Edward Peters: We have two distinguished gentlemen sitting here in the front row and once upon a time these gentlemen were at college together.
James Silver: Yes, we were, the most important college (Worcester) in the most important university (Oxford) in England.
I am just going to tell you the truth about Garth, that’s all! We were actually at the same college in the early 30s. This was the time when Britain had twice as many unemployed as now and unemployment pay was 25p a day and not everybody collected even as much as that.
I tried 21 times and it was at the 21st attempt that I got a job. It was after that I went to college. Anyway, I actually got there before Garth, a year before, and Garth hove in sight one day. He was a very distinctive figure.
Garth: Distinguished, did you say?
James: I thought you would say that Garth! He had long flowing hair and wore a green suit, a red tie and red carpet slippers - at 11 o’clock in the morning! That intrigued me a great deal. The company he kept in his room did too. There were a number of people, I was told some were communists. As I didn’t then know what a communist was, I wasn’t much the wiser. There were also a number of poets.
But what is much more important was that Garth changed and when he and I went down (that is left the university with distinctions of one sort or another) there were actually 16 people in the college who listened to God every day and told each other what God wanted them to do with their lives and their careers. Half the college - we went through a college list and checked this - had had the opportunity to listen to God with one or more of us. Every member of the college had actually had a personal talk, which would affect the future of their lives.
Garth Lean:
I went back the other day to a college Gaudy, you know a reunion when people come back, and they were all still terrified. We had some interesting talks.
Well, that was an idea about dress, wasn’t it? I really must see if I can get back to that standard.
Margot (Garth’s wife): What about the hair?
Garth: Well, I don’t think there is any danger of me growing it down. I do my best, but Margot comes along with one of those clippers, you know. I have got a razor with a clipper on the back, and she goes up the back with it, you know. That is the problem
Reggie Holme: You could always get an ‘afro’, Garth.
Garth: Very nice. Exactly. Well now, where do we start after all that? Well, I think people were a little surprised when I began to become different at Worcester. I don’t know why because I was always a very nice, peaceable chap really. But I certainly didn’t believe in God. I don’t think I’ll tell you all about being changed because that would take a little while and you can read about that .. and my wife is shaking her head .. in ‘Good God It Works’ if you want to, which is upstairs. If you can’t afford it, let me know and I will let you have a copy.
Then the question was:- What did you do about altering the situation around you? Because it became clear to me that if you do not make a dent in the situation around you, it very soon makes a dent in you. If you go to school and you start drifting in life, the only thing to do is to put yourself in a position where you are making the pace. Well, this was very easy in my case because when I arrived back from having given my life to God, having been through these four standards, I walked into college and I had two things I felt I had to do immediately. One was to write to my brother, Peter, to say that I had read all the love letters that were written to him, which were very interesting but wasn’t quite honest.
And the second was to write to my brother, John, and tell him that - well he had a rotten old car - a car which was tied together with string. I drove it and I scratched another car with it. Money must have been worth something then. It must have been a very small scratch, because the chap said if I gave him £1 he wouldn’t go to the insurance company. If he went to the insurance company then of course my family would know. Then I might not be allowed to drive the family new car.
In my research, purely academic of course, into my brother’s drawers, I knew that my brother John who owned the car had 100 francs in one of his drawers. So, I changed the hundred francs into £1, which it was then worth, sent the pound off, and everything was fine. I mean his car had done the damage, after all. During this time when I thought about how to change, the first two thoughts that came to me were to put these two things right.
I walked back into college to do it and as I walked in I met my best friend, a man in the rugger team. He said to me, ‘Hello Garth, whatever have you been doing?’ So, I thought, ‘I either plunge in now or I never will,’ so I said, ‘I have been with Prescott and I have been making an experiment’. He asked, ‘What’s that?’ because he knew if I had been with Prescott what it must be. So, I said, ‘Oh I have given my life to God.’ He said, ‘You damn fool’. And I said, ‘Never mind, goodbye.’ and I went off to write this letter. Just as I had finished writing the letters there was a thud-thud-thud and the whole of the rugby XV came into my room, or about 10 of them. Anyway, all he could mobilise in the time, to get me out of this frightful predicament - because they didn’t approve of my becoming like this at all. They felt it was most out of character and a disgrace to the side.
