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In 1908, exhausted and depressed after a budget dispute that led to his
resignation, Rev. Frank Buchman
[upper right], the future founder of the Oxford Group, arrived in England to
attend the Keswick Convention of Evangelicals. He hoped to meet the
renowned Quaker-influenced Baptist evangelist F. B. Meyer
[center right] (1847–1929), whom he believed could offer him guidance. Although
Meyer was not there, Buchman experienced a profound spiritual
surrender after hearing a sermon titled “The Cross of Christ”
delivered by evangelist Jessie Penn-Lewis
[lower right, a descendant of William Penn’s]. As he later recalled:
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She pictured the dying Christ as I had
never seen him pictured before. I saw the nails in the palms of His hands,
I saw the bigger nail which held His feet. I saw the spear thrust in His
side, and I saw the look of sorrow and infinite suffering in His face. I
knew that I had wounded Him, that there was a great distance between
myself and Him, and I knew that it was my sin of nursing ill-will.…
I thought of those six men back in
Philadelphia who I felt had wronged me. They probably had, but I'd got so
mixed up in the wrong that I was the seventh wrong man. Right in my
conviction, I was wrong in harbouring ill-will. I wanted my own way and my
feelings were hurt.
I began to see myself as God saw me,
which was a very different picture than the one I had of myself. I don't
know how you explain it, I can only tell you I sat there and realised how
my sin, my pride, my selfishness and my ill-will, had eclipsed me from God
in Christ.
He
later helped another participant in undergoing the same experience. These
experiences became pivotal to the rest of his life’s work. Upon returning to
the U.S., he entered his “laboratory years,” where he developed the principles
he would later implement on a global scale.
In 1918, Bill W.
[left, in uniform (1918)] sailed from Boston to New York Harbor aboard the H.M.T.
*
Lancashire
[below right].
During the subsequent voyage to
England, an officer shared brandy with him, which he immediately took to, of
course.
On the eve of their arrival, while Bill was on watch, a sudden crashing thud
sent the soldiers into a panic. With his pistol drawn, Bill took control of
the situation by barking orders, thus proving to himself, at least, that he
was the coward he feared.
After reaching
shore, his unit was delayed by a minor epidemic near Winchester. During this
time, Bill visited Winchester Cathedral, where he felt a “tremendous sense of
presence,” partly inspired by an epitaph on the headstone of a Hampshire
Grenadier, Thomas Thetcher. He later quoted this epitaph from memory in
“Bill’s Story” in the book Alcoholics Anonymous.
*Hired Military Transport, i.e., non-commissioned
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In 1921, without a job and no idea what he wanted to do, Bill W was
“restless and his drinking increased,” according to his wife, Lois.
She worked as an occupational therapy aide for the Red Cross at
Brooklyn Naval Hospital
[upper left: exterior, 1940s; lower left: a group of nurses at the
hospital, 1920]. Using her vacation time, she and Bill embarked on a camping trip
along the 300-mile Long Trail* [below right: map], along the peaks of Vermont’s Green Mountains—a trail that her
father and brother had helped to clear. For Lois, these camping
trips served as an opportunity to “think things over” and to
encourage Bill to curb his drinking.
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During this trip, Bill resolved to
attend law school. His grandfather, who had raised him from the age of
11, had always wanted him to be a lawyer. Although bill was “not sure
he wanted to be an attorney,” he believed that “knowledge of the law
would always be useful.” Upon their return, Bill enrolled in night
classes at Brooklyn Law School
[left: Brooklyn Eagle Building, home of Brooklyn Law School,
1923], a division of St. Lawrence University, and kept at his studies for
four years. Lois later wrote, “After paying the fifteen-dollar
fee [~$270 in 2025] for his
diploma, he was too drunk to leave the apartment the next day to pick
it up. He never bothered to get it. It could still be there.”
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Lois was not quite correct. David G. Trager,
who served as Dean of Brooklyn Law School from 1983 to 1993 and reviewed
Bill’s records from the early 1920s, noted that Bill failed a course on
Executors and Administrators (pertaining to wills, estates, and trusts) in his
final term in 1924. He returned in the fall to retake the course but
ultimately left the law school without completing the required examination,
and so was ineligible for a diploma (although New York state allows anyone
with at least one year law school to take the bar exam, after completing three
years of law office study under the supervision of a practicing attorney or
judge).
[All quotes are from Lois Remembers.]
*The Long Trail, constructed from 1910 to 1930, follows the main ridge of
the Green Mountains from Massachusetts to Canada. It is the oldest
long-distance trail in the United States, and later inspired the creation of
the Appalachian Trail.
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In 1922, Lois W.
experienced her second ectopic pregnancy, where a fertilized egg develops
outside the uterus—in her case, in a fallopian tube. The first had occurred
just a month before in her other fallopian tube, and her father, Dr. Clark
Burnham
[left], had treated her at
home.
This time, he promptly sent her to the Skene Sanitarium
[right], where he was on staff. A colleague performed the surgery, and Lois then
went to her family's camp on Emerald Lake in Vermont to recover under her
father's care.
Unfortunately, her condition worsened instead of improving. Despite feeling
increasingly unwell, she missed home and pretended to be getting better until
Dr. Burnham “let” her go home. Once home, her husband Bill kept her in bed for
several weeks. Concerned about her deteriorating health, he consulted Dr.
Leonard Strong
[left], his
brother-in-law, who realized that a cyst had formed on what remained of her
ovary. Lois returned to the surgeon who had operated on her, but he only
conducted a “cursory examination” and prescribed a laxative for what he
assumed was constipation. Knowing better, Bill contacted Dr. Burnham, who
quickly took a train back from Vermont and readmitted Lois to the Skene
Sanitarium. There, the cyst was removed, and she began to recover rapidly.
Lois would suffer a third and final ectopic pregnancy the following May.
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