RAE Holme: I am interviewing Arthur Strong in his home in the Somerset village of Stoke St Gregory in England. Mr. Strong is a photographer whose camera has taken him all over the world. In 1937 he won the Picture of the Year award of the British Professional Photographers’ Association. Have you had further awards of that nature?
Arthur Strong:
I have had no other awards but I have had some interesting experiences with my camera. I remember in 1945, in San Francisco, I had the fortunate chance of being the only foreign photographer on the floor of the UN Inaugural Assembly and was the British pool photographer at that time. I also I had another chance to do big enlargements. The biggest poster ever done in America at that period was 30’ x 12’. But I found that the BBC had done one a little bigger in England so this wasn’t the biggest in the world.
I have photographed many personalities. I took Nehru more than once. The first time was in 1935 when he was - I won’t say ‘unknown’ but he certainly wasn’t a figure in the political world. He was visiting Geneva. I got to know the cartoonist, Shankar who was there and he introduced me to Nehru when he was staying with the Zilyarchas family. He asked me to come along and take some pictures of him. He seemed to like them. He bought 100 and paid for them which was always helpful when you are in a foreign country.
I took the President of Czechoslovakia at that time. I took a number of the statesmen. In those days people didn’t do intimate pictures. I used to go round and see their secretaries and say I wanted to do something ‘plus intime’ (more intimate). I remember going in to do Lavalle, in those days you had a camera which weighed about 30lbs. I had an old Soho Reflex with a Dalmayer 17” telephoto lens. As I came into the Hotel I heard the detectives there say in French ‘machine-gunner’. They were very sensitive - he was Foreign Minister of France at the time.
I remember when I went to photograph De Valera. He was President of the Republic of Ireland. He was very sensitive about the light. I thought it was because of his eyes because he had great trouble with his eyes but his secretary said, ‘You know, people get shot near the windows’, so he wouldn’t come near the windows.
I always tried to get the greatness out of a man in my photographs. There has been a modern trend where you try and show the opposite. But I thought if you could show the greatness of the man and try and get what he was aiming at, it made a much more interesting picture.
When I first started taking pictures of children in their own homes, I happened to be the first person who did that sort of thing. I said ‘taking the world as my studio, I photograph children in their natural surroundings’. I wanted to get the reality of people, the simplicity of the children. With the grown-ups I went for the statesmen because I wanted to get at what they were trying to do with their lives at their best moments.
I was in a bank when I first left school. I have never passed an exam in my life and the idea of banking didn’t appeal to me very much so I learnt a bit on the horses there. We lived quite near Epsom. We used to go up as kids and watch Steve Donoghue come round Tattenham Corner with his leg over the side. It gets into your blood. But in the bank I graduated, you might say, from betting on the horses to running the sweepstakes.
However, the bank didn’t approve of that very much so I was asked to go abroad for them. At that point I thought it was probably time to look for something else. I got a chance of being apprentice to the best photographer of men in Britain, Howard Costa, just off Fleet Street. There I also studied under Baron Hoyningen-Huni (?) who was Vogue’s Paris photographer. He specialised in women - which was very high-key work, whereas Costa worked with very low-key. Low-key - he would use a blue light for his portraits and a reflector of some kind and would give maybe 4 seconds exposure. You would get all the muscle and everything in the face coming out. His shots today are used in the press. I mean you see DH Lawrence - I saw him in one of the Sunday papers recently - and GK Chesterton, Bernard Shaw. We used to visit these people in their homes. So, it was a very interesting life. He had never had an apprentice before and I had a fascinating time.
As far as finding a faith goes, Costa started me off on it really. My sister was secretary there. She was older than I am and used to get hopping mad because every morning he would come in at 9.30 or so and say, ‘Come on Arthur let’s go and have a cup of coffee’ and we would go and sit in the cafe opposite and have a coffee for quite a time. He would tell me of his faith. And he would say, ‘Whatever you do in life, you believe in God.’ Well, I didn’t believe in God at all, but it started me looking.
I began to explore other sides of photography. I remember Shaw Wildman, who was doing Kodak’s advertising at that time. He was the best in London for that sort of work. He came into the studio one day and said ‘You know, Sid (that’s what they always called Howard who knew him well) I am fed up with my photography. I don’t think I am getting at it.’ Sid said, ‘Arthur, go and get some of your pictures of children and let Shaw see what you are doing.’ Well one thing was that Shaw began to move out of doors with his camera after that because I had been photographing children out of doors. When I left Sid I started doing that and happened to meet a photographer who was on the council of professionals - a brilliant photographer. She had a studio in Oxford and one in Cambridge. She had definite left-wing views. She asked me if I would run her studio in Swanage for three months While I was there I happened to pick up a book about the Oxford Group.
It didn’t mean anything to me - I hadn’t been to Oxford - but I read it and I was fascinated by the idea that God could speak to a person. ‘Lifechangers’ by Harold Begbie. He wrote under the name of ‘The Man with a Duster’. He used to go round dusting off peoples’ characters. These stories, true stories, fascinated me. I read it all one day actually, while I was looking for a place to put my caravan. I had one of these old horse-drawn caravans, built a hundred years before. I had only paid a fiver for it. I went and trained with a farmer nearby because I thought, if I was going to have a horse, I had better know how to look after it - curry comb and all that. Before I went off on the horse I had an experience I can only say was really an experience of God. After reading this book I talked to this extremely left-wing friend of mine whose studio I was running, to try and tell her what I thought was good about the idea but she wasn’t very interested and so I went to bed.
I couldn’t sleep that night. I tossed and turned and went over and over in my mind. ‘Be absolutely honest with Bill.’ Now Bill happened to be my best friend. He was everything I wasn’t. He was a stockbroker. He was a playwright. He had his play about Napoleon played at the Stock Exchange. He was ‘A Brain’. He had done very well at Oxford and I rather treasured his friendship. I built myself up to be the kind of person I thought would interest him but it wasn’t the real me at all.
Anyway at 2 o’clock in the morning I thought, ‘Whatever this thought is, I will obey it’, just for peace of mind really. So, I got up and wrote him an honest letter. I wondered what would happen in the morning - probably I would tear it up so I went downstairs and posted it there and then. I went back to bed and slept well. In the morning I did what they said in this book, take time to listen and write down the thoughts that come into your mind and I have done that ever since. I have spent an hour at it One of the first thoughts I got was ‘give up painting’ - because I was a very dilettante person, I was thinking of giving up photography and doing painting. ‘Give up painting and go out and photograph’. I had planned to leave anyway the next morning as I had done my stint at the studio. I got the horse and the caravan and went off into the heart of Dorset. I lived there for six weeks.
It was quite a tricky business because - how do you develop and print in a circus caravan with only a camp bed in it? In those days you could buy paper that would print in the sunlight, but then of course unless you were quick it would go dark. So, I got some salt sea water. First of all, I had to develop the film under rugs under my camp bed at night. Then I printed them in this way in the sun in little frames, made it permanent in the salt sea water and then mounted them. I took them round and sold them at 5/- a time. It was all right as long as there were children in the neighbourhood to photograph. There weren’t very many, but enough to keep me.
Or at least until the children went back to school and then I was foiled because I had no more chance of making a living in that way. It is now an army shooting range there, so you can imagine it was a pretty wild part. Then I had a letter from my best friend to whom I had written. ‘Will you come abroad with me at my expense and tell me all about the Oxford Group?’ Well, I didn’t know anything about the Oxford Group. I had just read about it in this book. However, I saw it as a way out of a rather difficult situation so I left my caravan and went to London. I went with him to the battlefield of Waterloo because he wanted to see where Napoleon had been defeated. He had written this play about him and there we were at Waterloo. We had been talking a lot all the time. He had no faith but he thought he would make an experiment. We got down on our knees there and he gave his life to God.
