This transcript is from an interview with unrecorded questions
I am 66 years old. I studied to join the Navy at Osborne and Dartmouth. It was during the First World War when everyone wanted to serve. By the time I was through with Dartmouth I didn’t want to go on with the Navy and I went out to Heidelberg University.
I was the first Englishman to go back there after the First World War. I heard English history as taught by German professors. It was a fascinating time for an Englishman who had had a rather sheltered existence to go through those times in Germany when there were putsches and all kinds of things.
I was there when Hitler made his 1923 putsch. We were all locked in our rooms - I was staying near the place.
Then I went up to Oxford and enjoyed myself there. We played all kinds of games for the college - soccer, rugger, hockey, tennis, golf and so forth. I was captain of tennis. None of them good but all enjoyable. I was playing games to enjoy them and wasn’t in the Blues status at all.
I was fed up with life and didn’t want to go into the business which was open for me because my father had committed suicide after being a successful businessman. I didn’t see the point of going on having that hanging over my head the whole time as a result of success. So I went out to India and lectured in a university but spent most of my time working among the ‘Untouchables’ and outcasts. For the first time I came across real poverty - terrible poverty, people starving to death and so forth. I organised the college students who had never taken any notice of it to take a practical interest in it. We had teams of 40-50 people going out once a week teaching in night schools, teaching them to grow things or levelling football fields. We all carried earth on our heads, etc.
Then I decided to come back to England and spend a year at a theological college at Westcott House, Cambridge, really to learn how it was that the missionaries had been so successful in doing social service work. I didn’t want to be ordained.
It was during that time I received invitation after invitation to go to what was then called the Oxford Group and 15 times I refused. The 16th time I was not invited so I went, to see what was going on. There I found something which I had not seen in India. I found that people were really changing their inner nature and receiving direction from God in a way which I didn’t understand. I did know a little bit about God because I turned down a very big job in South India, the biggest job I could think of, after a time of prayer and quiet. I remember exaltation at turning it down and feeling I was doing God’s will but it was a rare exception.
At that houseparty I found that quite ordinary people could do extraordinary things and I was very angry. I had the headmaster of Eton, the headmaster of Harrow, the headmaster of Winchester, 15 Anglican Bishops and all kinds of other prominent people on my committee, the Master of Balliol, Lindsay, Halifax, at the college where I had been teaching, Elway, out in South India, and then these rather pimply undergraduates who had never much been outside Cambridge suggested that it was I who needed change. My reaction was ‘Well what the hell do they know about it?’ But I did find the power and authority of God in their life in a way which I could not fail to be impressed with.
I tried the times of really listening, ‘Speak Lord, thy servant heareth’, and I got very simple thoughts, along the lines of honesty, purity, unselfishness and love, which led to a very deep change in my own life.
One day I was trying to help a fellow of 16 and we had a time of quiet. I had a very, very clear thought, ‘You have not yet given yourself to me. Get down on your knees and do so now.’ After hesitation that is what I did. From that moment I found the power of, as it were, a personal friend and master which was quite different from trying to be a good person. It was the sense of strategy, of direction and power and going on. It was during those days that I first met Frank Buchman.
For me it was a slightly embarrassing meeting. I was introduced by a friend as ‘a missionary’ which distressed me rather considerably. I regarded myself as a lecturer in a university who was engaged in work with the Untouchables and outcasts. Buchman said to me, ‘What is the problem in that part of the world where you were?’ So I said, ‘Homosexuality’ which in 1932 was not a word that you used, as you use today. I said, ‘Homosexuality practiced by 60% of the students.’ Buchman replied, ‘Yes, and by 70% of the priests. Good morning.’ After that he asked me to come to his room and we began to get to know each other a little better.
My first tete-a-tete with him was in a hotel where we were having a party. He asked if I would like a cup of coffee and I said, ‘Very much’ so the waiter came along and we had coffee and cream buns. Buchman offered me one and I said ‘Oh yes, very much’. Buchman refused one and I said, ‘Aren’t you going to have one Frank?’. He replied, ‘Oh no, be generous with others but strict with yourself.’ That was a lesson which I have remembered all these days.
