Interview conducted by Reggie Holme
RAE Holme: I am sitting here in Edinburgh with Adam McLean who has quite a story to tell, born in Musselburgh, beginning life as a motor mechanic in Joppa (a suburb of Edinburgh), then his wartime experiences in the hills of Italy, severely wounded. He was later to meet some of the leaders of Italy - aristocracy, political leaders, trade union leaders, communist leaders. A real story of a Scot with true enterprise but with a plus that not everyone has.
Adam McLean: I was born in Musselburgh: ‘The honest toon’. I think everybody is born honest in Musselburgh, but my mother said it didn’t last long with me.
I had been working in a hotel and wanted to get back into engineering. I saw a fellow called Sam Reid advertising in the newspaper as he wanted an apprentice. Now Sam Reid was a well-known dirt-track racer, speedway. To my mind he was the kind of person I wanted to be. So I turned up for the interview and one of the first things he said was, ‘Can you drive?’. Well, I said quickly, ‘I have my licence’. I didn’t tell him I had only paid 5/- the day before for the licence and had never been in a car in my life.
RAEH: In those days you could just pay the sum in the Post Office and off you went, whether a menace to the public or a miracle.
Adam: We chatted and then he said, ‘Well, I have a few more people to see this morning.’ I said, ‘Of course it is a bright Saturday morning, why don’t you go away now and leave a message for the others saying the job is filled?’ and I quickly jumped on my push-bike and off I went.
After I started work with Sam - I knew something had happened to Sam himself. It was his attitude to the customers and to us, to myself particularly. I hadn’t been working long there when I had a Talbot to attend to. The old Talbot had a big dynamotor, a great big heavy thing. It was sitting in the front of the car and I was replacing it. He came up behind me and helpfully put his toe behind it and pushed. It slipped into place but took my fingers with it! As a good mechanic I had some very special words for the occasion, so he went off frowning. In the afternoon when he came in he noticed my fingers were black and bruised and said, ‘Now how did you do that, Adam?’ So I said, ‘How did I do it?’ And I told him.
Well the way Sam Reid apologised to me and his real concern convinced me something really had happened. I had been very cautious not to ask too many questions until then, but I asked him. ‘What is it that has happened?’ He said he had met some people, he called it the Oxford Group. They had helped him set his foot on a new path. He said he had never felt completely satisfied with his motorbikes and everything and had decided to let God run his life. I could see something had happened, so I said, ‘How do you do it?’ He replied, ‘Come in tomorrow morning half an hour earlier and we will see.’
I was brought up in a good Christian home. My mother was very Christian but it wasn’t always related to certain practical things in life.
I did come in early - I was interested. When I went in he sat down and I said, ‘How do you begin?’ and he replied, ‘Oh you sit quietly and let’s see if God will speak to you.’ He produced a paper and pencil, just so I wouldn’t forget any thoughts I might have. So after 5 minutes he was writing away. I called a halt. I said, ‘Hey. Stop. My connection with the Almighty must be broken.’ So like a good mechanic he said, ‘Maybe the contact points are dirty.’ So I said, ‘Oh? And how do I clean my contact points?’ He said, ‘Aha! That’s the secret. These four moral standards - absolute honesty, purity, unselfishness and love. You just put your life in front of those and see if any thoughts come.’
This was what he said he had been trying out with these friends in the Oxford Group. He said it was only practical, simple Christian living but it was new to me. We sat quiet again and the very first thought that came to me was ‘Oil’. You see I was in charge of the oil and sometimes - I had a motorbike by then, an old thing - I had been swiping some of the oil. So I told Sam about it. Being a good Scot, of course, I had to pay for it and there were a few other things.
I got straight with the foreman. He was, as I thought, an old-fashioned mechanic, or rather a blacksmith. The only trouble was sometimes he could fix a car when I couldn’t and I was jealous. So the thought came to go and tell him and we became real friends. In fact his home was remade, healing the trouble with his wife.
We went on like that and a completely different spirit came to that garage. We moved on from there and decided to share our experiences with other people. We had meetings here and conferences there We went all over around Edinburgh and Glasgow, Greenock to the shipyards, down to Birmingham and even to Oxford. This was the team from the garage and one or two other workers, a post office worker and some other technicians and ordinary fellows.
In the garage, being human, things went wrong sometimes. Somebody would break something or somebody would leave my tools on the car and then they were gone. There would be a slight rumpus. So we didn’t live in perfect harmony all the time, but we knew what to do when it went wrong. Sam would get us together to look at things honestly - what is best for each other, for the other fellow, for the garage and for the customer. This is how God actually affected the daily work. We had real comradeship. I can tell you I really enjoyed working in that place.
I think this same thing (job satisfaction) is exactly what is needed today because, although I needed money to live on and expected to get wages, I felt there was far more to it. I know once I was out a few years ago at British Leyland in Bathgate. A friend and I were talking to this worker there and he was browned off. He was fed up with the job. He had been complaining, complaining, and I know his foreman had spoken to me and said he was just hopeless. Now this fellow was pressing to get new equipment to lift the shafts up between the two machines. The management felt this was ridiculous because you could lift them with one hand but the thing I realised was that he had no satisfaction in his work at all.
We went down to London and met with other shop stewards and others from the engineering union. We talked of what we were aiming to do in life and what we were called upon to do as ordinary workers. He met some Indians in London who talked of British Leyland and the tractors and the diesel pumps that were coming out from this country. Then my friend said, ‘You know I think I have got a new perspective on my job. Those shafts are actually for the tractors that go to India.’ Then the foreman decided that he should take him around and let him see some other parts of the factory. The fellow had a whole new attitude to his work. I believe this is the kind of satisfaction that ordinary people need to re-find.
