The Governor-General was a family friend of the van Heeckerens. Lily van Heeckeren stayed at Government House while they were in Pretoria, and Athlone waited up each evening to hear what the group had been doing that day. He invited Buchman to tea, and asked particularly how the group had reached an outstanding young Afrikaner like George Daneel, who had been a member of the 1928 Springbok Rugby team.

Daneel was at that time training to be a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church, and was still somewhat innocent. Buchman started to teach him how to deal with individual people. One evening he left him and a friend, Don Mackay, to keep an eye on Baxter, who was more than usually beset by his chronic problem and asleep on his bed. Daneel and Mackay had a long talk by the fire in the sitting-room next door. On his return, Buchman asked Daneel how it had gone.

'Fine, Frank - all quiet.'

'That sounds bad,' rejoined Buchman.

Investigation revealed Baxter's room not only quiet but empty, with the window wide open. Buchman sent Daneel and Mackay to find him. They were to divide the town in two, and visit every bar. Early in the morning they returned empty-handed. Baxter had staggered home on his own at 3am.

The house-parties at that time were for whites but the group visited Lovedale and nearby Fort Hare, the only institutions of higher education for blacks in the Cape. Apart from this, their visit had little effect on what was then known as 'the Native Question', but which had not then posed itself as acutely as one would now imagine. The key question appeared to be the bitterness festering between English- and Afrikaans-speaking South Africans as a result of the treatment by the British Army of Afrikaner civilians during and after the Boer War.

At the final house-party at Bloemfontein in September Professor Edgar Brookes, Professor of Political Science at Pretoria University, addressed his English-speaking compatriots with considerable bluntness. 'We have the problem of racialism between English- and Dutch-speaking South Africans,' he said. 'Every one of us individually is going to do our best about this, but it is not going to be done easily or without sacrifice... You must ask God's guidance about learning Afrikaans. It is not everybody's duty, but is there anyone here who is too lazy or has been too proud to learn it? That is a first step.'

Brookes then challenged the audience on their attitude to 'the Native Question'. He did not, he said, have any simple solutions, but 'I do know that we must handle it as Christ would do if He were here . . . Not only have we failed to do it. We have actually been a stumbling-block.'24 In later years Brookes went into African education and became a close friend of Chief Albert Luthuli, the President of the African National Congress, who described him as 'one of South Africa's greatest champions of public and private sanity and morality'.25Brookes' words and the atmosphere of the house-party brought a deep response from many of the Afrikaners. The widow of an Afrikaner general who had died in a British prison camp had sworn that she would never again speak English. Now she stood up and, in broken English, asked forgiveness of the English-speakers for her hatred.

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