His first thought was to go and put right a marriage of his best friend’s he had nearly broken up. He was living in Edinburgh and - silly ass - had taken this fellow on honeymoon with him and his new wife! He had nearly broken up their marriage. He left me to go and put that right. Here I was with just enough money to get back to England but in one of these times of quiet in the morning I had the thought ‘Go and look up a family in Holland’ - my sister had met the young son when she was at a finishing school in Lausanne and the family were a little disturbed. I thought this was a chance to see what the young fellow was like.
It turned out that the father was the banker to the queen. They were a very wealthy family. I arrived there with my last penny. Fortunately, they asked me to stay and after a day or two the father said, ‘How much does it cost to get back to England?’ I think he was sensing the fact that I hadn’t much money. I told him I didn’t know. He said, ‘What? You a Christian? And you don’t know how much it costs?’ He was a Jew. I said I would find out and at the next meal I told him. To cut a long story short he gave me the money and their blessing and I said goodbye to them. I have never seen them again, nor did my sister.
My best friend had the next touch with the Oxford Group. He had to meet someone in Edinburgh who told him about a party from Liverpool going to Canada with the Oxford Group. He went to that meeting. I had a cottage in the country at this time, and he wrote and told me they were having a meeting in London. They were calling themselves ‘the men who were Thursday’ - I think it was rather after GK Chesterton’s book. We did meet in the upstairs room of a pub on Tower Hill. We used to meet there every Thursday and that was the beginning of my touch with the Oxford Group.
At these meetings people told their stories of how they had found a simple faith and how it began to work in their businesses. I told mine, such as it was. We used to go and work in East London too, calling on people in their homes. We met with the workers there and talked with them and were quiet with them, sitting down and writing down these thoughts. We were in South London too, Bermondsey I remember. Some people had a faith in God and would say that was what God told them. To others it was what they really felt in the deepest part of their heart was the right thing to do. There was always the moral challenge -whether it was honest or pure, unselfish and loving - if so then the odds are it was from God because the type of people we were, it wasn’t natural for us to be honest or any of the others.
One man was the leader of the unemployed in East London - 400,000. He had been the leader of the unemployed at the TUC congress in 1936 and had led marches. One friend of mine had lived in his home for six weeks. He was a big fellow - my friend - for six weeks he lived and slept on two chairs put end to end. That home became - well you might call it a centre of a different kind of idea.
I remember another man there, Tod Sloan, he called himself a watchmaker by trade and an agitator by nature. He lived in Tidal Basin and I remember going to visit him one day. I was quite horrified to see the poverty he lived in. They had no stove in the kitchen or anything like that. He had an open gas flame out of the wall and his wife cooked on that.
Tod was a wonderful character. I remember on one occasion there was a meeting of the Oxford Group in East London. He had angina and was told on no account was he to go to it. So, some of us went down to visit him there and tell him about it afterwards. It was about 3 or 4 miles away from where the meeting was. To our amazement we found that there was no Tod - he wasn’t there. And Liz, his wife, said, ‘Oh he went up to the meeting.’ Sure enough, he had been at the meeting all along. That was Tod. He had been in prison many times but he was a revolutionary of a different calibre to anything I had met before. He had a burning faith in God by the time he died.
I have forty of my family in Rhodesia at the moment. One of my nephews has just resigned from being President of the National Farmers’ Union there for two years. During that time, he went up to see Kaunda in Zambia and it was reported in The Times that Kaunda said he had never met a man like him before. He said ‘The people I usually meet are politicians’. He has also done a great job in getting the black and white farmers to meet together, all over the country. My brother started there in the early 20s. He was a pioneer of tobacco farming. He had three years running the finest crop in Rhodesia and he pioneered pig farming. He took Swedish Landrace into the country, and now he has grandchildren there.
The greatest trouble at the moment of course has been the drought. He wrote the other day saying the drought is far worse than the guerillas. They are 6 million bags of maize short. His son John has had to kill all his pigs. South Africa has had just as bad a drought. Normally Rhodesia can feed six countries. Even during the troubles, they were feeding Zaire, Zambia, Mozambique (via South Africa). We British gave Mozambique £50 million to help them out on that sort of thing - but how are these countries going to fare, he said. It is going to be absolutely disastrous for Zambia because their own farming methods are typical of so much in the independent countries. 41 out of the 48 independent African countries do not now feed themselves and food is going to be a vital part.
I know Mugabe told an African farming friend of mine, who was questioning him about where the white farmers going to go, he said, ‘If they go what happens? We have got to keep them because food is so vital’. These are points that the politicians don’t take into account. My nephew paid his own way to go to the Geneva conference. He met all the African leaders there and he found that not one had thought about the economic side. ‘Seek ye first the political kingdom and all these things will be added unto you’ - that is their philosophy. But it doesn’t feed hungry bellies.
And I believe the women of Africa are going to be the ones who will play a very great part in the future. It was striking that, at the Geneva conference, there was not one woman there amongst their delegations. The only women there were the prostitutes.
It is not going to happen overnight, but all my family with the exception of one are deciding to stay there because they love the country and they love the people. My sister wrote last week that her son’s farm had just had 300 rounds shot into it and rockets. Fortunately, the thatch had not been set alight and the children were not there. They have a high wire fence around, but that doesn’t stop rockets going over. It is very easy to get one-sided on it and to blame but when lives are at stake, you do things which afterwards you very often regret. My brother has changed very considerably over the years. At one time he wouldn’t have any African visit him as a friend on the farm. Now he has helped financially the different African movements whom he feels are helping the country.
I have photographed Joshua Nkomo when he was a third the size he is now. He was quite a young man then. I showed the picture to my agent in London and he didn’t believe it was the same man! But it was. That was way back in ’53 when I was there. Mugabe I have never met, nor the others actually.
I met Frank Buchman in 1933, just to get to know him slightly. The time I got to know him in a deeper way was in 1935, which became another crossroad in my life really. I had an offer from the biggest advertising agency in London, who were doing Kodak account, Huntley Palmer, Johnnie Walker whiskey, you name it they were doing it. They asked if I would be their photographer and they would build me a studio - or would I have a retaining fee and just do the Kodak account. It was very tempting.
At the same time Buchman asked if I would come abroad with him and help with the press. He was taking 500 people to Denmark. Well, I have never regretted that I accepted Buchman’s offer. I didn’t get paid anything for that. But I went with him and I shall never forget the ten days in the island of Visby in Gotland.
Of course, the difficulty always, as a photographer, is finding a place to develop and print your pictures. The only place on the little island which had a dark room and enlarging equipment was the local chemist. I used to go in there at night, about 6 o’clock, with a Danish photographer, and we would work till three or four in the morning. We would sleep for a few hours and then at 7.30 we would have stacks of prints for people to send to the media of their countries - Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia .. These countries were all free at that point but we sensed - 1938 - that things were hotting up and that we didn’t know how long they would be free. So, there was a great sense of urgency.
A Stockholm newspaper sent a plane. It would arrive every morning at about 9 and we would have the pictures ready to go back on it to Stockholm. After 10 days of living like that with only about 3 hours sleep a night, I was glad the conference was only a 10-day one.
You know the funny thing about a war is you never think it is going to happen till it actually happens. Of course, there was Chamberlain who came back and said, ‘Peace in our time’ and everybody hoped he was right. I was in the Cheviots where I had gone for a holiday. I was hoping to photograph a sheep farm. I was interested in making a film of it really. I was sitting there and, while we were having supper, there was a knock on the door and there was a policeman. He had puffed and pushed his bicycle up the hill for a couple of miles. He asked ‘Is there a Mr. Strong here?’ He had a cable for me, from Buchman in America, asking if I would come and join him and help with the launching of MRA in America.