When we went to these different conferences, I learned a great deal from other people as a young mechanic from the garage. We worked as teams. One of the people I met was Dr Frank Buchman, the founder of MRA. I met him in Birmingham. It was at a great big meeting and there was a lot going on but I found he had time for me and we talked. I already had my earlier kind of personal change which I had found in the garage when I got straightened out on simple moral standards. He changed that into something that would be effective for everybody everywhere, in fact an ideology. He enlisted me, with a crowd of others, to go out and take it to the world.
Soon after that we were invited to Canada, in April 1939. We were a dozen Scots who had been working together. We were invited by some of the civic heads to go to take MRA to the different towns in Canada and United States. So off we went and arrived finally in Madison Square Gardens in New York. I had heard of that place before because of its reputation as a boxing venue. With my other Scots friends we spoke there at the launching of MRA in the USA, to how many - 2, 3, 4,000 people? We piped all the way - we piped all the way across Canada and the United States.
Before the war came - being a mechanic by trade, my father was a coal-miner - I decided to apply myself to an industrial world. We came down as far as Seattle and I had just begun to get to know some of the trade union men there when war broke out. All this time I was giving my full time to the work of MRA, on that trip. As soon as we heard war had broken out of course we went to the British Consul first to get his advice, because of the war going on. He knew what we had been doing and said we would serve best by continuing to do what we were doing. One thought that came to me was to go and see the President of the trade union in the Boeing aircraft company in Seattle. At that point the company was having quite a lot of trouble in the plant. Apart from the usual troubles of different factions fighting for position in a growing plant, there was another element:- Russia and Germany had an agreement then, and the communist party line was not to encourage the production of the materials in America that Britain so desperately needed. They were building the Flying Fortress then.
So I approached the president of the trade union - just went to his door and said who I was. He wondered what this Scot was coming for - I was dressed in a kilt. He invited me in and we talked. He recounted to me all the different problems they were having in that growing plant and what it meant to his country, the USA, that they couldn’t get the materials. He said, ‘Can you help?’ So we promised it. As a matter of fact two of us, a Greenock fellow and myself, took a flat next door to him, and saw him regularly, usually in the morning very early, about 5.30 before he went off to work before 7.00. There I had my first experience of American hotcakes with maple syrup and sausages for breakfast. I survived that. He introduced me to others in the plant and he had two groups. He had the fellows that he could trust and who became, you might say, the beginnings of a team. Then there were the fellows whom he did not trust and felt were up to no good. He said, ‘It is your job to change them!’ Well we didn’t change them all but a real force grew up in that trade union and in time, not very long, we had a real programme going. In fact every week the trade union paper of Boeings carried all the news of MRA and they had a weekly broadcast so we were put on the air.
One of the things we used widely was a handbook that was produced, called You Can Defend America. Its outlined programme was ‘Sound homes, teamwork in industry and a nation united’. Then it said how this could happen ‘change, unite, and fight’. It was done colourfully and they loved it. They said ‘This is what we need in Boeings’.
Things progressed and when things were more sorted out the president, Gary Cotton, said one day, ‘Will you go down to meet a friend of mine in California - Dale Reed, who is president of the independent trade union in Lockheed aircraft company?’ Now that plant was growing so fast that Dale Reed felt it was getting a bit beyond him because the men who were coming to work were not at all used to industry. They were coming from the ranches and the desert and from everywhere else other than industry. So two of us went down. I remember that meeting with Dale. He took us to a place - and again I had my first experience of one of those American dishes, of chicken in the rough, where you don’t even get a knife and fork to eat it. Over that chicken he explained what was likely to happen - that the production in that plant was going to get chaotic. He also said the president of the company did not even recognise the union and asked us what we thought he should do.
We had one of those times of quiet and the thought came to build a core of a few people he trusted. That first team were very interesting. There was one fellow who had really come from the desert. He had almost no formal education. Another fellow was a young Californian who just liked having fun but had decided to work in the company for some months to earn money to go to college. These were the first two. Much was done with a few people because those trade union meetings that were getting bigger and bigger were being more and more controlled by the small minority groups composed of people from the Left to the Right - from the German Boon (?) - to the leftist communists. They planned to take over the trade union by always fighting for the microphone. So we got our friends to be early to the meeting and get right near the mike so they would get across their programme for that trade union of real teamwork, to produce the aeroplanes that were meant to be produced.
At that time Lockheed was making that aeroplane interceptor that became so famous - the P38. The team got going very well and applied themselves in the factories. One thing that did happen very early on was that Dale Reed saw that same booklet, You Can Defend America, and he was gripped by it. He said, ‘I want every one of our members to get a copy of this’. When he went to the boss - because he had to go to the boss of Lockheed to get permission to distribute the book to the membership in the factories - the boss looked at it. Now that man had been very much against the trade unions. He read it and was quiet. Then he said, ‘This ought to go not just to the membership, it should go to every man jack in this factory. I think we should get 5,000 copies and the company should pay for it. We will put it in a good envelope and we will give it out with the wages, because everybody turns up for their wages.’
The next day Dale Reed was called again. The President was very pleased and smiling. He said, ‘I have come to a decision. I think we should now officially recognise the trade union in the factory.’ That meant a very great deal because Dale Reed had also decided with some of his friends that instead of being an independent union they should be part of that great machinist union in America, so that when agreements were made they would be made together and would be done peacefully.