Well of course that was the best thing that could happen because I had very little faith - none really - but I wasn’t going to be got out of it by that lot of thugs. That sort of set the scene.
A few days later Prescott and I were wondering how to make clear the position. So - we were a very heavy-drinking college - we were called ‘Worcester College for the Blind’ because most of us were blind drunk most of the time. The drinking was done in The Buttery, after dinner. So, Prescott and I went into The Buttery and walked up to the very distinguished gentleman who looked after The Buttery and said, ‘Two pints of milk in a silver tankard, please’. This was a great shock to him because a) milk wasn’t provided in The Buttery and b) it was always provided in glasses. So, two glasses of milk were brought to us and we didn’t like this a bit. We said, ‘Why shouldn’t we have it in the college silver tankards? Why is this discrimination against milk drinkers in this college?’ After we had made a really thorough fuss on this subject, it dawned upon the college that something was happening.
Then all sorts of people started stealing around to my room to find out what the blazes had happened to me. We had many talks and most unusual people started to change. Quite a lot of the Scholars, the captain of this, the captain of that and so on. It was really getting very awkward. Nobody knew who would be changed next. In fact, some of the more sporting people had a sweepstake as to who should be changed next. It became quite a sporting event to watch and spot the form of the different people about college.
Meanwhile we were going quietly on our way and people were coming to tea with us every day because we didn’t regard any day as complete unless we had had a shot at somebody, and so it went on. The only trouble was the rowing lot. They were a very difficult lot. Of course, they were - as I often felt - “wooden of head and wooden of seat” otherwise they wouldn’t have been doing it, because there were much better games to play. But they were very obstinate and at the same time they thought themselves to be the very heart of the college. Which no doubt they were.
James Silver: Of course!
Garth: Well, Prescott and I were pedalling our way up the street one day, just before the Boat Race. You know Oxford and Cambridge are two places which have a thing called the Boat Race on the Thames in about March, and it is supposed to be a race. It is generally a procession, you know. That is the trouble with boat races. One lot gets ahead and then that’s the end of things, unlike rugger or any other game. There is not much fun in it, but anyway everyone watches it. It is a great thing.
We were going up the street and we saw this poster from the Oxford Mail which said, ‘Oxford Stroke (the stroke is the man who gives the timing in the boat, you know) Changed’. Well of course in our college this only meant one thing. We realised that it would be a matter of great interest to all the rowing men of the college to know this news because, after all, the Oxford Stroke was the number one man - I mean, they hadn’t got a God, so he was there. So, we went round to the Oxford Mail and got 8 duplicates of this poster and rushed back to college. In those days you were a gentleman and you ate your lunch in your room. There was no nonsense about eating it in hall. It was brought to you by your college servant. It was probably only bread and cheese but you ate it in state. And your door was a big oaken door, so that you could close it when you did your work, if you ever did.
We went back and hammered one of these posters on the door of each of the rowing 8. So, when they got back to lunch in their rooms, they found this appalling news facing them which shook their morale considerably, because there was a war of nerves going on in the college. The next day we went out again, and there was another poster. ‘Another Change in Oxford Crew’. So, we got copies of this and took it back and put it on the same doors.
In fact, the whole thing became a bit of a riot because we believed in keeping the initiative. Things got to such a state that the college were frightfully interested. They didn’t know who was changing next. Two South African Boxing Blues got changed. One of them is now head of the hospital in which that chap does all those heart operations.
One day we said, why don’t we have a dinner for anyone who would like to come and we will tell them about the Oxford Group and we will get some people from London and so on. So, we fixed up to have a dinner, second sitting, at 8pm. The first sitting of dinner at 7 was almost empty. Dinner at 8 was absolutely full. We told the whole college about what went on. They didn’t know who was going to pop up next. They really got a lot of shocks. This was the sort of way we went about things.
