AWAKENING DEMOCRACIES

Ford admired the vigorous way Buchman went to work: 'Leave that fellow Buchman in a forest and he'll start changing the trees,' he said. He sometimes entertained Buchman and his friends at the Dearborn Inn near his home; but he did not give money to Buchman's work. This was typical of his life-long belief that if a thing was worthwhile it should make its own way. 'Every tub must stand on its own bottom,' he would say - and, in fact, the Fords only gave two money gifts to Buchman or his work in twenty years, one of $1,000 from Mr Ford and the other of $2,000 from Mrs Ford. However, he turned to Buchman on personal questions. He consulted him about his will (from which neither Buchman nor his work benefited); and when he was having an operation asked him to look after Mrs Ford while it took place.

Part of large crowd at BIF demonstration

On 29 September Buchman sailed for Britain to take part in a weekend house-party being given by Lord Salisbury, the son of the Victorian Prime Minister and himself a former Cabinet Minister and Leader of the House of Lords, at Hatfield House. Salisbury had first been brought into contact with the Oxford Group through an acquaintance named Andrew Charles who had written several times suggesting to him that he should acquaint himself with it. He had finally attended the Oxford house-party in 1935 and another in January 1936 at Bournemouth. In March 1936 he had put forward the essence of Buchman's message in an economic debate in the House of Lords. 'The cause of the world's state', he said on that occasion, 'is not economic; the cause is moral. It is the want of religion which we ought to possess. If I may use a phrase which is common in a great movement which is taking place in this country and elsewhere, what you want is God-guided personalities, which make God-guided nationalities, to make a new world. All other ideas of economic adjustment are too small really to touch the centre of the evil.'19

When asked by august friends why he was interested in the Oxford Group, he replied, 'I saw the spirit moving on the waters, and I dare not stand aside.'20 To his niece, Lady Hardinge of Penshurst, he had said, 'These people have great spiritual knowledge and strength. Go to them and they will help you.'21 Now he had invited a number of his friends to meet with Buchman and a dozen of his colleagues at Hatfield House. They talked in the library and walked under the centuries-old trees together. Lord Lytton, glad to meet Buchman again after their conversations in India ten years earlier, told him of his son Anthony's death in a flying accident and gave him a copy of his book about him inscribed 'In memory of our talk at Hatfield'. Buchman himself regarded his conversations with Lytton as the high point of the weekend.

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Photo: Part of crowd from all over Britain and from overseas, 1939.
©Ronald Proctor FIBP, FRPS/MRA Productions