Well things went on in that factory but there was one thing - that fellow that I mentioned - one of the first young men we started with, Lyn Alexander is his name. Lyn had almost no formal education, came from the desert, from an adobe hut, one of those mud huts. He worked in that factory and took an interest in everything that happened around it. It was at a time when in Africa they needed that interceptor plane, the P38. The problem was how to get the belly tanks on them. These were the extra fuel tanks that needed to be slung underneath them to take them across the ocean because by sea was too slow. There just wasn’t the space. Everybody was on top of each other.
So Lyn came home one time and he said, ‘I have a thought. I think I will go to the factory about it. I think it can be done.’ His foreman laughed at him when he said he wanted to talk to the employer, to the boss, about it. In the afternoon he saw somebody else. They laughed and said, ‘What can you do?’ Next morning he had the same thought, ‘Go to the bosses and tell them what you have in mind.’ So Lyn went.
It was a very simple thing. He said, ‘Why don’t we take over the main airfield at Burbank and allow the commercials to use our smaller airfield. It is big enough for their traffic, and we could spread out those airplanes all over it. We have so many people we could easily fit the belly tanks there.’ That is actually what happened.
Now some time later Harry Truman, who was then Vice-President of the USA and responsible for the production all through America, said, ‘There are planes in the fighting front today that would not be there were it not for the work of MRA.’ That was from the information he had received from Harvey Brown, the head of the machinists union. It was Lyn Alexander’s work - the fellow from the desert.
Finally my number came up in the draft so I went into the infantry and off to North Africa. I was only in North Africa for a few months but I decided to make the most of it while I was there. I gave my best to everybody I met. One fellow, who was to turn up later, was a Sergeant Sass. He was very frustrated and wondered what was going to happen. He had been hanging around. More of him later.
I went from there to Naples where I got equipped with everything a soldier could ever carry - two great big kit bags full of stuff. Then we boarded one of those ex-yachts to sail up for a landing just beside Rome. Rome was taken and we got off the landing barges all tensed up. Now just before going over the side I had discovered there were great big cans of pineapple juice. I had seen one of my friends guzzling one. So I whipped one under my arm. Then we landed but extraordinarily there wasn’t a German in sight. It was like a picnic. In two seconds I had about 100 of my friends around. We were sweating with more than the heat and I got a bayonet from somebody and opened up the can up and the pineapple juice was strawberry jam!
So we went on from there and got into trucks and chased on up north. We got off the trucks and the tanks came up beside us because we were going to hit the enemy. Now that was the first day of real combat. We were a company of 140 men and inside two hours we lost 40. It was quite a shocker and I learned a great deal. I became everything. I became a help for carrying the wounded, I was on the radio, and at one point I got so excited I told the fellow at the other end of the radio that we needed help and more quickly and called him a few names. It turned out later to be the Colonel.
Then we moved into this battle. It somehow was even easier to reach men with the thing I felt most deeply about. For instance, I was responsible to distribute the rations and to make the morning report, which is the First Sergeant’s job - to get supplies of men and materials. One of my runners, Tocher (?) was a fellow who was really bitter. He got into the army in the territorial days and was shipped overseas because he got venereal disease. He was annoyed because, when he told them that he had got it from his wife because he had never been with any other woman, they laughed at him and off he went. He was very angry at the army and he was very angry at his wife. He was no good to anybody.
The strange thing was that I noticed he carried a New Testament in his breast pocket. We chatted and I told him how I had got the answer to my bitterness, how I had changed in the garage days. How my father had been a coal-miner and I had arrived in that garage pretty sour and up against the capitalist classes. Well, Tocher changed and became my closest friend.
Then there was this fellow I had met in North Africa in passing. He turned up and was the Sergeant for supplies in the next unit to mine. I remember the night he said, ‘You know I have finally found out what I am fighting this war about. I want to give my life to make this thing worthwhile’ and on the hillside there we got on our knees and he asked God to take over his life.
Well we moved on from there and some months later we moved into the Gothic Line - that was the German line that crossed Italy - where they had decided to stop us from moving north. Every day as we moved northward we were in combat. It was almost inevitable - you knew what was going to happen. At 6 o’clock at night the Germans would fire off all their ammunition to hold us down and then they would quickly retreat. Then we could sleep. Where I was in the mountains there were no Italians under arms. The only Italians we saw were the Partisans and there were a few of them.
We changed fronts. I went over from Pisa to Florence. The British had taken Florence but there was still a lot of fighting so we had to walk over the Arno, all wet. There was some sporadic shooting. We moved through there and a small unit of us - about 120 - moved ahead of the formal attack three days before it, keeping high in the mountains. Our function was to get on ahead without getting too involved in the fighting. We were supposed to take the most forward position we could, so that we could pass back information of all kinds. We started off with telephone links and then when that was finally broken we kept up with radio. Of course, all mountains go up and then have to come down again. One time we came down into a valley and we were seen. I can still remember the morning I got up - the thought came to me that something was going to happen. First I thought I was going to get killed but in my little book I kept in my pocket I had far too many things in the future that I felt the Almighty wanted me to do and people I felt I was meant to care for, so it must be something else.