Frank was a very ordinary-looking man. One day I found him looking at himself in a mirror, screwing up his face a bit, trying the best possible combinations. His conclusion at the end was ‘God didn’t make me beautiful, did he?’ No one would have been attracted to him by his physical appearance, by his aliveness, yes, by the alertness of his eyes, by the interest which he took in you? Yes, certainly, all of those things! You wouldn’t have come into a room and said, ‘Look! That man must be interesting because he looks so nice.’ Generally because people felt almost instinctively that he wouldn’t judge, that he would care and that he had a serenity and was at peace with himself. I don’t think they thought of him as a holy man. No touch of the guru about him whatsoever.
The things I feel need emphasising too are his complete care about the spending of money. I used to work with him very closely and pack up for him. I remember once leaving behind three or four tin-tacks, drawing pins. He said, ‘Roger why are you leaving those behind? If you leave that amount behind in every city we go to, we will have to buy another box. That would cost money! Always think of a thousand people doing what you are doing.’ He wrote me this letter once about a friend of ours, ‘Do greet friend Edward. Tell him the marks today are selling at 22.70. He got 19. Tell him in reckoning the price of the ticket I included the 3 marks 70 pfennigs that he lost on not checking because I believe in giving good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over. Just think how much money he might have spent and how rich he might have felt if he had those 3 marks 70 to spend. But Edward is a great statesman. What more do you want?’ Those are the kind of ways he took things up. He would spend freely but he would save economically.
Also in giving correction:- one day I came into his room and I met two princesses just outside. He said, ‘Did you meet the princesses?’ I said, ‘Yes’. He said, ‘How were they?’ I said, ‘I think they were very angry with you.’ He said, ‘I expected it. I gave them the truth. I had to. I don’t want any relations with them unless I can have them on that basis.’
That is another reason why I think people turned to him - they knew he gave them not what they wanted but what they needed, with love and affection and care. Oh, he emptied his pocket book again and again and again. I mean every account - no private accounts, nothing. He expected God to come along again. I remember one day in Canada I had the thought to write out a cheque for £400 and take it in to him. I came into his room and he was in the very unusual position of sitting in a chair doing nothing. I said, ‘Frank I have got this to give you.’ He said, ‘Well I have been praying for money.’ He had no money. He said, ‘I was just waiting here for something to happen.’
Personally, he had no security. I remember someone dying leaving a very moderate amount of money and Frank’s comment was ‘I would be ashamed to die with all that money.’ Normally he had very little money indeed. Money to him was something to use quickly for the work. One day a fellow called George Light came to him out of work and with no money. Frank had a talk with him and they had a time of listening together. Then Frank opened his notebook and gave George half of everything he had. He said with a smile, ‘That is my guidance. Now we are both socialists’.
He also had no fear of money. One day Peter Howard was looking a little gloomy. Frank said, ‘Peter, are you feeling gloomy?’ Peter said, ‘As a matter of fact I am, Frank ‘Is it about money?’ ‘As a matter of fact it is.’ ‘Tell me about it.’ Well,’ Peter said, ‘I have got three children at school, the bills to pay, I have given up my job, no money is coming in, I don’t know what to do.’ Frank’s reply was, ‘I don’t understand you at all Peter. We started this work with nothing and look where we are now. God has always given us enough for what he needs to be done.’
When I first met Buchman in Cambridge, you must remember that I had heard a lot about him, as the leader who had started all this off. So I expected a rather impressive figure who would not exactly dominate me, but be different: be one to whom I wouldn’t talk quite as I would talk to other people. I never felt that, from the word ‘go’. I felt at once that here was a man I could talk to, ups and downs, fears and hopes, sins and virtues, anything which came along. I could talk to as an ordinary person and he would understand, without judging, that he would probably point me to the way I could find an answer, and that he would forget immediately the past. Several times I have been to him and referred to things which I had told him to my shame of the past and he had forgotten completely about them - no recollection of them whatsoever. It was just something which God had dealt with and he had been a channel through which God had come. So you felt a very alive man.
I never saw Buchman slouch. I saw him rest, particularly in his old age. He had to be on his bed a very great deal or sit up to be alert. When we used to travel in trains, when he was much younger, he was always the first off the train. He was vibrant with ideas - not all right but he hated people conforming. For example he would say, ‘What did you think of that meeting?’ and people would say ‘Fine, magnificent, awfully good’. He said, ‘I thought it was lousy. What do you think now?’ ‘Well I was not so impressed really...’ ‘Well, why didn’t you say so at the beginning?’ He was a terribly frightened of people leaning on him.
