LIFE WITH BUCHMAN

Brown's Hotel in Dover Street, just off Piccadilly, had been Buchman's first stopping-place in London after World War I. This unpretentious-looking, Swiss-managed hotel, with its faithful clientele 'of country gentry, retired colonial administrators, distinguished service officers, not the aristocracy',1 was, during the 1920s and most of the 1930s, Buchman's only permanent address for mail and co-ordination. On every visit to London he returned, and in the late twenties began to keep a permanent foothold there, a bedroom which others used when he was away.

Few people knew of Buchman's long-term link with Brown's. In 1932 Sir Henry Lunn, who ran the Lunn travel agency, questioned him about it and about his finances generally. 'I want you and your great work to be encased in triple brass against the darts of hostile criticism,' he wrote. He had heard it said that the Group people always travelled first-class, and why did Buchman make his headquarters at a West End hotel like Brown's?2

'Just in from two overnight journeys on the Continent,' replied Buchman, 'one happens to have been in a second-class carriage, the other the typical crossing in a boat on the North Sea, which was none too quiet.

'I enclose at once the statement of the American accounts. As far as my own personal finances are concerned, I have no investments; my mother had left me what she hoped to be a small annuity of several pounds a week when I was 65; this has all been wiped out in a single week by the closing of a bank.* I have no personal funds.

(* The bank failed because of a dishonest cashier. Buchman was warned of the impending collapse and could have withdrawn his money, but said he would suffer with his fellow townsmen. On a later visit to Pennsylvania he called on the cashier in prison and on his wife. The $50 a month from his brother's insurance policy went after his mother's death in 1926 to his old cook, Mary Hemphill, until her death in 1937.)

'As for Brown's Hotel, let us get at the facts. I pay ten shillings and sixpence a day when I am in residence, for which three rooms are placed at my disposal. In addition I receive stationery. I have the service, seven days a week, of letters being forwarded, etc. This saves paying a secretary when I am out of town. . . The meals I take in the hotel are given at a reduction.

163