Well, it was after midnight when some shelling began. We thought it was artillery, because it was hitting the tops of the mountains behind us but all of a sudden one came right in. It was in fact that Germans had captured Russian mortars and this was a great big 81mm mortar. They had observed us down at the bottom in the valley. I was trying to pick up one of my runners. He was wrapped in a blanket. I was waking him to go for supplies. That blanket was like a lace curtain afterwards. He broke his back but I can’t remember exactly what happened. I remember handing over my little book where I kept my inspiration for the mornings and the facts about the movements of our own unit. I just remember in the half-consciousness my friend Tocher, who had become our best runner, speaking to the medics saying, ‘You had better pick up Scotty’ (as he used to call me). The piece of ground beside us was flat and was being heavily bombed. We had to cross that to get over the mountains where they were going to carry me. The medics were very unwilling to expose themselves like that. Tocher said, ‘Pick up Scotty’. No movement. Then I heard the click of his rifle - it was an M-1 and he was putting a round into the chamber and then the medics picked me up. I don’t know what Tocher would have done.
Then we got back. I got quickly stitched together at some field station. I don’t remember it much but we landed in Rome. The hospital I arrived at was a big one. There weren’t so many people in it and I must confess the first thought wasn’t exactly patriotic. I was delighted for the first time in so long to see sheets under my chin. After two days or so I still had my beard and my three-month moustache, and the chief nurse who was a captain in the US Army came around with the barber and looked at each bed and said what had to happen. When she came in front of my bed she looked and the barber asked what to do. With her hand she signalled to take all off. I protested and said, ‘No, no, I want to keep my moustache. I want a photograph of my moustache. I had never had one before.’ She looked at me and flicked her hand and said ‘All off’ and walked on. Now that nurse had a long nose and I looked over to my friend in the next bed. I couldn’t move any more than my eyes. I said, ‘Who is that needle-nose interfering?’
Within three or four days that ward was filled with 120 men, because the Gothic Line really saw some fighting, and nearly everybody in that place referred to the chief nurse as ‘needle-nose’. She was a fine lady though prim. The incident had troubled me. After two or three days I decided to do something about it and the thought came to me just to apologise.
Now Tocher, who had also been wounded, had helped to get a wheelchair for me. I was away at the other end of this big ward and I wheeled the thing down - it is very difficult with only one arm to make a wheelchair go straight so by the time I came in front of Miss Dot Ayer, the Captain, I was exhausted. She looked at me and said, ‘What is it you want Maclean?’ And I said ‘I wanted to have a word with you. I want to apologise.’ She said, ‘What on earth for?’ I said, ‘I was so annoyed when you came and made that man cut my moustache off I referred to you as ‘needle-nose’, and I think some others have picked it up.’ She said, ‘Yes’, and looked like she was going to explode. Then she said, ‘Well, Maclean. I can understand you saying it, perhaps, but I can’t understand for the life of me why you tell me.’
So I took a big breath and I said, ‘Well this morning God told me to tell you.’ She said, ‘What?’ So I went right ahead and gave her everything from soup to nuts, the four moral standards and what I had decided to do with my life. Absolute honesty, purity, unselfishness and love - the same standards that Sam Reid had told me about all those years ago and I really had tried to live them. At least that was the bullseye for me to aim at. She listened and a day or so later she said, ‘My fiancé, who is a Lieutenant in ordinance, has landed in Livorno. I had a word with him and he would like to meet you.’
He came down some days later, Lt Guthrie walked in. Now this was 120 enlisted men, all looking at this officer walking up to my bed. We chatted and I told him about MRA. He asked, ‘But how did you begin?’ So I told him the one definite step was when I went on my knees and asked God to use my life. ‘All right, I want to begin.’ He got down on his knees. It is not what I would have suggested, but I had to get down too. It certainly put me on the spot. He simply gave his life to God.
The reaction from the rest of the ward was varied. They pulled my leg quite a lot but some of my friends knew. I had met many very interesting people. For example, the fellow across the way, George Burnell is his name. I went into the Red Cross and I felt he was being anything but pure with one of the nurses, one of the auxiliaries and I told him so. He professed to be a Christian, everybody said he was. I told him what I thought of him. He was furious. I told him what I felt, in detail, about honesty and purity. We had many talks after that and I discovered that he wrote to his father who was a well-known clergyman in a Fifth Avenue church.
Then there was the Japanese fellow in the next bed to mine. He was a real friend. Also a black fellow in one of our neighbouring units, I think the 91st, who read a book that was beside my bed. It was called ‘The World that Works’ - written by the Anglican Bishop of Burma. He told me about how he got along with the native Burmese and what he felt they should do together in Burma. That fellow said, ‘This is what we need in the US so that we black people really feel as responsible as you white people and we have the one purpose.’.
There were others but one was particularly interesting:- This Lt Guthrie, his father was a mine-owner and at that time John L Lewis, the great mine-workers leader, was having a strike and fighting with all the coal mine owners. So Charlie Guthrie went to his father and told him what had happened to him personally. I am convinced it made a real difference and help towards the settlement that came afterwards in the industry.
RAE Holme: So, wherever you went, on the battlefield or in hospital, you were using the first experience that came to you in that garage - repairing people as well as repairing cars.
Adam: Exactly. But it was always fresh because it is not a system. It is not a bunch of principles. It is just living, seeking God’s inspiration.