Have I got time to tell you about the Dean? Well, we had an extremely distinguished man who was Dean. He had been a Colonel in the Guards and he was still a legendary figure in Oxford. He was about 6’ 4” high and now, after a sedentary life drinking and eating the best at Worcester he was about 6’ 4” round the middle as well. He was the sort of President of the Wine Club and President of this and that. He taught Renaissance Literature and Charles II, those sorts of plays, and when things were getting a little merrier again (after the Civil War).
We had a battle of nerves with him because we really thought he ought to change. After all, he read the lessons in chapel, and if we believed him really, we expected different conduct from him. We used to go and tell him regularly that he was a hypocrite. He reacted to this, but finally he was fool enough to say that we could pick a lesson for him to read. So, we did. It was all about wine-bibbers and so on. But it had great merit from the religious point of view because that day instead of 4 or 5 people coming to the daily chapel the whole place was absolutely bung full. We had warned the college what was going to happen.
Anyway, this went on. At this time Frank Buchman was taking a large team to Norway and it really became a tremendous movement in Norway – ‘the greatest movement since the Reformation’, according to the archbishop. They, of course, couldn’t worry with the word ‘Oxford Group’ they just made it ‘Oxford’. And you got headlines like ‘Oxford captures Oslo’. Of course, the general impression was that anyone who came from Oxford would be changed, to the great embarrassment - I don’t know why - of the Oxford professors who sometimes went up there to Norway and hadn’t gone through this process. After all the motto of the university is ‘God is my light’, so why shouldn’t they be changed?
About this time a gentleman arrived in Oxford who was a Norwegian shipowner who became a member of parliament. He had changed - very much so. He wanted to know how things were going in Oxford. So, we took him into college and sat him down at the Scholars’ table. He naturally was very polite, as everyone is on the continent. You know in England you have to know each other for 20 years before you introduce yourself. But out there, when you meet someone, you shake hands and you give your name which is a very logical thing to do. So naturally he turned to the man next to him and said, ‘Morland’. And the man next to him said, ‘um, mmm, matter of fact, my name is Smith’. So Morland said, ‘I was changed last month. When were you changed?’ As this man had been running away from us for a long time, this embarrassed him a little. So, we thought this was just the man, Morland, to see the Dean. After a decent interval, to give the Dean time to imbibe sufficient port in the Senior Common Room, we knocked on his door and ‘Come in’ came from inside. We went in, and we said, ‘Mr Dean we wanted to introduce you to a distinguished visitor from Norway.’ ‘Oh yes’, intoned the Dean.
They advanced towards each other. Morland said, ‘Morland’, and the man said, ‘I happen to be the Dean of this college’. Morland said, ‘I was changed last month, when were you changed?’ The Dean went into one of his well-known acts which was to explain that - as he had often explained to us young gentlemen - that he found great difficulty in reconciling the Gospels with the problem of pain among animals. This went on for some time and the phrases were rolling out in a proper manner. And then he unfortunately stopped for breath. Morland, who was looking at him very perplexedly through his spectacles, trying to keep up with the English, said ‘It is not that. It is SIN!’
At that point I’m afraid Phil Woolley and I collapsed. We began to laugh, the Dean began to laugh, then Morland began to laugh. We all sat down and had quite a long talk.
But it is true that there was a great effect on many people, and the Provost of the College, who was a very shy little man, said to Prescott at the end of a year and a half, ‘I think, of my time - a little longer of his’ - he said, ‘You know, Mr Prescott, I have to admit that you have changed the whole atmosphere of the college.’
All I can say is that when I went back to this Gaudy/reunion, there were about 12 people of our year. Almost the only thing they could talk about was the change in Prescott and what had happened in our day. I don’t think they had hit anything as interesting since. Then the two men, one on each side of me at dinner, told me how they couldn’t get on with their children. One of them said, ‘You know, I have got to get on the phone. I stormed out of the house this morning.’ Then he said, ‘My younger son, you know, he won’t work. He doesn’t want to get into anything. He won’t pass any exams. He won’t do anything.’ Then I asked about his other children, and he told me about the other three. Then I said, ‘Does it occur to you that there is only one common denominator to all these tragedies?’ and he shouted at me ‘I know, I know.’ he shouted.
With special thanks to Ginny Wigan for her transcription, and Lyria Normington for her editing and correction.
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