Now this was April 1939. Well, fair enough but it meant catching the boat the following morning from Southampton, the ‘Bremen’. So, the sheep-farmer drove me and my friend, who was also holidaying there, to Berwick, where we caught the Night Scot train and arrived down in London. Friends went and packed my luggage for me - I was living in a flat in the West End. I had been working on some photographic murals which I thought would be rather good to have at Frank Buchman’s birthday in June. 5 murals. Each one about 6’ x 4’. Then I had to go and get a visa from the American embassy. To cut a long story short I missed the boat train, but my luggage and the photographs were on it, and I caught the next one that arrived down about 40 minutes later in Southampton. With much presence of mind one of those travelling in the party on the boat train said to the man who was running the tender to take us out to the ‘Bremen’, “Could I have a farewell message to my fiancé in Belfast?’ Of course, he fell for that and so she had a long conversation with him in Belfast when they eventually got through on the phone (no direct dialling in those days). Sure enough, she held things up long enough for my train to arrive just as she finished her call. So, I caught the tender and the boat and I left for America.
My family were very surprised to hear from New York that I was over there, and I never saw them for seven years.
In America, the country had no thought of entering European affairs, fighting a battle to help us or anything like that. They had had the last war and they didn’t want another. To an extent they were very much for us in spirit, but that was about it. And then of course there was a large middle-European population in America, and a number of societies. You could see the Nazi flag with the Stars and Stripes beside it in their meetings. They also had quite a following in the different America First and other organisations. So, the idea of Moral Re-Armament, first of all, was that - war hadn’t happened at this point - and the hope was that we wouldn’t have to go to war. Buchman had a saying I remember that either you listened to God or you would listen to guns. He had brought over 100 people to America with him a few months before and he started off with big meetings in the Madison Square Gardens in New York, Constitution Hall in Washington, and in the Hollywood Bowl in California.
The New York meeting had a radio link-up with Britain and my old friend Tod Sloan. Bill Rowell, the unemployed leader spoke, along with Lord Salisbury and Sir Lyndon Macassey. Also, Arthur Baker who was chief of the Parliamentary Staff of the London Times and in America there had been a group of 15 Scots who came over. They were a cross-section from Clydeside, mechanics and students who had just finished college. I never forget hearing Senator Truman who was unknown in those days - nobody thought he would become President. He read what took place at the meeting in Washington into the Congressional Record, so that it went all over the country. One of the things he read was the message of President Roosevelt, who sent a special message to the meeting.
In Hollywood naturally we got the response from the film industry and Louis B Mayer gave a luncheon in Hollywood at the Victor Hugo restaurant. There was Harry Warner there, the head of Paramount, the head of RKO, Will Hayes, who was the kingpin of the film world in those days. They were all there. Jimmy Roosevelt, the eldest son of the President was there. He was very keen on Jeanette Macdonald at that time, who was the leading star in the MGM studio. I remember getting a picture of Jeanette Macdonald and Louis B Mayer laughing together. There had been quite a feud between them. One direct result of that luncheon was that they made it up.
At this time America was very suspicious of foreigners. You must remember that when the war began, that whole winter there was a phony war when nothing much happened. It began over Poland, when Germany moved in and took over Poland, and the Russians moved in from the other side. Poland after 200 years have only had 30 years of freedom. Once again they were taken over. It was a terrible thing for them. One of the well-known photographs of the time, taken by a man I knew called Phillips, was of a mother looking down at her child who had been shot by one of these Stuka bombers. That stirred people - but not really. Shortly after the war began you had the link-up between the Soviets and Nazi Germany. So, throughout America you had all those who had sympathies with the Soviets fighting very hard to make sure that America didn’t do anything to help Britain and France. Harry Bridges on the West Coast of America, the head of the dockers or longshoremen as they call them, was a very powerful communist and had a big following. He was brought before the courts for his communist views, and he said, ‘Well I do have The Daily Worker, but I also have all the MRA literature’.
At this time there was not so much opposition to Buchman’s work as a certain amount of apathy, though I must say that crowds turned out for the Hollywood Bowl - 30,000 filled it and 15,000 were turned away, they couldn’t get in. And the papers - the Los Angeles News, the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco papers carried great support.
It wasn’t till later, when Britain was isolated against the Germans, after France had fallen, that Buchman realised that something more was needed in the force that he had around him. He was lent a cottage, 6,000 feet up on the borders of the California/Sierra Nevada states beside Lake Tahoe. There for four months he gave the truths that were at the back of his faith. The great Christian truths in songs, or hymns you might say, and the simple rugged American philosophy of sound homes, teamwork in industry and a united nation.
We were fairly rough youngsters. Most of us had not had to work hard, really. Some had come from workers’ backgrounds but, like myself I had always had it fairly easy. And there we learnt to use all of everything. No waste in the icebox, no waste in the brainbox. I remember some of those things. Increasingly men from industry, management and labour, came up for long weekends. I remember John Riffe, who later became the pivotal man in bringing the CIO and the AFL - the two great unions of America - to become one. He was at that time the head of the steelworkers on the West Coast. He came up for weekend after weekend as well as others in that field.
Also, at that time we had the thought to create a handbook for national defence, called ‘You Can Defend America’. General Pershing broke the rule of a lifetime and wrote the foreword to it. He had been the CinC in the last war and was a very well-respected man in America. This book came out in 1.25 million copies and went all over the country. With it went a revue. It was started in the chalet which we had been lent by an old bootlegger. He ran the only hotel in the district. He said we could have it. There were 5 bars in it. I remember because I had the job of looking after the vegetables.
One day I went into Frank’s cottage - the cottage he had been lent by a friend - and saw raspberries laid out. Now my mother always liked raspberries with the cup up, then she would sugar them, then put another row cup up and sugar them, then leave them overnight and in the morning in that cup would be wonderful juice. So, I thought this was the way to do it. So, I said to the person who was cooking there that I knew the way to do it. I thought nothing more of it.
Next morning, I heard that Frank wanted to see me. He said, ‘Why did you do the raspberries that way? I like them done the other way.’ I said, ‘That’s the way to do them Frank, my mother always did them - that is much the best way.’ He was quiet a minute and then he said, ‘Well I think you had better look after the fruit and vegetables for all of us.’ I knew nothing about buying vegetables and fruit. We were over 300 miles from San Francisco and to bring up vegetables and fruit for 150 people - I didn’t know where to begin.
However, someone in San Francisco introduced me to a couple of Armenians who ran a stall in a market there and they were wonderful. They lent us their one-ton truck every other weekend and we would drive it up through the night, because we had to cross the Mohave desert. It would get terribly hot if you travelled during the day and all the vegetables would perish. We would arrive at Tahoe at 4 in the morning, I would sound the alarm to get people out of bed and we would unload all the food and put it into the chalet. Then we would use these bars - we would get ice in them and keep the place cool enough to keep the fruit, graded carefully, and the vegetables, enough to last 150 people till the second weekend when I would go down and get some more. Actually, we would have to take the truck back over Sunday night, down the mountain pass and so on, to get it there so the Armenian brothers could use it for work the next morning. It was a fascinating experience. I learned a lot.
It is one thing to be miles from anywhere, but we were very much living in the world in our spirits because this was in 1940, from July to October, when Britain was losing her biggest number of planes. I remember getting a photograph of a sky where it had the look of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. We were very conscious of what people were doing to save the lives of our families in England. So, it was natural that we thought of how we could get what we were learning personally to the whole country.
Fortunately, we had one of Hollywood’s young actresses who had a lot of initiative. She had played in ‘Mutiny of the Bounty’ and ‘The Barretts of Wimpole Street’ and was full of enthusiasm about what we could do with a revue. We started quite simply - actually we used it for Bunny Austin’s birthday, and Globin (the old hotel owner) was there, and the Mayor of Carson City.
Now Carson City sounds a big place but it was not much more than a one-street town. He was fascinated. He said, ‘You must take this to Reno’. ‘Reno?’ That was the last place we had thought of going to. It was then - and I suppose still is - the divorce centre of the world and Frank Buchman said to us, ‘Don’t, whatever you do talk about divorce, but talk about national unity. But, sure enough, we did and we filled the biggest theatre there. They said only Mrs. Roosevelt had managed to fill it like that. We realised we had got something. I don’t know whether we realised it actually, but Buchman realised it and he said, ‘This must go on the road’.
