Cooking for hundreds of people takes skill and courage at the best of times – and all the more so when your team speaks several languages and includes people who have rarely cooked before.

For most of the Caux conference centre’s existence, the meals have been cooked by conference participants, led by intrepid and experienced head cooks, who came from all over the world. These women – and some men – were volunteers, who left jobs and other commitments to spend summer after summer at Caux. Three of them ⎼ Alison Wetterfors, Debora Kupferschmidt and Liz Weeks ⎼ appear in the photo above.

Alison Wetterfors, a gifted Scottish singer who took part in a number of Moral Re-Armament (now Initiatives of Change) productions, was one of them. She writes:  

I am of course totally biased, but there is no doubt in my mind that by far the best place to take part in the volunteer work at Caux was the kitchen. I worked there in the summer for over 25 years in the 70s, 80s and 90s, many of them as a head cook.

To come to the kitchen after an intense plenary meeting was the perfect contrast, and many friendships were made and discussions had as one stirred the soup or fried the fish. It gave the perfect chance to translate theories about a better world into practice.

Many friendships were made and discussions had as one stirred the soup or fried the fish. It gave the perfect chance to translate theories about a better world into practice.

Many memories come to mind. The conversation between a British navy commander and an Argentinian shortly after the Falklands war, as they mashed the potatoes. The animated discussion between two Russian journalists as numerous omelettes were made, and the quiet to and fro between a retired ambassador and an African businessman as they chopped piles of parsley at a very slow pace. The challenge and fun of working with 10 or 15 other people to produce a meal for 500 was both satisfying and creative.

These moments were far outweighed by the achievements of a group of people, a good number of whom had never in their lives worked together with others to produce a meal for such numbers.

And then there were the times when it could be a little too exciting! The large amount of whipped cream left a moment too long in the mixer transformed in a flash into butter. The swoosh of many litres of egg mixture disappearing down a drain as someone lost control of a machine – and the sinking feeling that accompanied it. The frantic search for the tip of a large knife lost in ice cream for several hundred people – it was found!

These moments were far outweighed by the achievements of a group of people, a good number of whom had never in their lives worked together with others to produce a meal for such numbers.

No account of the kitchen operation would be complete without mentioning the Economat and vegetable teams. The former ordered all the food, and with their considerable expertise and support kept the whole show on the road. The vegetable team, starting very early, cut, chopped, peeled and washed, filling baskets full of salad, broccoli, or whatever else was on the menu that day. It goes without saying how important these teams were for the kitchen.

And so finally, in case you are wondering, we come to a certain skeleton. The discovery that the theatre was using one in a play was irresistible! It was duly ‘borrowed’ one evening, and, clad in a cook’s apron with parsley in its teeth, was draped over the largest soup pot in the hope of giving the night watch or any other passer-by a fright.

History doesn’t recall the effect it had in the midnight hours, but it had to be removed very quickly the next morning, as a group of Asian diplomats from Geneva toured the kitchen.

I still wonder what their reactions would have been to the contents of the soup in Caux if they had come round the corner a moment sooner!

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Listen to one of Alison's songs: Born on the Wind (1975)

Watch Alison perform a solo (6"6') and a Scottish dance (14"4') in Anything to Declare? (ATD) in Hong Kong

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This story is part of our series 75 Years of Stories about individuals who found new direction and inspiration through Caux, one for each year from 1946 to 2021. If you know a story appropriate for this series, please do pass on your ideas by email to John Bond or Yara Zhgeib. If you would like to know more about the early years of Initiatives of Change and the conference centre in Caux please click here and visit the platform For A New World. 

• Last photo: Mary Lean
• All other photos: Initiatives of Change (top: Alison Wetterfors, Debora Kupferschmidt, Liz Weeks)
• Video Anything to Declare? (ATD) in Hong Kong: Initiatives of Change
• Song Born on the Wind: Alison Wetterfors

The West Indian cricketer Conrad Hunte was often at the conference centre in Caux in the years following his retirement from first class cricket in 1967. So much so that he once said that he was having to get used to not being welcomed as a celebrity every time he arrived.

