THE PRIVATE BUCHMAN

The writer Hannah More said of William Wilberforce that he lived in a 'kind of domestic publicity': 'in such retirement', she added with gentle irony, 'that he does not see above three and thirty people at breakfast'.

With Buchman, in the days before his stroke, the figure would often be a couple of hundred; and afterwards, at Caux or Mackinac, the numbers constantly around him were even larger. Moreover, for the last twenty years of his life, all his immediate colleagues would come in and out of his room, without knocking, at any time of the day or night. On a 'holiday', as in Ganda in 1946, his party might start with five or a dozen, but would generally increase before long to at least thirty or forty. For him, as he said, a holiday was 'a change of location not vocation'. It was made easier because he genuinely liked people. Yet at heart he was a very private man. He once said what a wrench it was when finally he had to let others pack his bags for him.

This bias towards privacy was masked by the intertwining of his two roles, as an individual and as a symbol of the work he represented. It was this which bewildered Peter Howard when, during their first meeting in America, it was agreed that he should write a book to be called That Man Frank Buchman. Straight from Daily Express journalism, which had taught him the value of the personal angle, he was amazed to hear Buchman add, 'Of course, there must be nothing about me in the book.' Buchman meant that the book should be about his work and must not go into 'irrelevant' matters like his tastes and habits, his likes and dislikes, his looks and dress - the very stuff of Fleet Street writing. This avoidance of all personal information may not have been well-judged for, where there is a vacuum, rumours soon fill it. It may be one reason why this much discussed man was so little known and so little understood. Once, when I talked with Buchman about this, he said, 'When I am dead, everything must be told.'

The practice of privacy went deeper than his public attitudes. Buchman very seldom spoke of himself in private conversation - and then only to a few. Part of this his doctor, Paul Campbell, believes, went back to a decision Buchman once made 'never to think of himself again'. If taken literally, it is a decision which sounds impossible. It could perhaps be translated as 'never to put himself first again'. But at the least it meant that he spent much more time thinking of others than of himself.

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