The 10th anniversary of the Moral Re-Armament (now Initiatives of Change) conference centre in Caux was a big moment for Eugen and Anneli Zeller. ‘We had the great joy of deciding to sell our house and give the money to Caux,’ Anneli told the conference on the 29 July 1956. ‘The man we sold it to was so impressed that he gave 10,000 Swiss francs to Caux as well.’ It was an elegant villa in the centre of Zurich. They were already living in a flat in order to let people who worked full time for Moral Re-Armament (MRA) live in their house.

We had the great joy of deciding to sell our house and give the money to Caux.

Eugen Zeller was a school teacher, with a reputation for being rather strict. In 1946, he had invited a number of his pupils to help with the preparations for the opening of Caux. At least two of them – Rita Fankhauser and Suzy de Montmollin – later decided to spend their lives working with Moral Re-Armament.

Eugen and Anneli’s three children, Berti, Hildi and Robi, also worked with MRA and became familiar faces in Caux over the next six decades.

Berti Zeller spent a lot of time in Rome, introducing the ideas of Caux to Italians – working with colleagues from Britain, who, to her mystification, insisted on serving Yorkshire pudding to their guests on Sundays. She then looked after her parents for the last years of their lives.

When they died, she joined the team which bought and managed the food stocks for the Caux conferences, often catering for 800 to 1,000 people at a time. She was a gentle person, but could be quite outspoken: ‘She would tell me what she thought I needed to hear,’ one of her colleagues told me.

Robert Zeller, known to his friends as Robi, was a sound technician. He had his own electronics firm where he did a lot of editing and transferring tapes and songs from the Caux conferences. Earlier he helped to build the film studio at the Moral Re-Armament centre on Mackinac Island, in the United States, where a number of MRA films were produced. Back in Caux, he helped to construct and maintain the sound equipment and translation cabins, above the meeting hall.

Hildi Zeller worked with MRA in South Africa, France, America, Canada and other countries, before coming home to settle in Switzerland. She took charge of the baking kitchen in the conference centre in Caux, producing delicious cakes for tea and delighting in teaching groups of children how to make them. She was also the flower lady, arranging big bouquets in the main hall and elsewhere.

In her later years, she lived in a little flat in a chalet not far from the conference centre and invited countless people to tea, with the inevitable home-baked cookies. She put together 25 albums of photos, leaving a mine of information, which are now on their way to the archives.

When Cornelio Sommaruga became the President of the Caux foundation, he spoke of coming to Caux for a meeting of the Council, and meeting a little old lady in the train. They started to talk and she invited him to tea and told him something of the history of Caux.

It was Hildi Zeller.

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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 top, Robert, group photo: Zeller family
• Photo Hildi in baking kitchen: Arne Rogge
• Photo Hildi with children: Initiatives of Change

After a week at the Caux conference centre in July 1955, the African delegation was ready to move on. They told their hosts, ‘We’ve enjoyed Caux. Now will you please arrange for us to see more of Europe?’

The next morning, 28 July, the founder of Initiatives of Change (then called Moral Re-Armament), Frank Buchman, called the group together. They came from several countries, most of them struggling for independence, and included politicians, trade union leaders, business people and students. ‘I spent much of last night in Africa in my thoughts,’ Buchman told them. ‘Africa is not meant to be torn apart between East and West, but to speak to both East and West with an answer. I think that it may come in the form of a play. Do you think you could write a play?’

Africa is not meant to be torn apart.

‘Thirty of us Africans met after lunch,’ remembered Ifoghale Amata, a young Nigerian graduate. ‘Soon we started quarrelling about what should go into the play. Then someone called for a time of quiet.’ When they pooled their thoughts, they found they had the skeleton of a plot.

Manasseh Moerane, a South African teachers’ leader, Abay-Ifaa Karbo from Kenya and Amata volunteered to write an act each. Next morning they read their drafts to the rest of the group and by five o’clock they told Buchman they had a finished play. 

A week later, on 5 August, the Africans presented the play in the Caux theatre, with Amata and Moerane playing barnstorming roles as the leaders of two political factions in an African nation on the verge of independence.