When I got out of hospital, for instance, I didn’t feel very well because I had had a lot of morphine and the bright light in Rome and all the noise made it difficult. On the first morning I got up in this nice hotel room that the US army provided. I asked God to guide me and I couldn’t get a blooming thought. The only thing was I had been given a nice new tropical suit and there was a button off the pocket. I couldn’t sew it on myself because I was paralysed down my left side. So I thought, ‘I will get this button sewn on’ and that was the only thought I got. Because it was my only thought, I just went to the Red Cross to get it done. I still remember I walked up to this table with the threads and so on and the lady behind it and I said, ‘Would you sew this button on for me? I can’t do it.’ She did it. She said her name was Kathleen, and she said, ‘But how have you got a Scottish accent and an American uniform?’ So I explained how I had gone to America with MRA. She asked all the details. She said, ‘You know, my mother should hear about this. Will you please come home with me and meet my mother?’.
Well I had been in the army long enough to know that most times when a lady said ‘come home and meet my mother’ it had nothing to do with her mother, so I went off. On the way back to the hotel in the jeep I thought, ‘But I had the thought to pursue this.’ So in the hotel I found out from the address her telephone number and I could ring up this lady. A little lady she was, Mrs Short. I think she had a kind of Irish accent. She said, ‘Why, how did you know to telephone me?’ I told her about her daughter, whom I discovered at that point was Countess Kathleen Gritzy. She had married an Italian Count. Mrs Short said, ‘Come over and have tea and tell me all about this.’ So that day, off I went and had a talk with the old lady. She said, ‘You know, this is thrilling. This is what Italy needs. This is what Rome needs. Everybody is in confusion. We need an ordered life and we need it to come from something other than the dictator. You must meet Princess Doria Pamfile (?).’
Well you know, my father was a coal-miner, I didn’t know many princesses. I thought this would be interesting. So the date was made for the following week - a Tuesday. I went along in the evening and when I went up to this home, a beautiful house, the room was filled with all kinds of chatter. There was a Norwegian fellow on my left I remember. It was like a circle, and there was a sofa opposite where a lady sat. I looked around to see if I could find a princess. Now I didn’t really know what a princess looked like - I didn’t think she would be more than 25 for one thing and I knew she wouldn’t be wearing a crown but I could see no princess. After a few moments I heard a Scottish accent and I looked across to the senior lady sitting on the sofa. I said to her, ‘When did you leave Glasgow?’ Then all conversation stopped. I had found the princess. I could have crept under the table.
She beckoned me and I went over and she chatted - she said how she had been host to the King and Queen (my King and Queen). I couldn’t continue much on that subject because I didn’t know them so well, although I had met them in Canada. Finally she said, ‘You know I want you to tell me about MRA’, so I did. She listened and then she said, ‘You must meet my husband. Do come along and we can have tea together.’ Well she didn’t think I was interested so she said, ‘You see, my husband is the Mayor of Rome.’ I was really interested but she just didn’t seem to think so. ‘I’ll tell you if you will come along each week to the palazzo Doria..’ (it is a whacking big city block in the middle of town) ‘you will have tea and Scots scones that you haven’t tasted the like of for many years!’ Well each week that is exactly how we began in Rome. Each Tuesday she invited her friends in and, with some friends of mine, we met and we started our first effort to bring the answer that Mrs Short wanted so much to come to Italy.
There was one thing:- You might say that is the conservative life, the aristocracy and their friends but I had a longing to meet the ordinary working men and the leadership. There was only one name I knew. It was Umberto Colosso who had been working outside of Italy. He was hounded out of Italy by Mussolini, because he was a great Socialist. I knew he had also served Britain with the BBC and had some part in the Intelligence Service. With a bit of looking around and asking questions I found his address. I had heard of him from a clandestine newspaper that referred to him and I had got a letter from an MRA friend in London - Stephen Foot - who had mentioned his name. I knew he had a requisitioned house which meant that I knew its location and I knew he was certainly trustworthy. People who had suffered so much under the Fascist regime were vetted very thoroughly by the Allied authorities and were given a home to stay in. Those became the people one could trust.
Off I went and found this place. I still wasn’t sure how I was going to begin. I got in past the passage by ducking under the caretaker’s window so he didn’t ask any questions and went up the stairs not the lift. I came to the door which had many little things on it showing the bolt holes of many bolts and I pressed the bell, trying to keep out of the way of the little security peep-hole. I was in American uniform. I wondered what to say. When I rang the bell I heard the pitter-patter along those marble floors, the voice said in Italian ‘Who’s there?’ and I said, ‘Adam Maclean’. ‘Who?’ ‘Adam Maclean.’ And then there was a rattle of bolts and the doors flew open and a tall lady dressed in black jumped forward, embraced me and kissed me on both cheeks. That was pretty rough for a Scotsman. She swept me inside. I went into this room and there was a table with a great bowl of spaghetti and sitting there was a round, jovial-faced fellow devouring spaghetti. I would call it the vacuum system style of eating. His hand flicked and the thing disappeared inside him. I watched mesmerised. Finally he said, ‘What do you know from Malta?’ I said ‘Malta?’. He said, ‘Aren’t you the priest from Malta?’ I said, ‘No I am not from Malta, and I am certainly not a priest.’ He said, ‘What are you doing here then, in my house?’ I said, ‘You ask your wife that, she brought me in.’ ‘Well what did you come for?’ ‘Well I had a thought to come and tell you about MRA.’
There was a long pause, and Umberto Colosso put his hand in his hip pocket and produced a little book and said, ‘MRA? The Oxford Group. Do you know, I met a fellow in the Mediterranean on a boat, a pharmacist, who told me about quiet times in the Oxford Group and Moral Re-Armament. Ever since that time, every morning, I collect my thoughts. Mind you, I don’t have the orthodox idea of God. Maybe not the same ideas as yours but I do understand this moment of quiet. It has been very helpful.’
