OXFORD AND SOUTH AFRICA

The tour consisted largely of five major house-parties, each in or near one of South Africa's bigger cities. Each of them lasted ten days, each took place in a sizeable hotel and all drew large numbers. Between 600 and 700 went to the house-party held twenty miles outside Cape Town.

'In Jo'burg I was just a traffic cop directing the crowds,' Loudon Hamilton said. 'We never seemed to be able to finish a meeting. If anyone in the audience got up to leave, there were always at least three others waiting to take their place.' The method at those meetings was very simple. 'Whoever happened to be leading would simply get other members of the travelling team to tell the story of their change.'

'The message in the meetings was direct and personal,' recalls Eleanor Forde. 'Queues of people would come up to us afterwards and ask for a talk. Before they left we made sure they had fully grasped the point of the absolute moral standards, and then made dates with them next day, one after the other, for twenty minutes. "Go through those standards before we get together and then we will talk about listening to God," we'd say.

'Of course, they would not come next day unless they meant business, but nearly everyone did. So they'd come and they'd mostly have it all written down, and boy! the things that came out were the deepest things in their lives. Then they'd get down on their knees and make a decision to give their lives to God, and then they'd go away and change other people. All ages - one was the head of a girls' school, and another was the matron of the big hospital in Johannesburg. That's why she asked us to come and stay in her nurses' home.'

'I was very impressed by them,' recalls Bremer Hofmeyr, then a university student who was shortly to become a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. 'I was used to one-man shows but this wasn't like that. Buchman himself led some of the meetings - he was spick and span, and moved at a tremendous lick - but my overall impression was not of a person but a group.'

The Group's visit touched all kinds of people, some in spite of themselves. Bishop Karney of Johannesburg, preaching before the Governor-General, the Earl of Athlone, and his wife Princess Alice, admitted that he had gone to the house-party in Bloemfontein 'tired and jaded and not a little critical' but had come back 'feeling much humbler than I went. I was profoundly touched';22 while Bishop Carey of Bloemfontein declared that he now felt 'the need of much more power to alter and recreate the lives of the people committed to me' and was 'seeking to discover where I may alter or change'.23

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