Conrad, from Barbados, was the Vice-Captain and opening batsman of the West Indies cricket team when they were world champions. During their tour of Australia in 1960-61, he gave a radio talk in Adelaide. He concluded: ‘I hope to contribute much to the world effort of sowing love where there is hatred, reaping peace where there is war and spreading light where there is darkness.’

I hope to contribute much to the world effort of sowing love where there is hatred, reaping peace where there is war and spreading light where there is darkness.

He received many appreciative letters from listeners, but he felt he was a hypocrite, as he wrote later in his autobiography Playing to win. His Christian convictions didn’t stop him ‘exploiting women for my pleasure’ and using cricket ‘for fame and fortune’.

The next test match was in Melbourne, where an avid cricket fan, Jim Coulter, invited him to see the Moral Re-Armament (now Initiatives of Change) film The Crowning Experience, portraying the story of African American educationist Mary McLeod Bethune.

After the film Conrad said, 'I have felt we [Barbados] may get our independence but whoever can harness the bitterness left from slavery will finish up in charge of my country.' The film, Jim Coulter wrote, ‘was the first thing Hunte had seen that could deal with that bitterness. He decided to try Bethune's approach of listening in quiet for God's direction.’

That Easter, Conrad made his first visit to Caux. The weekend ‘was like an opening of a window on a new world,’ he wrote. ‘On the evening of Good Friday I gave my life to God and asked him in the silence of my own heart what I should do.’ His first step was to pay back money to his father that he had stolen and to the West Indies Cricket Board of Control which he had cheated on his expense accounts.

His early retirement from cricket was prompted by two factors: a knee injury which forced him out of the sport for six months; and the gathering storm-cloud of racial hatred in Britain, where he had lived since 1956, and around the world.

He feared that other blacks would regard him as an Uncle Tom, while a challenge to white British to change would meet with ‘fierce resistance’. As he walked down a street in Mayfair, he had the compelling thought to look up. There on the wall was a beer advert: ‘Take Courage’*. He went into the church opposite ‘and on my knees accepted the commission to fight with others to forestall racial violence in Britain’.

He went into the church opposite ‘and on my knees accepted the commission to fight with others to forestall racial violence in Britain’.

When Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968 the police expected major riots in Notting Hill, London, and elsewhere. When they didn’t happen, local authorities attributed this in part to encounters of Black Power members with Hunte and his colleagues from Moral Re-Armament over the previous months.

Hunte’s campaign took him to 33 British cities before he was invited to the US to help in race relations there. In Roanoke, Virginia, he met Patricia (nee Wilson) in 1979. They met again in Caux the following year. They were married on her parent’s farm in Cascade, Va, in 1982. They lived in Atlanta, where Patricia became a TV news anchor, and they had three daughters. In 1992 the family moved to South Africa, where Conrad trained young Africans in poor communities in cricket and promoted reconciliation.

Hunte returned to Barbados in 1999. There he was knighted and won the presidency of the Barbados Cricket Association.

On a visit to Sydney, Australia, later that year, he suffered a heart attack while playing tennis with Jim Coulter. He died, aged 67. ‘Thousands and thousands of young South Africans are better because of his influence,’ said Ali Bacher, head of cricket in South Africa, at his funeral.

Thousands and thousands of young South Africans are better because of his influence.

• Read more on Conrad Hunte
• Discover the article Healing the wounds of history by Conrad Hunte

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Watch an extract with Conrad Hunte (from 26"47') from the film Choice for an impatient world (1977)

Watch Conrad Hunte in an interview in Chapter and Verse (1976)

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This story is part of our series 75 Years of Stories about individuals who found new direction and inspiration through Caux, one for each year from 1946 to 2021. If you know a story appropriate for this series, please do pass on your ideas by email to John Bond or Yara Zhgeib. If you would like to know more about the early years of Initiatives of Change and the conference centre in Caux please click here and visit the platform For A New World.