It was rugged country around there. I remember going to one spot near there, in Virginia City, where the first 50 citizens all died violent deaths, and the pub was called ‘The Bucket of Blood’. One of the gravestones - well it wasn’t a stone it was a wooden plaque in the local cemetery - had on it ‘He played 5 aces. Now he plays the harp.’ There was a four-poster bed there on top of one grave and that couple had brought that bed with them - their most treasured possession - all the way from Germany, round Cape Horn. When they died it was put above their grave. It is quite a spot there. One newspaper I remember had for its headline ‘The only paper in the world that gives a damn about Yerrington’.
There were two brothers there at that time. One liked silver on the saddles, silver on the stirrups and he liked drinking. His brother was a solid citizen who farmed well. There was a feud and it split the valley. It was actually over water. Water is a much-treasured possession in those parts and if you don’t have water, you don’t farm. Frank heard that these two brothers hadn’t spoken, nor had their families, for 12 years. He talked to Globin about it at Tahoe and one day Globin went and shot duck for a dinner where both brothers and their families were invited. So, they came up from Nevada, up into the heights and came to this dinner. We sang some of the songs of this revue we were doing and the dinner went off so well that you would have thought that the brothers had always been pals. That was the beginning of a new day for them.
I remember John, the brother who liked silver on the saddles, saying ‘You know Frank, I have had a wonderful evening and I haven’t had a highball all evening’. Later this story was to go throughout Washington because John’s best friend was Senator Pitman, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee. This Senator used to go on drinking bouts with John and the next time they went out together he said to John, ‘What’s yours?’ John replied ‘Coca Cola’. He had to say it twice. ‘Coca Cola. MRA is tops!’. You can imagine how that went throughout the valley and we put on our production there.
I remember one old dear saying, ‘No I just don’t neighbour but I don’t hate no one.’ However, she got the idea of baking a cake for her neighbour and she took it round and that began a new friendship between them.
But back of it all Frank Buchman had this thought from way back in 1921 when he was in Cambridge:- ‘You will be used to remake the world’. Riding a bicycle at the time, it shook him so much that he nearly fell off the bicycle. So, this thought of reaching the world was deep in his spirit. From time to time he had the opportunity over the Boston World Radio and in San Francisco to give talks to the whole world about what he was aiming for.
We took this revue throughout America. The Civil Defense Authorities gave it backing and we were in cavalcades of cars. We had petrol specially given for it. We had two station wagons and about 20 cars. I took the back position in the last station wagon of all. 50 mph was the maximum speed we were allowed. It’s a very strange thing if you are the end of a cavalcade of 20 cars but always the last one has to do about 60mph, to keep up. I never could make it out but I always had to go hell for leather. Only once did I drive off the road through driving too tired. After the show at night, I always had to go and find a darkroom to print and get the pictures off to Washington for the next morning.
We had films there and wherever I went I used to hunt for a place to develop and print pictures, sometimes a newspaper office, sometimes the FBI darkroom, sometimes I would just hire a room. I remember one place was so dirty we had to shovel out the earth before we could get down to printing. We would print as many as 5,000 prints a week. They would be used all over the country. Pictures, for example, from the revue. I remember one song had something about ‘No waste in the icebox, the cashbox or the brainbox’. ‘Use all of everything’ was a theme that went right through it, because America has so much of everything that it is so easy for people to waste. Just like now with the energy, people are beginning to realise they have got to watch it.
As the war continued there was a call for those working with us to be enlisted in the forces. We tried for preferential treatment, as we were advised to do by our embassy, because the work we were doing seemed so essential to morale-building. There were forces in the country that wanted us out of the way. So, there were papers brought out attacking us. We had one training centre called- the First School for Home Defense. The General in command of the army in the North East of America came and said to us, ‘You are the arm behind the army’. That became one of the main songs in our revue. This man from the London Daily Mirror came there, said he was a bookseller with one of the local reporters. I remember welcoming him there and giving him a copy of the booklet YCDA. And the next day there I was, in the Daily Mirror in London. It said that I had given him a ‘tract’ and tried to convert him. Well, I don’t know whether I did or not, but obviously it wasn’t very successful. He made out that we were living in luxury, palatial surroundings. The place was actually old wooden shacks which had to be pulled down the next year. They were trying to spread around things against MRA.
Bunny Austin was one of those they featured. Bunny had been a hero because he and Fred Perry had won the Davis Cup for Britain, year after year. His was a name to conjure with. So, the fact of smearing him as a coward who would not fight was a very vicious thing because it cut at a vital part of British loyalty really to our sportsmen - that any such man could be a traitor. Bunny certainly was not; he was fighting as hard as he would have been had he been put in uniform in Britain. Actually of course later he was in the US army, although he was a married man with children and should not have been drafted. Even there he was attacked in a vicious way in some paper. They told lies about him.
However, this went on and it sharpened our sense of battle. We gave this play all down the West Coast, over on the East Coast, to the army camps, the aircraft industry, all the time they bought thousands of copies of this booklet and distributed it to all the workers there.
The play was also called You Can Defend America. It was based on the theme ‘Sound homes, teamwork in industry and a united nation’. A united nation is a very hard thing for America to become because you have every nation under the sun represented there, from the Chinese and the Japanese on the West Coast to the Germans and Ukrainians and Polish in the middle part, and on the East Coast you have the very strong Irish contingent. You get the Irish and the Scots everywhere. Down the southern states of America, you have the Mexicans. So, it was a very wide-ranging mission to make America a united nation.
President Roosevelt feared getting turned out if he supported Britain openly but Churchill and he had a very strong relationship. When Pearl Harbour came and America’s navy was smashed to smithereens in a matter of hours, Churchill scrubbed his programme for two weeks and went and stayed with Roosevelt in the White House. That was the basis of our unity with America during the war.
My first close touch with Frank Buchman was when I was working on the production of ‘Rising Tide’ - a 50-page picture magazine. It appeared in 8 languages and had a circulation of 1.5 million copies. It was being created at an Oxford Group house party in Oxford in the summer of 1937. Every day some 10 or more of us would be working on it and we were convinced actually that it would help shape the future of civilisation. There were writers, artists, layout men and women and photographers amongst us. Frequently we got advice from the labour and management people taking part in the conference, and housewives, farmers of the 23 countries represented there so we had a very good group of people to try it out on.
This was the first time I had ever worked on a magazine. I had sold photographs to magazines in London, but I was living alone in the heart of the country. And I was an individualist and I was very proud of it! I had been trained in the early 30s by Britain’s top photographer of men, but I decided to specialise in children. I had an advertising brochure which said, ‘Taking the world as my studio, I photograph children in their natural surroundings’. My friends were mostly radical and talked to me about their schemes, but movements had no interest for me.
Working on ‘Rising Tide’ was a very arduous business. It was my first experience of teamwork. After a month or so I inwardly bucked against the long hours - without pay I may say. Because I refused total responsibility for the whole production I got soft about one girl or another and I was in very poor shape at this point to be photographer-in-chief for a magazine that was out to change the world. There was one girl in particular whom I feel for who was a young American. I didn’t talk about her to anybody but it built up inside me to such a point that one day at a meeting I felt I must do something drastic to rid myself of this interior pressure. I rose to my feet and said, ‘I have had the thought to sell my cameras’.
Later I bumped into Frank Buchman. ‘I hear you have had guidance’ he said, ‘to sell your cameras. Come and see me after lunch.’ So, after lunch I went to his room. He said, ‘How much would they fetch?’ I had a Soho Reflex camera with its two beautiful lenses and my Contacts with three Zeiss lenses, so I said, ‘£125’. He said, ‘Fetch me my wallet’, pointing to where it lay. In front of me he counted out £125 and gave it to me. It was all he had. ‘You had better keep the cameras until I need them,’ he added.