The play shows change of heart bringing unity between people divided by ideology, personality and tribe. This disarms the prejudices of the arrogant colonial governor, and eases the country’s path to freedom.

We were catapulted into history.

Buchman promptly announced that the play, which they called Freedom, would be presented in London the next week. ‘We were catapulted into history,’ said Moerane. ‘Within a few months Freedom was seen by 30,000 Europeans in London, Paris, Bonn, Berne, Geneva, Helsinki, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Oslo and Milan. Demand was so great that we decided to make a film.’

Filming took place in Nigeria in 1956. Over 2,000 people contributed money. Some of the actors and crew gave up their jobs to take part, without pay. The actors came from all over Africa, apart from a retired British colonial administrator, Lionel Jardine, who took the role of the governor.

The cameramen were both from Scandianvia: the Swede Rikhard Tegström, who had worked for Disney, and Aimo Jäderholm from Finland, who was contracted to Suomi Filmi, Finland’s biggest film company. One scene involved a canoe race, with 10,000 extras.

‘Much of the filming had to be done at night because of the heat and noise,’ wrote director’s assistant, Loël Ferreira. ‘Film was kept in a cold room in a butcher shop to prevent expansion in the heat and was flown back to London for processing.’ 

Freedom is thought to have been the first full-length feature film written and acted by Africans and filmed in Africa. It was dubbed into many languages and shown all over the world. In Kenya, alone, a million people saw it in the run-up to independence in 1963.

After the apology, what?

Wherever Freedom was seen, it impacted people’s lives, with lasting consequences. Robert Webb, a young journalist in Jackson, Mississippi, saw it at a conference in 1957. He wrote later that it drove ‘a stake into my racist heart’.

After the film he apologized to ‘the first black person I saw’ who happened to be African. ‘I will never forget his response: “After the apology, what?” I have been trying to answer that question ever since.’

Webb went on to a distinguished career on the Cincinatti Enquirer. When he died in 2018, his obituary spoke of his ‘vision for journalism as a force that could help heal the deepest hurts and bridge the most bitter divides’.  

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Watch the full film here.

Watch a video on the film opening of Freedom in Los Angeles 1961.

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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.

• Film Freedom: Initiatives of Change & For a New World Archives
• Film opening of Freedom in Los Angeles 1961: Initiatives of Change & For a New World Archives
• Photos: Initiatives of Change & For a New World Archives

When Saidie Patterson, a trade union organizer from Northern Ireland, spoke at the conference centre at Caux in 1954, she was keen to point out that Moral Re-Armament (now Initiatives of Change) had not weakened her fighting spirit. ‘I thought this was something that made you soft, and I kicked against it for a long, long time. But believe me, friends, I have found that it is much harder to love a person than to hate them.’

Saidie became her family’s breadwinner at the age of 14, caring for her seven siblings and her invalid stepfather after her mother died in childbirth because they couldn’t afford to pay the doctor. She went to work in a linen mill and, in 1940, led a strike calling for full union membership for its women employees. Two years after her speech at Caux, she became the first woman to chair the Northern Ireland Labour Party.

I have found that it is much harder to love a person than to hate them.

She told her audience at Caux that she had direct contact with some 90,000 women through the trade union and labour movement. Then she described an experience she had just had at the conference. ‘A person said something to me the other day which I resented very much. You know the way the British have a habit sometimes of saying the right thing, but at the wrong moment! He was lucky he didn’t get a clip on the ear!’ After some time alone, she had apologised for her reaction because after she left Caux, she would be meeting people in the British cabinet. ‘If I couldn’t say I was sorry here, well, I couldn’t go back to have the answer for those people.’

On another occasion she’d found herself sounding off during tea at the conference centre, about the behaviour of Americans in Northern Ireland during the war. ‘I’m criticizing the Americans again and I discovered that the four ladies that I was having tea with were all Americans! Then they started telling me that all their grandparents had come from Ireland. So they were just exported from Ireland! I never forgot that lesson.’

