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OXFORD AND SOUTH AFRICA

When defeat threatened Buchman's instinct was to attack. So he arranged what turned out to be the largest American house-party so far, at Lake Minnewaska in New York State. J. Ross Stevenson, the Principal of Princeton Theological Seminary, who had backed Buchman throughout the controversy, and Professors Alexander Smith and W. B. Harris came from Princeton.

Five came from Oxford. One of them, J. P. Brock, a South African Rhodes Scholar at University College, had staggered his tutor by asking permission to postpone his final examinations for a year in order to attend. The college authorities debated it, thought it a mistake, but let him go because they felt that a genuine conviction underlay the request. Next year he was to take his finals with high honours, and he later became Professor of Medicine at Cape Town.

Within a month of resigning, the three leaders of the Philadelphian Society, together with Eleanor Forde,1 a Canadian and the first woman to travel internationally with the Groups,* were in Oxford. Kenaston Twitchell from Princeton, who had married Alexander Smith's daughter Marion, was already studying at Balliol, and together they reinforced the work which had been building up since Loudon Hamilton's return.

(* As Buchman's work was beginning informally to be known.)

Julian Thornton-Duesbery, then chaplain of Corpus Christi, held a weekly meeting in his study, but the numbers soon forced him to adjourn to the lecture room below, and fifty turned up for a house-party at nearby Wallingford in the summer of 1927. They were an average cross-section of the university, though some, like Dickie Richardson, soon to be captain of boxing, were enthusiastic sportsmen, and others, like Brock, outstanding scholars. There was also a handful of the senior members of the university, like the Revd G. F. Graham Brown, Principal of Wycliffe Hall, the Anglican theological college, whose interest stemmed from a small meeting in London, chaired by Buchman. He had entered the room to find an American, obviously drunk, abusing Buchman with the gossip of Princeton. Everyone seemed uncomfortable except Buchman, who let him finish, and then said, 'That's fine, now you will feel much better.' Next day the young American sought out Buchman's help with his own life. Graham Brown used to say that he learnt more from Buchman's handling of that incident than from many years of university teaching.

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