That was the beginning of my friendship with Umberto, the well-known socialist who was supposed to hate every priest and was called a ‘mange-pretti’, that means a priest-eater. He did several things. One thing he did was to say to me, ‘I want you to meet my friends and tell them about MRA.’ There was no Parliament or even constituent assembly in Rome yet. It was only just at the end of the war. He introduced me to some very interesting men:- a fellow called De Gaspari who became the first Prime Minister and I believe saved that country from total collapse and the communists taking it. Then a fellow called Giuseppe Saragat, a very close friend of his, who became the Vice Prime Minister and President of the Republic later. Then a fellow called Giordani, who was from the Vatican but became an MP. Another one was Lombardi, a great socialist Minister of Commerce. Oh, there were a number of others but that is how it began.
From these men who were the political wing you might say I met the trade union men. We fought to see that this basic idea which had gone with me from the garage and from those days in America with the message in the handbook, ‘Sound homes, teamwork in industry and a nation united’, was put into practice in everything.
I was not alone in doing this. We had many friends. One thing was, for example, that Frank Buchman had been in Italy years before and had a number of friends. It didn’t take him long when he arrived in Rome: within two days he had met Saragat, the Prime Minister De Gaspari and Carlos Forza who became the Foreign Minister. Then there were people who came from Austria to help and from many other countries. Indeed, during the war we had many people in the services who had been with MRA in different countries. They were able to travel to Rome and work with us. That was the beginning of the MRA work there.
The development of the work was like a repetition of my own experience and hundreds of others. We had meetings. We had films. We had conferences. And the thing grew like that. There were some most extraordinary people. One man stands out, the head of the Confindustria who was a very imaginative man, part of the employers’ federation, related to industry and one of the Angelo family who are a big industrial family from Genoa. That man got the idea that this is what needed to happen in industry and brought the whole Confederation up to Caux, MRA’s world assembly in Switzerland, to learn how.
We also had people like Baldini, who was a director in the great Montecattini concern. Baldini was very interested because one of one of his own men, Angelo Pasetto, who had been not only a communist and a cell leader, but also wrote the marching songs for the communist leader, Togliatti. was one of the adherents of MRA. He thought, ‘Well, if a fellow like that is interested in MRA and you get Angelo Costa, the head of the Confindustria, there must be something in it.’ He literally brought hundreds of people from that Montecattini firm to Caux.
Pasetto’s background was pretty rough. He came from a poor family from Verona, that wonderful town. He was a communist. His wife was a communist. His mother-in-law was a communist and he had been very active. He was a communist partly because he was so much against the dictatorship of Mussolini but frankly there were other things on his mind. Like many of those men he was a defeated man. He had a short memory. He forgot who his wife was sometimes. He had got into a mess and they fought. Our first effort with Angelo was to help him find an answer to his home life. When he got peace in his home, he heard that still small voice and decided that class war was not the answer for the country.
Then he got his barman to join him and it grew. His little team grew. There was the fellow whose father had been condemned to death as a fascist. Brought up in a fascist home. He came and said, ‘This is the only answer.’ Then there was the man, Nanda Quaglia, whose father was shot by his own neighbour because he was running a bank and wouldn’t turn over the money to the communist party in Domodossola. They all became part of the team and wrote a very special play. It was a play that was really like a bomb because half of the cast were former fascists and half were former communists. The play was called ‘Light of Tomorrow’ and was actually written by Angelo Pasetto, the former communist. He wrote it after he returned to the Church.
The man at the top of the communist party, Togliatti, who was in charge of the communist party in Italy, was in the ComIntern and arrived in Italy, flown in by the British. In Parliament one day a magazine of MRA was there on the desk of every member. It was put there by the Speaker of the House. After reading it one of the communists was very excited about it and Togliatti came along and straightened him out. He was against MRA because he felt he depended on class war and what this publication propagated was teamwork in industry. It was, you could say, from his point of view, politically wrong. But there are so many views it is difficult to put a label on communists in Italy and perhaps other places too. For instance in the ‘Street of the Armed Forces’ in Milan, we knew many. A one-legged lady who was a full-time party person told us how her aunt got a million signatures for a communist party piece of propaganda. They sacrificed because they wanted to see a better world and they really paid a high price for it. They did a lot more than so many of the so-called Christians were prepared to do. These people understood MRA and it was a natural thing to go and tell them about it. They all came to Caux and became militant MRA fighters.
We saw a great deal of Saragat, the Deputy Prime Minister and a great socialist leader. He was convinced and sent his son across to America as part of a travelling force of MRA. He was a deep thinker and very appreciative of the help he got. For instance one time he was in Milan and a friend of ours, Mr John McGovern, a Labour Party MP in Britain, went to see him. At that moment the socialist party was considering breaking away because it had a very serious difference with the Christian Democrat party. They wanted to break away and leave the coalition government. At that point it would have been very serious because then the largest party would be the communist party as many socialists had joined with them and were then voting with the communists. John McGovern felt very deeply about it, and talked in very forthright manner with Saragat. He said he understood exactly what he felt, from the political point of view - thinking of the country and the future – but he felt it would be a great mistake to leave the government at that point. He told him he ought to be thinking ideologically.
Saragat didn’t agree or disagree. He didn’t say a great deal but I know he went straight back to Rome and saw his party and did two things. He decided to tell them he was for them staying with it for a while longer and fighting to change the situation inside the government. And he made another statement, ‘From now on I think we need to end this time where, to be a socialist member, you have to be marxist.’ He said they had to leave room for everybody.