Saidie had spoken recently at a Labour Party conference where she’d been shocked by the hatred expressed for Germany and the Germans. She had told about how she had been invited to go to Germany with Moral Re-Armament in 1950. ‘I didn't want to go. My own home was wrecked. A nephew was killed on his 21st birthday and I had terrific resentment in my heart, but my friends said resentment’s not going to build a new Germany. When I was in Germany, I met many women in positions like myself. One had been in a concentration camp for her trade union convictions and her two sons were killed by the British. I told that story at the conference and I told them, you need more than a gun in your hand. You need an idea.’

If I couldn’t say I was sorry here, well, I couldn’t go back to have the answer for those people.

In 1973, after retiring from union work, Saidie became the chair of Women Together, working to cure the divisions between Protestants and Catholics in her country. ‘There’s no such thing as “orange” or “green” tears (the colours of the two communities); we all weep together,’ she said. ‘We must decide which we prefer, to bury the hatchet or bury the dead.’

The year before her speech at Caux, Saidie had been decorated by Queen Elizabeth for her work. The Queen asked her how things were going for the women. Saidie replied, ‘Well, ma’am, once our women were just pairs of hands. Now ma’am, they are royal souls like yourself!’

Discover the BBC News article on Saidie earning a Blue Plaque in 2018 and watch the Belfast Live video on Saidie.

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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.

• Top slider: Saidie Patterson, Irish Peacemaker, by David Bleakley, Blackstaff Press (1980)
• Photo centre text: All her paths are peace, by Michael Henderson, Kumarian Press (1994)
• Video A blue plaque for Saidie Patterson: Belfast Live

In the 1950s the ‘winds of change’ were blowing through the African continent. Many countries were experiencing unrest, with militant nationalist movements, including France’s North African territories, Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia. At the start of the decade, 10 countries in Africa were independent. At the decade’s close, in 1960, 26 were.   

In 1953, Mohamed Masmoudi, a young Tunisian nationalist, came to Caux. He was not yet 30 years old. He was then the senior representative in France of the Néo-Destour nationalist movement, and was living a semi-clandestine existence. In order to come to Caux he was more or less smuggled across the border into Switzerland.

Masmoudi had good reason to hate France and the French. He’d spent time in prison, and while in Caux, he heard that his brother had been arrested. But at Caux, he met French ‘who were different’ – and had ‘honest conversations’ with them.

Pray for blessings on me, but stop cursing the French.

On his third day, inspired by what he heard of the reconciliations between French and Germans in Caux, Masmoudi spoke to the conference. He said, ‘I was suspicious, untrusting, and very prickly…. My mother told me in a letter that she was praying that God would bless me and curse the French (some French policemen had threatened her that they planned to kill me). I told her, “Pray for blessings on me, but stop cursing the French.” In my opinion, this is the start of change.’ (see the extract of the hand-typed manuscript of his speech below).

At Caux, he lost his hatred of the French. He went back to Paris and, at the Moral Rearmament (now known as Initiatives of Change) centre there, over a meal, he met Jean Basdevant, then responsible for Tunisian affairs at the French foreign ministry. They developed a relationship of trust. Basdevant and Masmoudi became key members of the delegations who negotiated independence, which Tunisia achieved in 1956.

Whenever deadlock threatened, the two of them would retire to the garden of the ministry for a private talk. A French historian of the period talked about ‘a contract of trust’ between them. One commentator suggested that the two men had a harder time with their own delegations than they had with each other. Masmoudi became the first Tunisian ambassador to France after independence.

Whenever deadlock threatened, the two of them would retire to the garden of the ministry for a private talk.

In 1956, while leading the first post-independence Tunisian delegation to the United Nations in New York, President Bourguiba declared, ‘The world must be told what Moral Re-Armament has done for our country.’

The French statesman Robert Schuman wrote to Frank Buchman,  ‘There can be no doubt that the history of Tunisia and Morocco would have been different if it had not been for Moral Re-Armament.’ 

As for Masmoudi, he maintained, ‘Without Moral Re-Armament, we would be involved today in Tunisia in a  war to the death against France... Tunisia would now be a second Indo-China.’

During these years, Caux welcomed delegations from many other African countries moving towards independence from the Western, colonial powers, including Ghana and Nigeria, Kenya and Cameroun.

