The other practical matter also stemmed back to 1937, when an old friend had left a legacy of £500 to the Oxford Group. Previous legacies had been paid without question, but this time relatives contested the payment, and when it came to court Mr Justice Bennett ruled that the bequest must fail because there existed no body definable at law as 'the Oxford Group'. Hitherto everything had developed informally. Personal links were the basis of the Group's commercial dealings, accounts had been kept by responsible people and the Inland Revenue had recognised the status of volunteer workers. Now it became clear that a legal entity would have to be established.

Buchman regretted the need. When the same issue arose two years later in America, he commented, 'It looks as if we shall have to incorporate. We have always had the joy of being given money and being able to pass it on to anyone who needs exactly that help. But maybe it can't be done in just that way any more. It has still got to be a group affair - each in honour preferring one another.' It seems to have been in this spirit that he accepted the necessity for legal incorporation in Britain, while changing nothing essential in his way of working. Whole-time workers continued, like himself, to receive no salary, but to come forward and function on their own resources, if any, and their own faith and prayer. He continued to countenance no hierarchy, no membership, nothing sectarian; the only membership was in the church of a person's choice, and not in the Oxford Group or Moral Re-Armament.

Having decided on incorporation in the simplest form befitting a non-profit, charitable enterprise, the question of the name arose. Ten years' public usage of the name 'Oxford Group' made it, for Buchman, the only candidate, so a request for incorporation under that name was sent to the Board of Trade. A. P. Herbert, as the University's senior representative in Parliament, presented an official motion of the University's governing body, the Hebdomadal Council, opposing the use of that name. Herbert also had other support. One letter came to him on behalf of the Oxford Union, signed by its President, Edward Heath, while the Warden of New College, H. A. L. Fisher, thought it 'intolerable that Oxford should be saddled with the responsibility for this Salvation Army for snobs'.37

Herbert maintained that he had nothing against the Group except its use of the word 'Oxford' - 'I am not saying anything against the Oxford Group: it may be the best thing in the world. But it does not, in any true sense of the word, come from Oxford.'38 He took the matter to the correspondence columns of The Times, supported by Bishop Henson, A. L. Rowse and others. Lord Hugh Cecil, younger brother of Lord Salisbury and Herbert's predecessor as Member of Parliament for the University, however, took a contrary view. 'The Group want a name,' he wrote. 'They want it for purely practical purposes . . . The name "Oxford" is in fact in colloquial and popular use; it should therefore be also in legal use ... As to the Oxonian sentiments of Mr Herbert and others, I cannot take them very seriously, though I have been connected with Oxford ever since I was an undergraduate and was Burgess for I forget how many years. Are Mr Herbert's feelings outraged when his bootmaker speaks of "Oxford Shoes"?...'39

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