'We had a quiet time. The sentence from him which I remember was, "Alan needs persecution." Which annoyed me. I'd been thrown out of Hertford. I saw Wycliffe would be a softish job. He absolutely refused to discuss the job - that was for me to decide. He just gave me perspective. I accepted the job.'

Buchman's relationships took no account of age or gender. Where he found solid ground, he built on it. The young Canadian, Eleanor Forde, was a trusted colleague from their first meeting. 'You have a remarkable concept of the Gospel message,' he wrote her in 1925,' and it is a privilege in these days of loose thinking to find one who has so thoroughly gripped the truths of Christ.'7 From then on he confided in her his plans, his hopes, his thoughts and dilemmas about people, in much the same way as he did with his older male colleagues. 'I certainly want you to hold me to God's best,' he wrote to her, 'and I haven't forgotten that you want a full hour to tell me where I have fallen short.'8 Buchman counted on her intuition and wisdom with individuals, as well as on her public leadership in his work. She describes how he sent her off one day in 1928 during her first visit to England. 'He got hold of me in Brown's one day and said, "I think you'd better go out into the country today and have lunch with Queen Sophie."

' Frank, I can't go and see a Queen like that. What would I say? How would I behave?" I replied.

'He said, "Don't bother about behaving. Just tell her how you have changed, how you gave your life to God and what a difference it has made." I found he had made all the arrangements and off I went and did it. A year later, the Queen thanked me.'

Not all Buchman's team were so easily overawed. Cece Broadhurst, a cowboy singer straight from the Canadian prairies, used to call everyone 'George'. Bouncing into Brown's one morning, he greeted an unknown gentleman emerging from Buchman's quarters, 'Hiya, George!' The foreign gentleman bowed politely. 'I had no idea you knew His Majesty so well,' commented one of Cece's companions.9 Buchman himself treated royalty much like anyone else, even if he was more old-world in his greetings.

'Did you meet those princesses?' he asked Roger Hicks, an Oxford graduate who had joined him after teaching in India, when he came into Brown's at about this time.

‘Yes.’

‘How were they?’

‘Very angry.’

‘I thought they would be,’ said Buchman. ‘I told them the truth. If I can’t have fellowship with them on that basis, I don’t want it at all. Now let’s go on.’10

Besides interviews of every kind, the rooms in Brown’s were used to send off a mass of literature. 'We would make the midnight post in the box in the hall,' says Vinall. 'We were always catching that post! There was a tremendous lot of work to be done with the mail, and with the literature as well, sending it out all over the place.'11

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