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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 of hand-typed manuscript: Mohamed Masmoudi and his story from Tunisia, by Andrew Stallybrass
• Photos: Initiatives of Change

When Elsbeth Spoerry helped to clean up the derelict Caux Palace for the first conferences in 1946, she could hardly have guessed that, six years later, she would get married there – with over 1,000 conference participants as guests.

Elsbeth married Adam McLean on 9 August 1952. Adam, a proud Scot, wore his kilt, and Elsbeth’s eight bridesmaids, from different countries, wore their national costumes. Four ministers from three denominations officiated: ‘we were thoroughly spliced,’ Adam wrote in his autobiography.

The wedding was unusual for other reasons too. Elsbeth had grown up in privilege in Zurich, as a member of one of Switzerland’s great industrial families. Adam’s father had been a coalminer in Musselborough, near Edinburgh. Adam left school at 14, continuing his education in evening classes. Elsbeth went to Zurich, Geneva and Freiburg Universities, and graduated as a Doctor of Law.

They each encountered Initiatives of Change (then known as Moral Rearmament/MRA) in the 1930s: Elsbeth through Hélène Mottu, who with her husband, Philippe, later headed up the purchase of the Caux Palace; and Adam through his boss in the garage where he worked as a motor mechanic. During World War II, Elsbeth worked in one of her father’s factories, and trained as an ambulance driver.

The outbreak of war caught Adam in North America, where he was taking part in an MRA campaign. He stayed on in the US, working to raise morale and improve industrial relations, particularly in the aircraft industry. When the US joined the war, he was called up and fought in Italy, where he was injured and decorated for his heroism. After the war he based in Italy for 14 years, working with MRA at a time of fierce strife between Fascism and Communism. He got to know Elsbeth, who spoke four languages, when she interpreted for the delegations he brought to Caux.

I do not think anyone could have dreamed up a more perfect place to withdraw from the hustle and bustle of life to think quietly.

Adam wrote of his first visit to Caux, driving a large American car: ‘The brightly tiled roof and turrets shone in the sun. Because of the power under the bonnet of the American Buick there was really no difficulty climbing up the very steep and winding road, but I was to discover it was a test for the immediate post-war small car drivers to make it to the top without boiling or busted radiators. I do not think anyone could have dreamed up a more perfect place to withdraw from the hustle and bustle of life to think quietly.’*

Their engagement took place by mail: Adam was in Italy and Elsbeth in the US. When she accepted, a Communist trade union leader threw a celebration party for Adam – and the union leader’s ex-Fascist father-in-law, not to be outdone, invited Adam to dinner in his home. During the evening, Adam realised that the hill he could see from his host’s window was familiar. He had struggled up that hill under sniper fire during the war. ‘Do you know where the sniper was firing from?’ his host asked him. ‘From that chair you have got your foot on!’

Everyone who was in Caux in 1952 for the summer conferences was included in the wedding celebrations: but some came specially. Among them was an Italian professor and socialist politician, Umberto Calosso, and his wife. They arrived in Caux looking travel-worn, wrote Adam, having received the invitation only a day before, while on holiday in the mountains in Piedmont.

They had to get down to the nearest village on donkeys and find a friend with a small car.

‘They had to get down to the nearest village on donkeys and managed to find a friend there with a small car. Comrade Umberto cheerfully invited his friend to our wedding so, by driving through the night, they arrived in time for the service and festivities, much to our delight.’

Adam and Elsbeth shared their lives for 46 years, until Elsbeth died in 1999.  Adam died in 2008. Theirs was one of many partnerships forged and consecrated in Caux in the last 75 years.

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Adam McLean was a born story-teller. It was for his grandchildren that he first wrote the tale of his adventures as a young man which took him from the shores of the Firth of Forth to Hollywood, the aircraft factories of Boeing, into the US Army and finally back to Europe. Discover an extract of his autobiography here:

As he struggled to regain consciousness McLean heard the stretcher-bearers arguing whether it was possible to carry him through the heavy shelling to the mountain tracks.