Then there was the Prime Minister himself. He was a real friend. I think myself that De Gaspari was one of the greatest leaders in politics after the war and did a great deal to keep Italy from real chaos. He was a simple man too. He only had a couple of weeks holidays in the year and went to live in a little cottage away in the mountains. He was a great mountaineer. Three of us went to see him there. One was a colleague of mine, an artist and soldier, Ronald Mann. The other was Egidio Quaglia who was the head of the chemical workers and an activist in the Christian Democrats. We chatted and in the course of the conversation Egidio Quaglia criticised the leader of the Socialist Party, Saragat, suggesting he may not have always been sincere. De Gaspari immediately reacted. He said, ‘Nonsense, nonsense. That is not true. Mind you I think my fellow comrade sometimes has his head in the clouds but he is a sincere man.’ Then he paused and said, ‘Oh how I wish I could do with my fellow friends what Dr Buchman does with his.’ Then he explained how he had been talking to the Foreign Minister of Denmark, Ole Bjorn Kraft, who was also the head of NATO at that time. He described how through MRA his son had found a faith. He said, ‘That is what I would like to be able to do with my friends’.
After De Gaspari died his secretary got in touch with a friend of mine and said he had found some notes about what De Gaspari felt regarding MRA, and wanted to know if we would have them. He also described how in the mornings for years and years, when the secretary brought in the newspapers with the resume of all the news and things from the secretary that were of importance, De Gaspari would call a halt and say, ‘No. We start first with a time of quiet to get inspiration.’ And this De Gaspari did through most of his life.
Up in Caux there in the conference centre we had hundreds, literally hundreds, of Italians arriving, many of whom did not speak any language other than Italian. So one of my jobs there, for the sake of allowing people to meet each other and talk over tables, was to find a team of translators. You know the Swiss, in particular the ladies, do speak several languages. So I chatted up and enlisted all the girls so they would come and help me translate. I was very grateful for that and depended on them. By this time I could finally speak Italian.
One of them, Elsbeth Spoerri, from Zurich, who was very fluent in Italian, and German, French, Spanish and English, was having a birthday. I thought I must do something and decided to write a poem. I wrote a nice poem for her and thought we would have it with the cake, but just at the time when we were sitting down in the hall a group of Italians arrived in the front hall and I had to leave. I didn’t get the chance to present my poem.
The next day after her birthday I went to thank her and say I was sorry I missed the party and read her the poem. I don’t know what she thought, but afterwards I had a quiet time and the thought came to me, ‘This is the girl you are going to marry’. Well you know I had a habit every day, before starting to have a quiet time, I tick off all the things I have done the previous day and when I saw this line about ‘I will marry Elsbeth Spoerri’ I rubbed it out. ‘What a nutty idea’, I thought. She wasn’t even on my list of possibles! I had a long list of possibles and Dr Buchman knew them too. He laughed - he said ‘You couldn’t marry them all. It is not only wrong but it is also immoral and illegal.’
As the days went by I thought there might be something in it, and spoke to some of my friends. I talked it over most things that really mattered with my close colleagues. Buchman told us he felt we ought to share our victories and our problems and our needs with each other. Real honesty is one of the best things I know to find a cure.
I didn’t get encouragement nor discouragement. But nor did I take any foolish steps. I had been around too long for that. I really was fond of Elsbeth but very soon after this she went off to America, which annoyed me greatly. I thought somebody had a ploy. I finally got impatient and said I was going to propose. I wrote to Dr Buchman first. He was up with Elsbeth and others at the time in New Jersey. He wrote a wonderful letter back, gave me great encouragement, gave me her address, and then took her down to Florida. So it took ages for me to get that letter off. From the other end he gave time to Elsbeth. She used to say ‘I couldn’t understand why I was being invited to have lunch every day with Dr Buchman, with all these guests.’ He kept saying ‘And how are you Elsbeth?’ He knew what was going on. However finally my proposal arrived. In it I had said to her that I wanted only what God wanted and she should take time to consider. Well, after a week of I don’t know what I got the answer, by telegram. The funniest thing is that it was delayed and a whole lot more people knew I was engaged to be married before I did because at the time the telegram arrived in Milan I was already down in another part of Italy visiting the communists in that area.
It was all used to the glory of God. Ron Mann, my wartime colleague (he had been taken prisoner by the Germans and escaped when the Italians stepped out - he walked 300 miles to get across into the British lines) and I, were going to see one of the communists - actually he was the leader of the party. We weren’t quite sure how to begin the time with him. That morning when I got news by telephone from Milan that a certain telegram arrived saying I was engaged, that Elsbeth had said yes, Ron said, ‘Well we will go and tell him!’ Well of course, as I said before, you can’t put too many labels on people. When we arrived at the door he looked startled to find us there. Then Ron announced that this fellow had just got himself engaged this morning. He swept us in and there at his main table were about a dozen women of the village - they were the communist committee of women. And he told them all. He said, ‘You go and get lost for two hours. We are going to have a banquet.’ We did have that banquet. We came back two hours later and we had a terrific meal celebrating, and Ron was ill for three days afterwards.