• All photos except featuring C. Hunte playing cricket, : Initiatives of Change (photo top: Dickie Dodds, Conrad Hunte, Brian Boobbyer, 1962)
• Photos cricket: Playing to win, Conrad Hunte, Hodder and Stoughton, London 1971
• Video: Chapter and Verse, Initiatives of Change
• Video: Choice for an impatient world, Initiatives of Change
• *"Courage" is also the name of a beer brand

When she came to Caux in December 1974, Swedish actress Vendela Tyndale-Biscoe (then Lofgren) had everything she had ever thought she wanted. That year, at the age of 24, she had been given a permanent contract with one of the biggest theatres in Sweden. But she felt ‘dead inside’.

Vendela had made her performing debut as a 12-year-old, four years after her father died from a hereditary kidney disease. ‘I experienced the sweetness of making people laugh and applaud for more,’ she said. ‘I knew that this was what I wanted to do.’

I experienced the sweetness of making people laugh and applaud for more. I knew that this was what I wanted to do.

She started singing her own songs in rock clubs. But she didn’t tell her mother about the drink, drugs and destructive relationships into which she was drawn ever deeper as she finished school and moved on to drama college.

By Christmas 1974, she had quit drugs after a religious experience which turned her back towards the Christian faith of her childhood. She had even – on an earlier visit to Caux in 1971 – broken down the ‘glass wall’ between her and her mother by telling her about the drugs. Her mother had taken the bombshell with unexpected calm. The experience had left Vendela ‘feeling as free as a bird’. 

In spite of all this, three years on she felt her life was not worth living. Her work was exhausting and her latest boyfriend was becoming an alcoholic. ‘I thought I might as well die.’ She went back to Caux, in search of ‘the only hope I had seen in life so far’.

On arrival, she was asked to take a part in a play – and declined because she wanted to go ski-ing. When she found the ski lift wasn’t working, she relented. 

She was the only woman in the cast and the rehearsals were an eye-opener. ‘I felt that the men I was working with loved me just for being me’. There was no need to flirt. She realized that this was the sort of life she wanted. 

‘I decided to stop trying to make myself more popular, stop thinking that I had to sleep with every boyfriend, stop drinking alcohol and become open with everyone, especially in the theatre world, about what I had decided. It was like saying goodbye to my career.’

She returned to work ‘a new person’ and found, to her surprise, that her colleagues respected her values, because she was living them herself, rather than lecturing them. The next summer she gave up her contract so as to work with Initiatives of Change (IofC).

She found, to her surprise, that her colleagues respected her values, because she was living them herself, rather than lecturing them.

The first year was tough. She started off in Britain, where she fell deep into depression – caused, she believed, by mercury poisoning from a dental operation. When she returned to Sweden four months later, she had a minor nervous breakdown. She found her feet again in Canada, and there faced the decision of whether to return to her acting career.

‘I shut myself into my room for a “talk” with God,’ she said. She had a clear thought: ‘if you give the theatre to me, even risking to never do theatre again, I promise to give you a life that you could never dream of’. When she was offered a part by her theatre in Sweden, she declined.

Over the next decades, this decision took her to Africa, India, Russia and other parts of Europe, often acting in plays and reviews which challenged the audience to rethink their lives and values. In 1980, she married Philip Tyndale-Biscoe, an English actor who had been in the cast at Caux in 1974. After 11 years in the UK and travelling internationally, they settled in Sweden in 1992.

Philip and Vendela performed together many times in Caux and elsewhere, including in two plays of their own – Let’s Talk Turkey  (‘about three Christmases, two people and one bookcase’) and Stalling Between Two Fools (‘a pocket review which we could perform anywhere’).