And such was my state of mind that I took the money and the cameras and thought nothing of it. But in the days that followed I told my friends what was really bothering me about this girl and do you know, to my surprise, I found that I was not the only one who had fallen for the American girl! Her fresh and open ways had captured the hearts of 6 or more of us repressed Englishmen. We were sorry to see her return to America but the work certainly progressed better after her departure.
Towards the end of Frank Buchman’s life, he felt the need to see that every one of his fulltime force had a rock-hewn commitment. One evening I was telling him of a luncheon I had been responsible for on that day. I was cock-a-hoop and full of myself. Dr Paul Campbell was helping him get to bed and once settled there, Buchman began to talk. ‘Did you give them Jesus Christ?’ he blazed. During the next half hour, he returned to this basic question again and again. I was stunned. I had thought I had done so well. The number two lead in the current Drury Lane musical had come to lunch with his actress wife and, after three hours, we had had a time of quiet to see what God wanted to tell us. Frank was not impressed. He sensed that I had been central and not Christ. ‘You wear my people out!’ he exploded. I had invited to meet our friends Muriel Smith and Ann Buckles, the two leading actresses who were speaking after every performance of ‘The Crowning Experience’, in which they both starred, and which was showing for several weeks at Warners Theatre in Leicester Square. They should have been resting that afternoon. But what went deepest with me was the fact that I - who had given my life to recording on film Frank and his work - was not one of ‘his’ people. ‘You are dilettante’, was another shot he gave me.
Now this has been a constant sin of my life. I know it only too well. Peter Howard once said to me in a similar vein, ‘You are like seaweed, you go with the tide.’ I suppose it is all part of my natural passions to be liked and to be right.
However, at the end of this half hour with Frank, which was the most shaking experience of my life, he said, ‘Now we’ll pray’. Tired out as he was, he had shaken the bed again and again with the force of his challenge, he prayed aloud and I left.
Later that evening Dr Campbell came round to where we were staying and, though deeply tired, he prayed with us with great power. He prayed that I would be honest with myself, with others, and with God. And he also emphasised the need for me to listen to my wife.
Now my wife is Norwegian and in our early married days I took it for granted that we English always knew best. My deep-rooted pride dies hard and only this week a letter to the Bishop, which I had been sure was so right, went on the scrap-heap, for it was not rooted in God but was yet again born of the desire for quick success at another’s expense.
Looking back on that time with Frank, I see he cut forever my dependence on his appreciation. It bound me closer than ever to Signe and our common loyalty to Christ. I may not have given Jesus Christ to the acting couple but Frank certainly gave me an experience of Jesus Christ that evening which I shall always treasure.
When I think of the Vietnamese boat people, I believe Mrs. Thatcher’s action is right - to be generous ourselves and enlist other nations to be generous too. Recently I saw how God blesses faith. With others in the area, we had guaranteed £200 to the producer of one of the MRA plays if he brought it to Somerset. So, it came. We had the theatre three-quarters full but we needed £120 more to make up the total. On the morning before the performance, we received a cheque from the sale of Signe’s paintings in her recent exhibition in Taunton. So,I was able to write a cheque and the production crew left our village with the full £200.
Now a somewhat similar incident happened last year. We had had great flooding following an unusual snowstorm and a friend’s house had 18” of water in their downstairs room. Our village was cut off for a week. Our own policy in our home is that there is neither house nor home so small that thousands more may not enter in. That policy was curtailed because nobody could come. I may say that in an 18-month period we provided 400 meals to friends visiting here and 100 bed-nights. Anyway, the bills were mounting and with no gifts from friends coming in we had no money to pay the £100 bills we had on our hands. Signe prayed aloud. ‘We are ready to sell and live in a flat somewhere if you want us to get rid of this house and sell it, God.’ We wondered whether we were living on too ambitious a scale. I am 71. Signe is 74, and we live on a two-thirds state pension with four small covenants, just a little money invested. We have enough to get by and in fact our income tax rebate varies from £3-400 each year. So, we do all right.
However, the following day, having said that prayer, a letter came in the post with a cheque for exactly £100 from someone who we had never received a gift from before or since. We are now enlarging our sitting room so that more than 6 can sit down without everyone having to move when one person wants to leave the room.
I often think of that old hymn, ‘Dare to be a Daniel, dare to stand alone, dare to have a purpose true, dare to make it known’. This is an infectious quality which several in this village have, whether they know it or not. Not all are regular church- or chapel-goers but all are prompted by the spirit of God’s love for their fellow-man.
One picture I very well remember taking was of Senator Harry Truman. He became President of the USA some years later. It was in Philadelphia. It happened to be his birthday, and there was a birthday cake made for him. He had come to see the play ‘The Forgotten Factor’ which had been written by Alan Thornhill in Tahoe. On that occasion Harry Truman opened his heart to us. This is what he said, ‘The time is ripe for an appeal not to self-interest but to the hunger for great living that lies deep in every man. What Americans really want is not a promise of getting something for nothing, but a chance to give everything for something great. I have known this group since June 4, 1939, when I read a message from President Roosevelt to the national mass-meeting for MRA in Constitution Hall, Washington. I was struck at the time by the clarity with which they saw the dangers threatening America and the zeal and intelligence with which they set about rousing the country. There is not a single industrial bottleneck I can think of which could not be broken in a matter of weeks if this crowd were given the green light to go full steam ahead. We need this spirit in industry. We need it in the nation. With it there is no limit to what we can do for America and America for the world.’
Another of the men I remember photographing was Gary Cotton. He was the head of the union at Boeings in the Pacific Northwest, where they made the Flying Fortresses - the bombers. This is what he said, ‘In my work as President of the Boeing union and earlier, I have been greatly helped by the co-operation of the MRA workers. Their help has been especially valuable since it has not always been easy to get constructive labour policies put through on account of the undermining effect of un-American forces.’
You see at this time the Soviet were allied with Germany, with Nazi Germany. And so, all those who had pro-Soviet leanings throughout America were doing their best to slow down the production of Flying Fortresses and other war equipment.
Gary Cotton goes on in this way, ‘2 years ago when these forces got control of our union we had a tremendous battle to deal with them. It reached such a point that our international president, Mr. Brown, had to fly here to expel them. What we still face from these influences convinces me that we need a program that will arm our rank and file against their destructive efforts, and from my 3 years experiences of the MRA workers I believe they supply this armour. These men possess tremendous qualities of tenacity and fight. They help a fellow to see where he needs to pep up and at the same time make him like it. I speak from experience, knowing some of these 28 men. I have had them in my home with me. It means a lot to a fellow who has to make decisions involving thousands of men to have help from a straight-shooting crowd like this. They bring a new element into industry to speed up victory. For these men possess the rare ability to bring about a change in cantankerous human nature which releases and steps up productive power.’
Another man was Dale Reed, whom I remember well and photographed at the MRA assembly in Mackinac Island in Michigan (incidentally their centre there was given at $1/year by the Governor of Michigan). Dale Reed was the head of Lockheed’s union. He wrote that the shop stewards wrote out the results of MRA. ‘Tested over the last 2 years, one, it increases war production. Two, it inspires teamwork. Three, it creates enthusiasm on the job. Four, it cuts absenteeism. Five, it saves war materials. Six, develops unselfish leadership. Seven, it ensures the right approach to wage adjustments. Eight, it answers labour turnover problems.’ During the past three years MRA workers have maintained personal touch with over 1100 principal labour leaders in both the major union organisations and with representatives of management across the country.’
This man was the President of the largest American Federation of Labor local in the country when he worked at Lockheeds. He said, ‘There are planes on the fighting fronts today that would not be there but for the enthusiasm and unselfish leadership the MRA workers have brought into the ranks of labor.’
