LIFE WITH BUCHMAN

All the secretarial work was done there, too. Stella Corderoy 12 describes some of the hazards involved. Once, when Buchman's usual secretary was away, she went to take dictation from him for the first time: 'He was marching about the room, talking to half a dozen people. He suddenly said, "My, you have started with a team." I waited. "My, you have started with a team," he repeated - and someone whispered, "That's the letter." It was to a Dutch couple who had just had twins. I started in, but I had to guess when he was talking to someone else and when he was dictating.

'On one occasion when he was off to America,' she continues, 'Grace Hay had taken dictation till the last moment in London and on the boat train, I was to take it on the boat, and Enid Mansfield was to type all the way to Cherbourg and send the letters back from there to be posted. We had thirty minutes on the boat, saying goodbye to innumerable people, walking up and down the deck, going up and down in the lift and in his cabin. I think I took seventeen letters in the time, nearly half of them to children - wonderful letters. Then everyone had to go ashore, so I stood at the top of the gangway with Frank waiting for the sailors to lift it. There we got some more down.'

'One of the endearing things about him', Stella Corderoy adds, 'was the way he saw that everyone possible was in on the big events. He took all of us who worked with him at Brown's to the Command Performance in honour of the French President at Covent Garden. Somehow, he got most of us in to the musical evening at the Austrian Embassy when the Trapp Family Singers first sang outside Austria. And this did not stop as the team grew larger. He found several hundred tickets for his friends and guests to see the Coronation procession in 1937, and we all went each year to the Albert Hall carols. Frank looked after you and saw you had a good time.'

At the same time he did not find so constantly public a life easy. When once for a short period he rented a small house, he said, 'I feel like a child with a new toy.' And during house-parties held in large hotels, he would at times choose to eat at a small table by himself.

Arthur Strong, a young and successful professional photographer, spent a weekend with him and his secretary, Michael Barrett, in the English Lake District in the late 1930s, partly with the aim of finding and photographing the chapel in Keswick where Buchman had had his decisive experience in 1908. Buchman was now aged 60. 'Frank's gaiety is immense and he chips Mike like a schoolboy,' Strong recorded in his diary. 'We had constant laughter.... In the car going there FB sang and whistled, he was so happy not to have any plans and engagements for two whole days. He sang old hymns and it was then that I realised his age. To Keswick.. . . Then the chapel. There were several possibilities . . . Frank warned us it was an ordinary place with nothing particular to distinguish it. Found the Tithebarn Methodist (Primitive) Church; opposite it is a bus depot.

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