Not long after throwing in her lot with IofC, Vendela discovered that she had inherited the kidney disease her father died of. She decided, ‘From now on, I will live every day as if it is my last.’ She died 39 years later, in 2018.

You can read more on Vendela here.

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Vendela performing "I've dropped the charge", 2013

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This story is part of our series 75 Years of Stories about individuals who found new direction and inspiration through Caux, one for each year from 1946 to 2021. If you know a story appropriate for this series, please do pass on your ideas by email to John Bond or Yara Zhgeib. If you would like to know more about the early years of Initiatives of Change and the conference centre in Caux please click here and visit the platform For A New World.

• Photo portrait: For a New World
• Photo Nordic Revue: Tone Nelson
• All other photos: Philip Tyndale-Biscoe
• Photo top: Performing with Philip in 'Stalling between two fools', 1996-97

In 1973 Australia’s national elections brought a Labor Government to power, and Kim Beazley – a familiar face at Caux – was appointed Minister for Education. Beazley was determined to ensure that every Australian child received the best possible education, and launched a transformation in Australian schools.

The schools were either run by churches or by the state, and there was immense resentment at the inequities in their state funding. Under Beazley’s leadership, the Department of Education started funding all schools according to their need, giving the largest grants to the poorest schools.

When the Australian National University awarded an honorary doctorate to Beazley in 1976, the citation stated that his action had ‘healed an ulcer that has festered in our society for close to 200 years. Sectarian bitterness, which has focused on schools and their funding, was dealt a death blow by needs-based funding.’

Beazley regarded his first visit to Caux in 1953 as fundamental to his political approach. At Caux he had encountered the idea of taking time alone to seek God’s guidance, having ‘nothing to prove, nothing to justify and nothing to gain for yourself’.

When he did, he realized that he had ‘formed the habit of not being absolutely accurate in political statements’. As he told the conference, ‘I analyzed the government’s mistakes, but never their virtues. This is one of the most mischievous forms of lying in politics. I have decided to concern myself daily with the challenge of how to live out God’s will, to turn the searchlight of absolute honesty on to my motives, and to try to see the world with the clarity of absolute purity... and absolute love.’

His approach to people – his eyes, his voice – were different. (...) His new approach showed me the possibilities of change.

A first step for him was ‘sitting down and writing a letter of honesty to my wife’. And when he returned home she found that ‘his approach to people – his eyes, his voice – were different’. Life was not easy for her with three children and a husband away in Parliament on the other side of Australia for long periods. She said: ‘I had seen many marriage breakups in political life. His new approach showed me the possibilities of change.’

Some of his parliamentary colleagues were hostile. ‘Facing the prospect of political destruction at this moment is young Kim Beazley,’ wrote a prominent political columnist later that year. ‘Powerful, office-hungry individuals fear that his idealism and his current determination to pursue the truth, whatever the price, could cost the Labor Party the next election. The story they are assiduously and effectively peddling is, “Beazley has lost his balance.” So the word has gone out, “Destroy him”.’

They did not destroy him. He was returned to Parliament at every election for 32 years. When he retired, the Melbourne Herald wrote that he was ‘beyond any dispute one of the best Members of Parliament Australia has ever had’.

In particular, he had played a significant role in advancing Aboriginal land rights, voting rights, health care and education in 22 Aboriginal languages. The ANU doctoral citation stated, ‘It has become popular over the last years to recognize the injustices done to Aboriginal people. But over the last half-century this was far from popular. In that time few people have done as much, and none have done more, than Kim Beazley has to bring about that change in attitude.’ When he died in 2007, three former Prime Ministers attended his funeral.

Beazley summed up his approach: ‘The thoughts of God, given primacy in the life of a person, bring to the innermost motives the virtue of mercy, and with it the cure for hatred that can turn the tide of history. This is the essence of intelligent statesmanship.’

Watch a short film about Kim Beazley from our archives.

Watch an interview with Kim Beazley on his ideas and visons for the future, 1981 (Music: David Mills)