Margot’s father, John Meekings, ran a successful poultry business in Sussex. Because of his encounter with the work of The Oxford Group during the 1930s he had obeyed what he felt was a God-given thought to double the size of his operation. This was during the Depression when most businesses were cutting back. As a result, he was able to employ some Welsh coalminers who were out of work and almost starving. Margot remembers hearing wonderful singing coming from the shed where the chickens were being plucked ready for market.
At the age of 46, when Margot and her twin sister Mary were 18, John died of leukaemia.
Margot remembers the respect in which the miners held her father. ‘More than 18 years after his death one miner and his wife came to my wedding in London. [Afterwards] his wife told my mother, “While we sat in the church waiting for Margot to arrive my husband said to me that if he didn’t like the look of the bridegroom he would protest when the minister asked if anyone had any objections.”’
Before Margot’s marriage, she had joined the Women’s Auxilliary Air Force (WAAF) during the Second World War. She worked as a ‘plotter’, charting the movements of all the enemy and allied aircraft, including during D-day, which was ‘particularly exciting’.
After the war, Margot got a job as secretary to the finance director of the Sunday Dispatch. ‘He didn’t do much work so I helped deal with Letters to the Editor, including writing some myself when we were short.’
In 1948, Mary was working in Caux and Margot decided to visit her, although she had no interest in MRA. She was then invited by John and Elisabeth Caulfield to live at an MRA home in London, which she did for three years. During this time she fell in love Major David Young, although they did not marry for another six years. David was working with MRA in India for much of that time, and Margot worked on a farm in Dorset owned by David Bowerman.
They married when David returned to the UK in 1958. They spent much of the next 17 years on the Indian subcontinent. During this time a number of Panchgani residents, impressed by what they had heard from young Indians influenced by MRA, asked Rajmohan Gandhi to set up a permanent training centre in their town. David was tasked with finding a suitable site and then persuading the three landowners to sell. David and Margot moved into a bungalow in Panchgani which allowed David to oversee the construction and Margot to help with the furnishing of the new centre. Living in Panchgani also meant that local people were kept informed about what was going on and felt part of the project.
After the centre was opened in 1968, David and Margot continued to be involved in all the initiatives that were going on.
In 1975, the Youngs moved to Scotland for nine years, caring for David’s mother who lived to 100. They then moved to the Brighton area and shared their home with Mary, who died of cancer in 1990. ‘Retirement’ was a relative term. David and Margot were active in many areas, including the local Interfaith Group, which played a constructive role in Brighton life.