There was an occasion when I first met him in Cambridge. He was in the corridor on his way to something else and yet, as always, you felt when he was talking to you he was not in the grip of the next thing. He was interested in you as a person, though he was clearly going on to do something else. Here was a new person he had met who had his undivided attention at that time. You know an awful lot of people you meet you feel are polite to you, are kind to you, but really they are thinking about something else. You never felt that about Buchman. You felt that he wanted to know. He wanted to know you. He had the conception of a world to be remade. Although he didn’t want to use you, he longed to give you the opportunity to have a part with him in doing it.
I don’t remember much about his physical appearance. I remember him coming in my derelict car for which I had paid £15 quite happily. I mean he didn’t like pomp or state at all. He just liked to be like anyone else.
One of the things which he taught me was to put right what I had done wrong. I had behaved very badly to the professor at this theological college. I wrote a letter putting things right but also, I think a little too fully, suggesting where he might do better. I checked the letter with Frank. He said, ‘I think that is a very good letter, send it off.’ The reply came showing that the recipient had not really understood what I said. Frank read the reply and said, ‘You should never have sent that letter!’ I said, ‘Frank but I checked it with you.’ He said, ‘Yes, and I made a mistake. I reserve the right to be wrong.’ Here was a person who would not let people lean on him or become a kind of infallible source - that’s what I mean. That happened again and again.
I have got letters from him here which are full of apology for the way he had misjudged certain situations. He had written me that way in one or two letters when I was at Oxford, also rightly rebuking me for certain things there. I wrote and accepted responsibility, because these were the people I had been training, but pointing out that I had actually been about 80 miles away when the particular incident applied. He wrote back, ‘Dear Roger, You shame me. You are a good owl and a good scout. I expected to be hauled over the coals as I thoroughly deserved. Remember the old lines, ‘I shot an arrow into the air, it came to earth I know not where.’ It went on with various other things and finished up, ‘The only virtue I possess is that this letter was dictated the instant your letter arrived.’ Well there was a man you could do business with.
He said his own father got hardening of the arteries when he got old and he did things which he wouldn’t have done in his earlier youth. He said to me, ‘Will you promise, Roger, will you absolutely promise that if ever you see me getting like that you will tell me?’ I one day took up with him for example - I wasn’t very happy about the way he had treated a certain person. Frank paused and said, ‘I did that to please him’. Then he paused again and said, ‘I will never make that mistake again.’ I mean, he was a man to whom you could give correction, who wanted correction, who was desperately sorry that there were not more people who could give him correction. That’s why you were free with him.
He asked me to go to Canada with him. Now that to me was quite a crucial decision. There was a team of some 30-odd people going. I had the offers of big jobs in India and a certain youthful reputation there and it meant cutting with that. In those days Buchman was comparatively unknown. All the people who were seriously interested in what he was doing could have fitted in one drawing room. No financial prospects, nor indeed are there today, but the thing was a gamble. I knew that my family, my friends and the governments and the people in India who had hoped I would go back there, would kick up all hell. But I had seen that the only fundamental basis for making this world different is that human nature should be made different. That unless we dealt with that we would merely play with the surface of the problem, however much we re-arranged it. So I said, ‘Yes.’ Then I had the thought that, having given myself, I had better give what I had and, if I was going to pitch heart and soul in this revolution, it was no good having private resources.
So I wrote to Buchman, giving him the £25,000 capital which I had, which in 1932 was a fair amount of money. Then I met Frank and he said, ‘Oh Roger, I was very grateful to get your letter and I am so pleased you are now free from the fear and domination of money. But I haven’t got the time to spend your money.’ I said, ‘What do you mean Frank?’ He said, ‘No, no, it is your responsibility. not mine.’ I said, ‘You won’t accept it?’ He said, ‘No it is your responsibility not mine. Good morning.’ I went out of the room deeply puzzled. I had some time of thought and I wrote out a cheque for £2,000. I came in again and rather emphasising it I said, ‘Frank, I am guided to put this money into your hand.’ He thought for a moment and said, ‘Well I will accept that.’
Then I said, ‘Now Frank, between friends, how are you going to use it?’ He laughed, ‘Well I have got 32 people coming with me to Canada next week. I have booked the tickets but I haven’t got the money to pay for it. Your money will be first used for that.’ I said, ‘Now Frank let’s get this clear. You believe you are guided by God to go to Canada with 32 people, you pray for money, someone comes in with much more than is really needed and you say “no”.’ He said, ‘That’s right, it wouldn’t have been right for you for me to have accepted all that money.’ I saw at once, here was a man who would never exploit a person or never put his work in front of the needs of a person.