Of course, travelling across America, I had the opportunity of photographing the leaders of the unions in the factories throughout the country, because this revue, YCDA, was presented 185 times in 20 states. We had audiences of over 250,000 people who came to see it. It was sponsored by the Governors, State Legislatures, management-labor committees, labor conventions. The labor convention I remember the most was the steelworkers in Columbus. There you had the whole convention, the top labor men in steel in the country, seeing this revue. It appealed to me very much because my whole philosophy of photography has been not confrontation, because confrontation is what every photographer goes for - you only have to look in the papers today and you see it is the pictures that carry confrontation that get the space. But I decided on the opposite - to get images of bridge-building between people, between families and in factories and industry. But between countries, and after the war I was very glad to have the privilege to work in Germany and see how France and Germany buried forever the hatchet, and made real what people take for granted today - that they work together. But in those days it was almost unthinkable. You thought France and Germany - they had been fighting each other on and off for the last 70 years and the fact that they could work together ... well, I was fascinated to photograph some of that. Schumann and Adenauer. Adenauer with the miners from the Ruhr who were as different from him as chalk from cheese but they worked together for the good of the whole.
My Norwegian wife and I live in a village in Somerset - it happens to be the part of the country my grandfather and his father, and way back, have always lived in. We live on Sedge Moor, a little village called Stoke St Gregory. We are about 1500 people. There is a good spirit in the village - we noticed it when we came here. People were very friendly and initiative seems to be on the steady up and up.
We have a devoted couple who have taken on the Sunday School and there are now over 40 children who come regularly every Sunday. Some of them are going to camp soon. Then we have the playgroup and toddlers’ group. That has only started this year. They do it in the Church Hall, which was a very cold and bleak place. They have turned it into a very warm spot. They have got carpets on the floor and they have made an excellent thing of it already.
We are fortunate too in having a publican, an ex-Navy man. He was very distressed to see the way these teenagers were just roaming around and I know our village telephone booth always had cracked glass and was often out of order. So, he invited them into the skittle alley, out of hours, and the pool table there. Providing they kept it clean he let them stay and enjoy themselves. On one occasion there was mess left behind by one of them, so he just said, ‘Well, you are all out for a week’. Then he got the idea of getting a cricket team going, and a football team going, because - there is no doubt about it - when people have a sense of responsibility, whether it is their football or cricket teams - they begin to have a sense of responsibility for everything. Now our telephone booth has its glass intact and it works.
The Navy man also has 6-a-side football competition on Bank Holidays, where 24 clubs come from miles around. Even one side from Heathrow. I spoke to one man and said it was rather nice - you always hear about Heathrow strikes and things, but he was so proud of the fact that he was the engineer for one of the Boeings. Then also he had the fun teams at the same time, during the morning he had the mums play the village school and the mums managed to beat ‘em too.
Last year we had 20 jobs advertised for 6 weeks in our village Post Office, and nobody wanted one of them. Basket making has gone on here for centuries and the withies that grow on the moor have to be cut by hand. There is a lot of work to be done of that nature. But nobody wanted the jobs. The young tearaways, I suppose, preferred to get jobs in their towns, in shops and so on. So, the basket-maker started evening classes for mums and those who wanted second jobs. So now, if you go through the village, you see baskets outside council houses or cottages in a condition which that person has built and is taken by someone else to the next place to be finished off. And there is great skill in them.
When The Queen, at the [Silver?] Jubilee, let the pigeons out of the baskets, they were baskets made here in the village. You can buy these baskets at Harrods and Heals and other places. And they send them back after 20 years, not because the baskets are worn out but because the lining has worn. So, there is a great tradition here in basket-making.
The selling of council houses is interesting here. I was talking to one man the other day. He has lived here in the village all his life. He is 44 years old and he said he is going to buy his. But he said one of his mates at work said to him, ‘Well you’re going to have trouble keeping it repaired’. He told me that he had laughed at his mate. ‘I have been repairing houses all my life, now I am going to have a chance to repair my own!’
Of course, everyone loves to grumble still in the village. You can always find a point of fellowship on that level and there is always the weather to grumble about if nothing else but there is a good spirit in the village, and it brings hope to visitors who come here. My brother from Rhodesia came, feeling very low in spirits. After being here for about 10 days he wrote in our visitors’ book, ‘A lovely happy home. Quite renewed my faith in dear old England. Wonderful village life.’
One day in the winter of 1957, Frank Buchman, who was staying in Los Angeles, went to get his hair cut. He was sitting in the chair and the shoeshine man came and asked if he wanted his shoes shined. So, Frank Buchman said ‘yes’. Frank said nothing to him at the time, although he noticed that the shoeshine man looked up at him. Later Frank said to someone, ‘That man was a man of God’. Then three weeks later Frank went back to the shop and the shoeshine man came up to him and said, ‘I have wanted to see you again and tell you what happened when I cleaned your shoes. I have been losing my sight, so I prayed and prayed. The day I cleaned your shoes my eyesight began to return and it has been getting steadily better.’ Frank replied, ‘My eyesight is bad and I have been praying about it. But God hasn’t done that for me yet.’
RAE Holme: I am interviewing Signe Strong, the wife of Arthur Strong, who lives in a Somerset village in England. I understand that you were a commercial artist working in Sweden, in Stockholm at the time when you first encountered the Oxford Group. Did you have any faith at that time?
Signe: As a young person I didn’t have a faith. Not at all. I was looking very much for something to guide my life by and looking into all kinds of things. I found that nothing really worked. I tried the German philosophers and I tried no philosophy. I just noticed that around us everywhere things were coming apart. In Sweden at that time where I was working, among our contemporaries a lot of people began to commit suicide. And then there were revolutions everywhere - the Civil War building up in Spain. In Abyssynia there were Italians walking in and taking over and at home there was colossal unemployment. This was in the 1930s. I was very worried, of course, but more than anything I felt that I wanted a purpose in life. I was living all the time with the sense of futility about living. I felt it was so absolutely futile to earn money and eat it up and earn money and eat it up. There seemed to be no purpose in it. I was earning good money and had very good prospects as a commercial artist. I had everything a person could wish for, everything but a purpose that was satisfying.
So, when Frank Buchman came to Sweden and presented this thought of Moral Re-Armament, it was such a tremendously challenging thing. I thought to myself, ‘Honestly, it is so simple - why hadn’t I thought of it myself? Of course, absolute honesty .. that is a concept that would change everything if people did it.’ I thought about what they said. If even a few people did it that would make a difference. It would be like the leaven, a seed that would grow, because it would work. I thought ‘Why not?’ I didn’t believe in God, but I didn’t need to believe in God for that. The other thing was absolute unselfishness that they talked about. If people were selfless, of course everyone in the world would have enough. But, if this eternal ‘progress’ and ‘more and more and more’, is going to be our aim, then of course there will never be enough for everyone. Just for a few. The few who have the energy to go and get it.
So, I wanted to find out what was behind it. That is why, when this invitation came to a so-called ‘house party’, which was really a very large conference I went . It turned out to become a very large conference, because people responded in such colossal numbers from all the Baltic countries, I went a little bit apprehensively, I must say, because they all professed to believe in God. I was absolutely certain that there was no such thing and I didn’t want to be involved in that part of it. But it didn’t take very long before I realised that actually I was totally unable to do anything about these 4 standards. For one thing I was far too proud to be honest. I didn’t want to go and put right any of the things that I had done wrong in that direction. I thought it was horrible. Nothing on earth would make me do it.
It involved being honest with my father, for one thing, and my mother. I had betrayed their trust in a big way, really. When I was confronted with the nitty-gritty of what absolute honesty really means, which of course includes putting right what you can put right, I realised that I was at a total loss. I just simply had to take on faith what other people said - that there was a power beyond us, that would give us the will and the courage to go through with it and to actually do what we believe.
We are a Norwegian family and father had become a director in the company where he started work as a mining engineer when he was a young man. He was by now the director of the whole thing, in charge of all the Norwegian side and all the international side of the work. He also represented the mining interests of Norway on the world councils. He was also the President of the Employers’ Federation of Norway one year. It was through him, actually, that I became interested in MRA and got this invitation to go to this conference, because he and my mother had gone to a similar conference in Norway. They were living in Norway again by that time, although we had been in Sweden for very many years - 19 years in all I have lived in Sweden and had my schooling there.
