The old story of indecent 'public confession', as originally put out by Driberg nine years earlier, was re-stamped on the public mind. Miss Rawlings, perhaps fearing an action for slander, wrote the Daily Sketch that she was 'astonished' at the publicity and asked the paper to correct the impression that she had referred to or criticised any of the other speakers,52 and Miss Foyle issued a statement that 'Miss Rawlings' remarks bore no possible relation to what was said at the luncheon, which was a reasonable and objective presentation of the case for moral and spiritual renewal at a time of crisis'.53 A copy was sent to 'William Hickey' by Miss Foyle asking for equal space for an authoritative account of the other speakers, a request which was not granted.

Bunny Austin, the tennis player, was at the lunch, although not then associated with the Oxford Group. 'I went across to greet Dr Buchman as he made his way from the room,' he wrote. 'I greatly admired him at that moment. He gave no outward evidence, as he cheerfully returned my greeting, that he was a man who had just been hit violently below the belt.'54 Buchman certainly realised how much damage had been done. But his immediate concern was for the other speakers: 'Those good men standing up for their belief in this country and subjected to that. Yet the OP (Order of Persecution) may be better to have than the OM (Order of Merit).' He also knew that it would scare away many of the people upon whom he was relying to rouse the country. He spoke more personally of his barber, whom he had invited to bring his daughter to meet him and who cancelled the date. 'That is what hurts me most,' he said. 'It will be some time before they come around again.'*

(* A.P. Herbert certainly regarded Miss Rawlings' intervention as a matter of importance. He telegraphed her: 'If anyone writes a history of the "Oxford Group" it will have a pro- and post-Rawlings period.' (Reginald Pound: A. P. Herbert: A Biography (Michael Joseph, 1976), p. 155.)

Fredrik Ramm wrote a letter to the Morning Post about the work of the Oxford Group in Scandinavia, in which he commented, 'I have taken part in hundreds of meetings attended by thousands of people and I have never heard anything confessed in public which could not have been said in Piccadilly Circus.'55

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