That I think has been the whole way in which he has taught us that where God guides, God provides, which is an easy phrase but which actually means that our job is to let God take control of a man so his trust is in him.
On the way over to Canada he asked me if I would be his kind of aide, a less polite word would be ‘batman’ I think. I woke him up in the morning, put him to bed at night, saw his laundry got off, answered his telephone, arranged his things, did his packing, and all the kind of things for which my university training had not fitted me in the slightest bit. But they were the very things which were necessary to provide those parts of my character which were totally lacking. So I saw him night and day, all day, for years. So I got to know him very well indeed.
The whole of the 30s, yes - well towards the end of the 30s I was separated from him a bit, but all through Canada, all through the States, all through Norway, all through Ireland and various other countries. You learnt how he handled people during that time, sometimes with tremendous gentleness and sometimes with great firmness.
I remember once we were travelling from Toronto to Calgary. The hotel in which we had booked our rooms had been burnt down and there was only one other hotel at that time in the city. So we went there and Frank took me in to see the manager and showed him the list of people whom we had travelling with us, a very distinguished list. We talked about how this hotel would then be made the centre for all our work, dinner parties would be given there and everything, how all his people were very happy to have a simple menu, which would save a lot of money and a lot of choice being prepared, etc. We explained what other hotels had done and Frank suggested a price which had come to him as a fair price. With that price the man could make a profit, but not an outrageous profit into the bargain. But the hotel manager said, ‘No you all pay the full price or you go out.’ Going out meant going into the snow. Well after all his persuasion Buchman couldn’t do anything, so he finally said, ‘May I borrow your telephone?’ The manager said, ‘Oh yes,’ Buchman said, ‘I want to call a press conference and tell them how you have treated us.’ The manager said, ‘Well perhaps we could talk a little bit more.’ At the end of another quarter of an hour’s talking we arrived at the fair price which Buchman had suggested at the beginning. He said to me at the end, ‘Well Roger one of the things you have got to learn is to plant your feet. When the other fellow plants his feet you plant your feet more firmly.’ That was that kind of thing I was learning.
Then there was the extreme at-homeness with other people. I remember coming back with him one day to his room in Vancouver and lying on his sofa was a man in a dinner jacket, an elderly man, obviously rather drunk. So Buchman whispered to me, ‘Go down and see the hotel porter and find out whom he has let into my suite.’ I was away less than 5 minutes - perhaps 3 or 4 minutes - and came back to find this man standing up, swaying slightly and saying to Buchman, ‘Now please tell me those standards again - abshlute honeshty, abshlute purity, abshlute unshelfishnesh, abshlute love. Yeah, I got ‘em. But Dr Buchman I want to tell you a shecret. Sometimes in the morning I don’t remember what is said to me at night. So will you please write them down for me?’ So Buchman takes a pencil and writes the four standards down on the man’s starched shirt front and adds ‘tea with Buchman Friday, 4.30’. The man came back at the appointed time, became part of our party and travelled with us.
So there was the gentleness and the firmness and you never quite knew which you were going to receive. He knew, for example, that I generally prospered on encouragement and one day he said to the team ‘Well I want everyone to know that Roger did that really well, he did that really well.’ Then he said, ‘Hmm, that’ll keep him going for a month.’ There was generally a sting in the tail of it.
Buchman was a man to whom Christmas meant everything. He was deeply attached to his mother and his mother had made Christmas a tremendous festival in which they sent out calendars to all their friends all round the world. He loved the Christmas tree and he loved the decorations of it and all his friends coming in.
Every year we celebrated Christmas with a real spiritual event - he liked to attend midnight mass and it meant everything to him.
One Christmas we were in Germany, at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, a few of us, 4-5 of us. Buchman arrived and went straight up to his room and didn’t appear again. We went in to see him and were not very welcome. Then he made a long-distance call to America, in which he was obviously very distressed about one of our magazines which they had vulgarised over there. He was obviously unhappy. We said, ‘Now Frank we have chosen 3 Christmas trees for you to select from. They are all very good.’ He said, ‘I am not having a Christmas tree this year and I am not opening my cards.’ Well this was so totally unlike Frank that we didn’t know what to do. That evening one of our party went into his room and, without saying a word, knelt down by the bed and said, ‘Dear God please give Frank a happy Christmas. Amen.’ Frank said it was as if the scales had fallen from his eyes. He said, ‘Why have I let that silly magazine get between me and Christ? Where is my Christmas tree? Where are my friends, why aren’t they all here?’ From that moment onward he was his jolly self again but he needed help like that at times.