The conference was in Visby, which is a little town which used to be one of the great Hanseatic towns in the Middle Ages. It is situated in the Baltic Sea and it is now a ruined city. It had marvellous facilities for a conference and one had to go there by boat. We used to meet in a huge, ruined cathedral, with no roof - birds flying in and out, and luckily we had good weather. We had the press coming in from all of the big papers. The man who was to become my husband later on used to take the pictures from the conference and send them back on the planes that came to fetch them.
It was a great mixture of things after that conference. One thing was my personal longing for something. I had a great struggle personally in finding guidelines for my life, something that made sense. I saw the need in the world. I felt powerless to do anything about it. I saw it was more than economics that was needed. I was very shy and didn’t want to talk about my inner struggles with anybody. Then I found a woman there who said she had had guidance from God to go and talk to me, because she felt that I looked unhappy and that I needed some help. I told her I felt it was absolutely scandalous that people should go like that and talk to someone in those terms. I resisted her approach because I feared sentimentalism which was what I thought of as religion.
A few days later I realised that I was absolutely stuck. I didn’t know how to move on. I fully agreed with the ideas of Moral Re-Armament but I couldn’t equate it with my own life and I felt a terrible fraud. So, I thought ‘Well the only thing is to go to that woman. At least she is old enough to understand all my inner workings.’ So, I went and said to her, ‘I am sorry I misbehaved the other day to you. I was rude to you, and I would like to have a talk.’ So, she invited me up to her room and by that time I had heard enough about these 4 standards - absolute honesty and absolute purity, absolute unselfishness and absolute love - to realise that it would help if I were to write down the places in my life which I knew had been wrong. It would be easier to deal with them. These standards are enough to make anybody blanch.
So, I had been sitting for days trying to listen to God, which they talked about. I heard not a thing and I thought the whole thing was a fake. But then suddenly, one day, I came upon the idea that it would be useful to write down the things that were troubling me. So, I remembered one after the other various things that I had done through life which were very definitely wrong and I knew it at the time, but I buried them so deep that I didn’t think about them again. These things had really ruined my relationships with my parents, among other things. I remembered how I had been stealing pears from a pear tree we weren’t supposed to touch. From that day on I felt very uncomfortable with my parents and felt there were always things I would have to hide. That grew and grew and grew and became quite a big problem in our family. It made me more and more “walled-off” and unhappy.
That was a small thing. There were many other things that came out as I thought about them and I had a big, long list which sat in my pocket and practically burned a hole in it. So, when I came to this lady she asked me if I had been thinking about how my life squared up to the 4 standards I said I had and I finally thought the best thing would be to tell her all these things and I did. There was one thing at the end which I couldn’t get over my lips. I just couldn’t say it. It was so horrible and I hadn’t even expressed it to myself before. So, I didn’t say it. A silence fell over the room and I didn’t know what to do. I just sat there. After a bit the lady said, ‘Well there is something that comes to mind from my experience which I would love to tell you,’ and she told me. It was exactly what I didn’t want to tell her in my own life. So, she provided me with a real life-line - all I needed to say was, ‘It is exactly what has been troubling me too’. I felt such a relief. I felt as if something broke in me - a pride. I don’t know what it was really that kept me back before, except this pride.
She asked, ‘Would you like to give all this to God?’ I replied, ‘I don’t believe in God’. She said, ‘Well I believe in God and I believe for you too. There is no harm in saying to God “if you do exist take over my life and run it”.’ So, I did and while I was praying I suddenly thought, ‘Gosh, I am now saying that I will do anything he asks me to do but imagine if he asked me to go to America! I wouldn’t do it.’ Suddenly I realised this was the crunch point. It would be just as well to jump into it as to crawl into it. So, I jumped, and said to God, ‘Even if you ask me to go to America, I will go’. And about six months later I was in America.
I got to America because after that conference in Visby, Frank Buchman had gathered a lot of people from all over Europe who had experienced what change means and how to find the guidance and the purpose of God in their lives - not only for themselves but also for the world: how they could gear in to God’s plan for the world. And Frank Buchman had conceived this thought - that he would take a group to America in order to launch the idea of Moral Re-Armament there. So, he invited me as part of a group of 100 - I being one of those who had a fresh experience. Some of the others had been much longer at it. So, I found myself in America with a group of, I think, 5 or 6 young Scandinavian girls. We were all completely out of our depth but found, during the months we were there together, a very great experience of doing something together which none of us could have done separately, in helping to reach a very great country with an idea.
During the years ahead, of course, the war came and I couldn’t get back to Europe. This, to start with, was a very heavy blow for me. But it turned out that we were able to do much more for the whole of the future of our countries than we would have been able to do if we had been at home and restricted, as so many were. During the war, I was able to use my commercial art training very much. We had very great poster campaigns and pamphlet campaigns. We had big stage performances. All these things, of course, needed commercial art for advertising, promotion and all that, so I spent all 7 years that we were in America doing that sort of thing, as well as meeting people.
I didn’t do any painting during that time. In fact, I was helping to look after some children There were 5 children in a household where two sisters were living together with their husbands. During that time, I was fretting really very much because I didn’t feel my talents were being used. I was wondering how on earth could I use them in the service of this great idea of MRA. One day, to my great surprise, I had a feeling as if a voice had spoken to me, it was so clear. It said, ‘You need to become an artist with people.’ Implying that I should stop all this thinking about what I could do through art. As I was really basically a very withdrawn person, it was a very great challenge to me.
The quality of that thought was such that I knew I had to obey it. It was vital and I knew that it certainly was not my own thought. I would never have produced a thought like that. So, I put away all these ambitions of mine. I concentrated on doing what I could with all the rest of the company who were in America at that time with Frank Buchman. It wasn’t until about 20 years later that I got the thought that I should paint again. That came with an equal sense of clarity and force, that was certainly from outside of me. It didn’t come only once - because I didn’t - I wasn’t in a position at that point. I was out travelling on the road with a stage production. I had no painting things with me nor any space to do it in. We were always living in other people’s homes in tiny little rooms and so forth. I was amazed. I saw no end to this way of living either, at the time.
But in one way or another it worked out. Quite unforeseen, we were asked to stay in the home of a teacher in the London area whose parents had died. She asked us to come and look after the house and to make our base there. Although we still were able to travel and do things, we had our base there. That was where I began to get one thought after another of what to paint and how to paint it. That was the beginning of a very interesting experience because instead of struggling about how to do things I was having one thought after another which came from elsewhere, from outside, which told me in detail what to paint and how to paint it . Which, of course, was very different work from the way I had operated before.
Then I had a very startling thought again, because by this time I was no longer a young person. Our daughter was a teenager and she was going to boarding school part of this time. I had had enough time to paint so that I had enough work to mount an exhibition. To my great surprise the thought arrived that I should go and find a place where I could exhibit my pictures. I thought it was very presumptuous to go and say to people, ‘You should exhibit my paintings’, but in one way or another various thoughts came - where to turn, what to say, how to do it and I never did have to say that. It came very naturally. People wanted to do it and I had an exhibition of more than 30 pictures in the Norwegian restaurant in Knightsbridge. It went very well indeed - to my great surprise.
I have continued to paint but it has been very much up and down because I have not been well and, for long periods, I was not able to paint at all. Each time I started again. It is like with playing the piano - you have got to practice in order to be able to do what you want to do. All during this time, things happened in my early morning times of meditation, which my husband and I have both made a practice to have before the day starts and before all your busy thoughts get going. That is where I began to realise that there are things going on in this life which cannot be explained in material ways, or with material explanations. I had thoughts which came from absolutely nowhere in my own brain, of how to express things that are of the spirit. I became more and more convinced that this thing that we call inspiration is a very real thing and the important thing is to catch it - to spend time enough to catch it. Being ill of course you spend an awful lot of time alone, so in a way I was lucky because I was able to prove the truth of this concept.
