London, however, he had met determined resistance from his actress wife, Phyllis Konstam. To keep the peace at home he had given way, and apart from their encounter at the Foyle lunch had seen little of Buchman and his friends. He had, however, continued to believe in Buchman's approach and, when the Munich crisis blew up, he had decided that he must follow his conscience, come what may, and throw in his lot with them.

(* And still, as I write, the last Englishman to have reached the Men's Final at Wimbledon.)

'The full impact of the crisis came home to me when, on 11 September 1938, a warden called with gas masks for us,' he wrote later.30 'He said our baby would have to have a gas-proof tent. Suddenly I realised that my forebodings of six years earlier had come true. And what had I done about it? I had been brought in touch with an answer - and had turned away, betraying the best in myself, betraying my wife and betraying my fellow men. For I believe that if the countless Englishmen like myself, who had met the Group in the early thirties, had wholeheartedly accepted its challenge, there could have been such a stiffening of morale that Hitler would never have doubted our willingness to fight. As it was, we in Britain had drifted towards war unwilling to face what Germany was doing, although it was spelt out for us in Mein Kampf.'

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