'Pick up Scotty and get back over,’ insisted his buddy Rocky. 'We cannot go over that open ground to the mountain.‘

'Pick him up now.' They still hesitated. Adam heard the bolt rattle in Rocky’s rifle.

'Pick Scotty up, or you won’t pick up anyone ever again.'

So they took him back ... and that is how McLean reached Rome where he was to spend the great part of the next twenty years, forging friendships with people from all ways of life.

Read more about Adam's adventures in his book Whatever next.

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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.

• * Whatever Next (Linden Hall, 1992)
• Photo top: Initiatives of Change
• Photo Adam & wedding: McLean Family

The Swiss Jean-Jacques Odier was not overly impressed when he first met Maurice Mercier, the man behind the large French industrial delegations that visited Caux in 1951. ‘He would have looked at home serving behind a bar down the street,’ Odier wrote* of their meeting in the offices of France’s Force Ouvrière textile workers federation. ‘But in the following weeks, as we got to know him better, we discovered an exceptional human being.’

Mercier had started work in the textile industry at the age of 13, and worked his way up through the ranks of the CGT, the French union federation. He had been a Communist and a courageous member of the resistance during World War II. When the war ended, he felt that the union was putting politics before fighting for workers’ rights. He left the union, but missed the comradeship of the struggle and the ideology that had motivated him.

When Jean-Jacques Odier, the son of a Genevese banker who worked full-time for Initiatives of Change (then known as Moral Re-Armament/MRA), and his British friend, Bill Porter, met him in 1950, he was cynical and discouraged. But they were struck by the speed with which he took to the idea of change in behaviour and a creative energy beyond the class war. On a visit to Caux that summer, he said, ‘Not one cry of hatred, not one hour of work lost, not one drop of blood shed: that is the revolution to which Moral Re-Armament challenges bosses and workers.’

He had that mark of all true revolutionaries– a vision, and he helped me to find a vision, too.

Odier and Porter invited Mercier to attend an MRA conference on Mackinac Island in the United States in June 1951. They thought that it might broaden his horizons, but they had no idea how hard it would prove to get a visa for a trades unionist with 11 years as a clandestine Communist behind him. It all worked out, and Mercier met the founder of Initiatives of Change, Frank Buchman, at the conference.

A Pennsylvanian Lutheran minister not speaking any French, and a French worker who’d never left his continent: it was a strange encounter of hearts and minds. Buchman saw the human in the militant atheist, and Mercier the revolutionary in the convinced Christian. Mercier said of Buchman, ‘He had that mark of all true revolutionaries – a vision, and he helped me to find a vision, too.’

Inspired by the delegations from American companies he met at Mackinac, Mercier decided to work for similar meetings in Caux on his return to Europe. He travelled all over the north of France encouraging workers to come to Caux and to get their management to finance the trip. The Caux conferences were extended that year to welcome these delegations, and in the autumn of 1951, eighty French businesses, mainly from the textile industry, sent parties to Switzerland.

A textile industrialist explained, ‘I came to see that I treated my business as my personal property. It seemed entirely normal to me to get workers to run errands for me, to help myself to coal from the factory to heat my home…. I decided to completely change my way of living.’

An atmosphere of trust was created.

A machine-tool operator said, ‘I thought the bourgeois and the bosses were arrogant and evil, only thinking of dominating the proletariat and keeping us down. I couldn’t imagine them overcoming the barrier between us and working to build a new world.’

‘An atmosphere of trust was created,’ commented Mercier. This led to an industrywide agreement in 1953, transforming working conditions and industrial relations in France’s 7,000 textile factories, which employed 648,000 people at the time.

Listen to Maurice Mercier speaking in Caux 1958

Watch an interview with Maurice Mercier from 1971 (17'09 - 18'40)

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• * Jean-Jacques Odier, Nous rêvions de changer le monde (Editions Ouverture)
• Recording: Initiatives of Change, digitally remastered by Leif Söderlund 2020)
• Photo top M. Mercier: Danielle Maillefer
• Photos text: Initiatives of Change
• Video: Crossroad of Nations, 25 years of Caux from IofC & For a new world Archives
• Proofreading: Mary Lean