And then I found that after still some years - another ten years I think it has been - I was ready for another exhibition. I have been terribly worried about what is going on in the Arts and generally of course in our country. Because art - like everything else - has been reduced to money. You invest in art and the artist becomes the important thing. The signature is more important than actually what the picture is all about. In the early days of painting, it was the idea that counted. Art was in the service of other things. The primitives and our own so-called enlightened age all started out with art as having a part to play in the communication between man and spirit, man and God, and also between man and man and the spirit of one man and the spirit of another. Art was communication of the spirit, also between men and women. We have become so enamoured with our technological achievements that we begin to forget that there is such a thing as the inner man. The inner man has his own needs and laws that must be obeyed and followed in order to receive the benefits. That is where I feel art somehow or other, in our modern day and age, needs to play a part. It is a very vital part. I don’t mean that we should paint religious pictures, people in long flowing robes and that sort of thing. But I have found that, in these early times in the morning, I got thoughts, contemporary thoughts, of how to communicate things from the depths of my spirit to the depths - as I think - of somebody else’s spirit. I do believe that what comes out of the most genuine part of you is the only thing that really has a chance to find a genuine response in another, even if it is only one other.
Of course, I felt very presumptuous that I should set out to try such a thing but I felt compelled to. I decided however bad I was at doing it, the point was to do it, and somebody else might catch the thought or the idea and do it better. It would have served its purpose. I have had another exhibition, here where we live in Somerset, and I was absolutely amazed at what happened there because people wanted to talk. Arthur, my husband, spent every day during the fortnight that the exhibition was on at the place itself helping to receive people as they came in and giving them the list and so forth, and was just around. If people wanted to ask questions, there he was. One after another people came and wanted to talk about the most genuine things inside them. Some people came out here to have meals with us and to talk further. It was way beyond what I could have planned and certainly way beyond any merit in my actual painting. It makes you feel very humble.
RAE Holme: I believe you have gone on to art in the form of words, with poetry, and have published a book of poems called ‘Without and Within’, poems by Signe Lund Strong.
Signe: During all these years it often happened that I got thoughts in the shape of poems instead of in the form of pictures. So, I jotted them down and, when the time of the exhibition came, I felt it would help people to see these poems because they give a little bit of a background as to why I paint and generally thoughts that are hard to express in paint. So, this little book of poems got printed. I will read a couple of poems:
One explains what I see as inspiration - it is called ‘Two Worlds’ and it really means my world and that other world where inspiration comes from which we only glimpse and experience in fleeting moments.
I was allowed some moments of vibrant clear reality
Some seconds in eternity where past and future knit
And nothing mattered more than being part of it.
and here is another one which I call ‘The Flame’. To me it is so that all these great concepts that we have and we say that we live by like Freedom, Democracy, Truth, Emancipation and so forth - they are great truths that only work if we live them. Democracy only works if we all are considerate of each other and if we are all honest. We cannot create trust without honesty and we cannot just expect other people to be honest. We have got to do it ourselves. To me that truth is like a flame and this flame is carried from one generation to the next Sometimes it nearly blows out, sometimes it flickers and other times the flame is very strong. Here is a poem about it:
The flame flickers with the winds.
Will it go out and leave darkness around it?
Deep darkness that stuns.
Shielded too closely for fear it will falter
The flame finds no air and flickers out all the same.
Flickering flame, through all ages there were always some
Who would rather die than see you flicker out
And leave sole darkness amongst us.
And here is a slightly longer poem which I wrote because I have been the kind of person who wants to protect myself and other people from suffering and from difficulties. But it is really my experience that it is when you face difficulties and face and accept suffering, when it comes, that you go through the sound barrier and you have experiences that you would not have had otherwise. So, I wrote this one. It is called ‘Please’.
When I grow old - well, I am quite old now -
When I grow really old, I mean - that is, if I do -
You never know these things.
So, if I grow really old, my child,
But you are my child no more,
Though you came of me and were me for most of a year
And still feel mine
Now with a child of your own you are one flesh with your man as I am with mine.
Well then if I grow really old in heart and mind and limb
One thing I ask of you - promise, promise not to pamper or protect.
I have suffered. I have loved. I have battled. I have laughed.
I have drunk of delights that have poured from the source of life
Into the parched, tortured, twisted, tangled mess that was my inner self
And cried out to die.
This me was cradled, fed and loved to life
As with parents’ love and patience, but greater.
Life bubbled where dryness was like a source that springs from the depths
While we watch in wonder.
It trickled, poured and made a stream
And the stream a river
The river made pools and lakes
And made way again towards the sea,
Source and Sea the same.
There were boulders in the river, rocks and logs to dam the flow,
Sticks and stones.
The force of flow made whirls and waves with froth and foam
That rise in cascades to be hurled back into the river.
There are those who try to roll rocks away
Who think them wrong - preventing progress.
Those rugged rocks that split dashing waters into sparkles,
Make rainbows in the sun, make salmon leap, make laughter in the soul,
Let them stand forever.
Never try to smooth the flow or still the stream.
Let me feel the pebbles grate on the riverbed.
Let me dash my spirit against those timeless rocks.
Let me, though weak maybe of limb and mind, run my course.
My tears as I dash against rocks
Are the drops that fly from the waves and catch the light of the sun.
My groans as I grate on the gravel
Are the roars of the river run.
Fool is one who tries to scoop the river up with hands
To stagnate in putrid pools.
Burdened he darts to and fro’ to no avail.
Let the river run its course in tumult towards goal and source
And merge with the majesty of the waiting sea.
I think I could illustrate this with a little story from the time when Ingrid was 10 years old - at least she was going to have her 10th birthday. She had two very special friends. In fact, they were so special that we were a bit worried about it because they formed a clique among the other children and they were so absorbed with each other that they forgot the others - entirely dependent on each other. As Ingrid’s birthday approached she became absolutely obsessed with the thought that she wanted the same as the other two children had had for their birthdays - that was moccasins and an Indian bracelet. Because their fathers had been together with her father at a conference in America which was based in Michigan where the Native American population had a settlement. Ingrid had no moccasins and no bracelet and felt out of it. The closer the birthday came the more obsessed she got with this idea and I tried to hint at the fact that she may not get them. In fact, I knew she wouldn’t get them because we had had a very different thought for her, which was to give her a paint box which we thought would develop her own individuality more as she had some talent in that direction.
I got more and more worried. One day Ingrid woke up in the morning in floods of tears. She had had a dream and described the dream for me. A parcel arrived in the post and she knew it was from Dad, she said, and she knew that inside were moccasins and a bracelet. She was so thrilled - she opened the parcel and as she opened the parcel it all turned into sand and ran away through her fingers. As she told me this story she sobbed and sobbed and wouldn’t stop sobbing. I was really worried. She didn't cry normally. So, I thought, ‘Should I have got her father to send her these things? Should I even send a telegram, to ask him to send them to her?’ because it felt to me that this was more than a little child could bear.
Suddenly I realised that God was actually speaking to Ingrid in this dream. He was preparing her for the fact that happiness does not lie in moccasins and bracelets, nor in any other thing that is of this world. So, I told her that I thought this was God speaking to her and that she might not get the bracelet and moccasins. But I let that stay in her mind and didn’t say to her what we had in mind for her birthday.
The day arrived and we had put a lot of thought - my friends and I - put a lot of thought into the birthday party and had a gorgeous time. Ingrid opened her presents and was very thrilled and at the end of the day she was radiant. Really radiant, and so different. She had been so thoughtful all day towards her other friends as well. This cliqueyness had gone. In the evening she said to me, ‘Mummy, it is the best birthday I have ever had. I got everything I wanted.’
With special thanks to Ginny Wigan for her transcription, and Lyria Normington for her editing and correction.
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