There was also a funny thing which happened because at that point the father-in-law of this communist came in. He had been a well-known fascist. He had the Germans staying in his home. He said, ‘Now these characters are not going to be the only ones. You must come to our home tonight for supper and you will be entertained by somebody who is not in that crowd.’ The others just laughed and Ron and I went along. We went to have a quiet supper. As I walked into the room - a little room, one floor up, with a table and a chair with wicker on it - I put my foot on the chair and was looking out of the window. Suddenly I recognised the hill and said to him, ‘I have been here before. I know that hill. I ran down that hill one day.’ They asked when that was and I told them. He asked what was happening at the time? I said, ‘We had come across and there was a sniper shooting at us and we had to run at intervals of 10 yards apart. We ran one by one, dropping when we got tired. When we wanted to we got up and ran again. It is very hard to shoot like that.’ I had a disadvantage because I had a great can of coffee that I had carried for three days tied with a rope round me, a whacking big thing and it was difficult. I started down there and ran like anything and it slipped off. I was in a great quandary because - being a Scot - I wasn’t wanting to lose that big lump of coffee, but being scared I wanted to get away. Finally, I went after the coffee and that thing went zip zip at me. I held on to that coffee and finally got up and back onto that path and ran down. I collapsed by this doorway and my friend Tocher said, ‘Scotty, you must be scared. Your eyes is as big as saucers.’
As I told this to the fellow, his eyes looked rather big. I asked what was on his mind. He said, ‘The German fellow that was shooting at you was sitting on the chair you have got your foot on.’ He had stayed in that home.
When I first met my new fiancée I was in Milan, so I went up and met her from the aeroplane and brought her to a home in Milan where her hostess was a Princess Castelbarco:- one of the noble families of the north with many Popes in her family. We had time to introduce Elsbeth to all the other Italians who didn’t know her yet. Her background is quite different. She comes from a Swiss industrial family and my father was a coal-miner from Scotland. The thing we decided together was to continue to do together what we had done previously separately but with the same commitment. That is what we decided on our wedding day. We were married in Caux, thoroughly married. The Bishop of Rangoon was the clergyman who took charge of the ceremony. Dr Buchman gave the blessing. Revd Alan Thornhill of England helped and Rev Howie Blake of the USA also.
Working together with Elsbeth was a new experience. As I said we took on the same tasks as we had been working at before, for example the factories in Britain, particularly in Scotland where we came to stay and of course sometimes in Switzerland. We participated in Caux conferences. Elsbeth being one of the very first to start in Caux each year, when they had the national conferences. Back in Scotland here, the day we arrived in Edinburgh area the newspapers pointed out that there was the 168th stoppage in the first 18 months of one of the biggest factories in the country. I thought we ought to do something about it so I just went to the factory gates and asked for the convenor of shop stewards.
The man at the gate said, ‘Of course you can’t come in here. It is not possible and in any case you need to have an appointment.’ However, as we chatted, another guard walked up and said, ‘Oh he has just gone into that building over there. Shall I go and get him?’ So after a moment the other chap agreed. When they came back with the senior shop steward he had with him his vice convenor and we chatted for a moment. I told him how I had read the newspapers and as I had come through London I had attended a conference I thought might have the answer for some of the troubles. He looked at me and wrote something down and passed me his address. He obviously didn’t want his friend to know what he was doing and this was his home address.
So Elsbeth and I went to visit him in his home. And there we talked and planned to have a group of different delegations to come from that factory. Each month we had somewhere between 20-50 come down at a time, and we had those training sessions to fight for what is right, not who is right. The sessions were at the Westminster Theatre in London, then the centre of MRA in London, and they were for shop stewards gathered from different factories - car factories and other factories all around.
Well I couldn’t say that it was entirely due to this, but for the next three years they had practically no stoppages. These men who found this new way of working contributed very much to making sure the factory kept going, because it was threatened with closure.
Then of course here in Scotland we have a great mining industry - coal is important in our area of Fife. We call it the Kingdom of Fife, as does our Queen and it is famous for many things in history. One of the things it is also known for is the coal fields, which have been the cradle of the communist party leaders - such men as the Moffatt brothers and other great militant men. Some of them have done a lot for the mining industry. That is unquestionable but we do not believe it is a complete enough ideology.
We met one fellow who spent all his life since he was a youngster in the communist party. We will call him Seumas. He came along and got caught by the idea of being able to do something not just for the miners but being part of a revolution that would really put right what was wrong throughout the whole country. This is what he longed for. He had had very little formal education.
Seumas heard at one point of some skulduggery. The government, then Labour, had suggested a programme relating to bonuses and productivity that would help the miners to get fairer wages. Some of the left-wing called all the miners to oppose it but they didn’t inform the miners either of the facts or what the Coal Board had proposed to distribute, until after the voting. Seumas discovered it as well as the person, from his own union, who had covered things up. He exposed it. This time he went to the press, and the TV caught hold of it. Within three days the miners of the whole country changed their tune. They altered their decision, accepted the government’s bonus policy and went back to work. I believe there are a lot of ordinary miners everywhere who, with the sense of knowing how important coal is to this country, will be prepared to give more coal and how to work it, if they understood it more. And this is what my wife and I are determined to do.
In the rest of industry we have used the films, plays and conferences of MRA. There is a colleague who has written an excellent play bringing out from the life of Keir Hardie the very best of what the socialists can offer to this country. There is another play on the life of St Columba, giving the fullest Christian truths in the setting of the life of a favourite Scottish saint. There is also a play on St Francis, giving the truths of St Francis in modern settings. All these, I may say, have been performed in the fine theatre owned by the Church of Scotland.
With special thanks to Ginny Wigan for her transcription, and Lyria Normington for her editing and correction.
