Roger was English and was one of the early people to work as a full-time volunteer with The Oxford Group (as IofC was then known).
Roger was still a boy when the First World War started but it motivated him to study to join the Royal Navy at Osborne and Dartmouth. But after Dartmouth he decided that the Navy was not for him. Instead, soon after the end of the war, he went to Heidelberg University. He was in Germany when Hitler made his 1923 putsch. After this, he studied at Oxford University. On graduating, he went to teach history at Madras University in 1928; but his real passion was working with the Harijans, the poorest caste in India. He said, ‘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.’
He then returned to England and spent a year studying theology at Westcott House, Cambridge. During this time he came into contact with The Oxford Group and met Frank Buchman for the first time. Roger’s father had been a businessman, and Roger could have followed that course. Instead, he decided to work without salary with The Oxford Group.
Buchman asked Roger to be a sort of ‘batman’ to him, which he was for several years during the 1930s, accompanying Buchman to various countries, including Germany several times. He probably knew Buchman as well as anyone. An account of his impressions of Buchman is available here.
Roger also spent periods in Asia, and after the Second World War got to know many of the leaders of India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Myanmar. He was a friend of Mahatma Gandhi and took messages from Gandhi to the British Viceroy before India won her independence.
Roger was the author of various books and pamphlets of which The Endless Adventure was published by Blandford Press in 1964. According to the blurb, it ‘tells how men and women stood up to the iniquities and faithlessness of their time and made decisions that altered history’.
