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