The visit had one unexpected side-effect. Almost from the outset, the newspapers - seeking for a simple catch-phrase to describe them - labelled them 'the Oxford Group'.* The story is told that a sleeping-car attendant, seeking for a name to put on their compartment, used the phrase for the group of young men who only had Oxford in common - and that the press meeting them picked it up. The name stuck because it so exactly described the party. Francis Goulding - a St John's graduate, by then working full-time with Buchman - remembers him receiving the news that this name was being generally used: 'He wasn't enthusiastic, but he said, "If it's got to be called something, that's as good as anything."'

(* The Sunday News of Durban (6 June 1939) attributed this to John Geary of the Pretoria News, who 'had a gift of coining phrases, the most famous of which is "The Oxford Group"'. First used, Pretoria News, 10 September 1928.)

In the early months after the Princeton difficulties, with Time snapping at his heels, Buchman seems to have felt some need to have the balance restored in his own country. In September 1927 he wrote to Mrs Tjader asking whether she could arrange to have his name put into the New York Social Register. 'I feel for the work's sake this ought to be done,'17 he told her. He need not have worried. The demand for house-parties, both in Europe and America, grew steadily.

There was a series of sizeable gatherings in upstate New York and New England; three in a year at Rhederoord in Holland, a fourth at Wassenaar; two at Melrose in Scotland; two more in Cambridge; while a house-party at the Beauregard Hotel in Wallingford became a standard event before the beginning of each Oxford term.

These occasions had long ceased to be private affairs in private homes because of the growth in numbers. More and more they were held in hotels, and more and more they aroused the curiosity of every sort of investigator, amateur and professional.

Some, like Kenneth Irving Brown,18 came away declaring that there had been 'no feeling of something uncanny, no conscious emotional exhilaration, no pious solemnity', that on the contrary 'religion was discussed with ease and humour and naturalness'. In a similar vein, the Revd Graham Baldwin19 reported that, in meetings punctuated by regular outbursts of laughter, all barriers were broken down..

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