Like all of us, he depended at times on being helped by other friends to maintain what our real conviction is - that Christ is our friend and master. He also needed help against the power of the evil one to allow something which we care about very much to get in the way. Everyone needs the help of friends to see that sometimes, and needs the initiative of friends to see it. It is not putting Buchman on such a pedestal that he didn't need help at times. One just took the initiative sometimes, like in this one instance, of giving him the help he needed and he was always grateful.
I remember him coming down one day to me and saying ‘Roger, I had a very dirty thought last night. Who shall I use that with today?’ He didn’t regard temptation as something he didn’t have. He regarded it as something he needn’t accept and which could be used. He distinguished between the two very much. That is humility. So many people think that if they were in the position Buchman was in they wouldn’t really have temptations. While actually, if you are being effective in remaking the world, you have probably more temptations than other people. The fact that he was willing to share them and use them is the humanity of the man.
He knew there were people round about him who were not living with the joy of real purity but wrapped up in various lusts and that if he told them that he had had a dirty thought that morning it might unlock their hearts for them to tell him that these things were going on hidden in their minds and so festering. I mean after all, Christ shared his temptations with us and very often we pretend we are without temptation because we think that we are ‘good’.
I am not very good at dates, but I went with Buchman in Germany in 1933 onwards, most of the times. Buchman always had the invincible hope that people could be changed and would never accept the idea that they couldn’t be. When we were in England in the early 30s people said ‘Why don’t you go to Germany - that’s where the real trouble lies.’ And when we went to Germany of course they said, ‘Oh you are pro-Nazi’ for going there. It is almost always the same - if you are in India they say you are pro-Pakistan, if you are in Pakistan they say you are pro-India. In the 1930s we were called warmongers and during the war pacifists. They always pick upon the popular thing and link it onto that. I don’t think Buchman was fooled by the German situation but he had the hope that there could be change.
I remember in our meetings in the middle 30s, Gestapo people were sitting outside the door taking down the names of all of us who entered. The Gestapo documents captured by the military after the war showed very clearly that the Germans had ordered the extermination of Buchman’s work wherever they found it in the occupied countries. This was because they said it replaces the swastika with the cross of Christ. That didn’t prevent Buchman from trying to meet these people and trying to give them the message which had changed him and people like myself and might change them too. He never met Hitler. I think he would have liked to have done in some ways. He would like to have had a shot at it. He didn’t believe the power of God was outside anyone.
He brought a German Bishop over one day, a Nazi bishop, and he happened to put me in charge of him because I happened to be able to speak German. This bishop said ‘I only know one word of English’ and that is ‘schnapps’. He was an absolute fraud put in there simply to try and make the church Nazi. Buchman saw this but he also thought the man could be changed and surrounded him by a lot of people to whom Christ had really become a power in their life so that might happen to him. What could that not do in Germany if that really happened? It began to happen to this man, so much so that he asked Buchman if he could send a cable for his wife to come over because he said, ‘There are things I have got to put right which I could do easier in this atmosphere than back at home.’ But then he was stopped by some good pious Christians from doing that. They said he shouldn’t have any contact with Buchman because he was playing with the Nazis.
He said to me once, ‘When do you think the explosion will occur? When do you think the chaos will come?’ He wasn’t fooled by events but he had hope. Of course, he would not speak out against anyone. You must remember that inside Germany there were thousands of people who were following Buchman and who had their names taken. If Buchman, outside the country, began letting off against the leadership of the country what would happen to those people inside the country, let alone what chance would there be to change that person? He had 40 journalists present one day and one of them reported that Buchman said, ‘I thank God for Hitler who stopped the wave of communism coming across Europe, though of course I don’t approve of his treatment of the Jews.’ He made some remark like that which of course was much milder than remarks made of Hitler by Churchill and other people at the time, in the early 30s. That has been used against him ever since. But there is absolutely no doubt that the whole tenor of his work was that God should guide people and not any dictator, that he must fight for the change in people.
‘On the whole I am glad I made that remark’ he said to me one day with a puckish smile, because it did show that he was fighting for people to change, which was the thing in his own life that he stood for - that nations should be governed by men who are governed by God. Why should he regret making it? The remark was true - I mean if the leaders of Germany had changed and accepted the cross of Christ instead of the swastika, what a difference it would have made in Europe! They didn’t do so, as many of us in Britain have not done so, as industry has not done so, as trade unions have not done so, hence we have had trouble. But that doesn’t mean Buchman wouldn’t fight for industry in this country and trade unionism in this country to change, even if afterwards they went to war. He would never regret having fought for them. Why should he regret fighting to try and change the Germans?
The last time I saw him was rather a touching time, to be honest. It was in Caux several months before he died and I had had the clear thought that time - I was going back to India - that this was the last time I would see him. I used to see him every morning there alone. I went in to see him and I think he knew too, though it was months and months before he died. He was no more ill than he had been for a long time. I said to him, ‘Frank you know I am going back to India and there may not be people there with both the perception and the courage to tell me where I need change. Now is your chance and please will you do it for me?’ He said, ‘No, no, no, no. Not at all. The Holy Spirit does talk to you, and he will tell you.’ I said, ‘That’s all very well Frank, but your help might be useful as well.’ After some persuasion he told me two very simple things. He just said, ‘Well there is one senior man here whom you don’t see straight. You are too kind to him
Secondly your jokes sometimes put you in the centre of the picture. There is something wrong with that.’ That was all he would tell me. All through the years I was in India, which were many years, he never gave me instructions what to do but he fought for me every time I came back that I would be the kind of man the Holy Spirit could tell what to do, which was something quite different.
Then at my last time with Buchman, at the end of that interview, I did something I had never done before. I asked him if he would give me his blessing. I knelt down and he gave me his blessing. Going out of that room feeling you had seen your best friend for the last time, into the hurly-burly of people at Caux, was a very moving experience which I have never forgotten.
He was fun to be with. I mean he could be as trenchant as could be and then it was over. He never exploded. I mean he never harboured things against you and you knew that what he said he believed. I think people loved him because he gave himself to them fully and didn’t demand things from them but expected great things from them. He expected more from them than they expected from themselves. But he expected it in the service of the Lord and not for their own ends. He pulled out of you talents and possibilities which you didn’t really realise you had, either false modesty or the fact that you had been hurt somewhere or other was removed and you found yourself possessed of powers which you didn’t know you possessed.
His humour was such fun too. There was a movie called ‘Susan and God’ which some of our people had a part in making. At first the letters about it were enthusiastic and I had got the mayor and corporation of Calcutta to back it up. Then I was in another part of India and a cable came saying ‘Susan and God has arrived. Do we support it?’ I rather wondered. I said to myself we have not heard a word about this for some time, it may be they were just using the Group and the thing has been pretty distorted. So I wired Frank, ‘Do we support Susan and God?’ Frank wired back, ‘Certainly not Susan’. That’s the kind of thing I mean. He always had a very amusing way of putting his correction and his help.
There was an amusing story when we went to a mid-Canadian city, of a reporter who on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday came out with absolutely vicious articles against Frank and his work, so much so that some of us met together to discuss whether we should start libel suits and things like that.
They were totally untrue and poisoning the whole city against him from the first time we went into it. Frank wasn’t in the least phased by it. On the Friday afternoon he met the man at a garden party and was introduced to him and, beaming all over his face, he said to the journalist, ‘Ooh, you are the man who has spelt my name right all the week. Not many people do that.’ On that Saturday the column came out headed, ‘Frank - you win’, and telling how in an hour over tea with Frank Buchman he had lost the bitterness and the hate against people when things went right, and his desire to make them go wrong.
He was no more against communists than he was against the selfish capitalists. He was against the qualities in a man’s life which prevented him using his nature to the full and he didn’t care a hoot whether he was a socialist, a communist, a conservative or a capitalist. He was not against any of these ‘isms’. He disliked the godlessness of some communists and felt they needed to change. He equally disliked the material selfishness of some capitalists who went to church but were equally godless. He would not say that a man’s political persuasion had any influence on him whatsoever. It was the man’s character. When men change nations change.
With special thanks to Ginny Wigan for her transcription, and Lyria Normington for her editing and correction.
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