by Billy Graham
“What do you mean, jammed? We didn’t see anybody as we approached.”
“The main entrance is on the other side. Most of the traffic and people came from that direction. The place is full and running over, and hundreds are outside.”
As we walked in, people were already singing. I stepped into a small office for my last-minute preparations, and there stood Senators Symington and Bridges! “Billy, we couldn’t let you down,” Senator Symington said, shaking my hand. “The foreign secretary understood and excused us.”
There was still the problem of the reporters and photographers, though. As we stood on the platform, I noticed that the first two or three rows were filled with press representatives, and many of them had yet to sit down. I thought of the New Testament story of Zacchaeus, the tax-gatherer mentioned in Luke 19, who couldn’t see Jesus “for the press” of the crowd. Would the press be in the way here as well? But I decided that there was nothing worse than apathy and indifference, and since the press had already generated much of the interest, they could be forgiven for their high profile.
I reported to the audience that prayer groups all over the world were focusing their attention on London for these meetings— including, we heard, 35,000 groups in India. Now that was newsworthy! All of our preparation, promotion, and programming, and even my preaching itself—necessary as those things were—were nothing compared with the prayer power around the world. We were engaged in a spiritual battle for Britain, and we needed intercession for divine intervention. Periodically during our Crusade, we scheduled all-night prayer meetings that lasted from 10:30 P.M. to 6:00 A.M. in venues all over the city.
Our two senators brought greetings, and we listened to several wonderful musical offerings.
“Do you think I ought to give an Invitation to receive Christ the first night?” I asked the bishop of Barking between songs.
“Of course,” he said, gripping my hand.
I preached on the topic “Does God Matter?” Nearly 200 came forward at the Invitation, and they seemed to represent every stratum of society. The unemotional British, as the newspapers had called them, had tears streaming down their cheeks as they came to Christ. One onlooker later commented on how struck he was by the sound of shoes creaking on the wood floor.
Photographer Carl Mydens of Time magazine went with his camera into the room where scores of counselors were leading converts as they prayed to receive Christ. When he realized what was going on, he backed out. “This isn’t the place for a photographer; this is too intimate and too holy,” he said.
As sleet turned to snow, snarling public transportation, we wondered what the second night would bring. To our great relief, more than 10,000 showed up. That included 1,000 in the choir Cliff led in singing stately old hymns and the favorite Gospel songs of the British.
In the United States, there had just been a shooting in the House of Representatives, and two congressmen had been injured. I requested special prayer for them. That incident gave a backdrop for my message on the universality of human sin, and the need we all have for God’s forgiveness.
Even my clergy critics found it hard to argue with that theme and the response it was producing. In the following days, support came from unexpected quarters. The world-famous Methodist minister Dr. Leslie Dixon Weatherhead wrote a generous newspaper article giving his impressions after attending the first week of the Crusade. In that article, he pledged his own prayers for us and urged critics to go to the services and “listen without prejudice.”
By Saturday night that first week, the arena was jammed to capacity an hour before the service was to begin. I went out and spoke to the crowd outside. The police said that between 30,000 and 35,000 people were outside. There were 1,000 from Wales alone, we were told. From then on, we had two services on weekends to take care of the crowd.
By the end of the first month, the Crusade had gathered such momentum that the building was jammed anywhere from a half-hour to two hours in advance of the service. People were clamoring for the free tickets, which were distributed in a variety of ways before each of the meetings. The socialites of the city were coming; bishops were beginning to sit on the platform; and the newspapers had become friendly and were giving the Crusade all-out support, with William Hickey of the London Daily Express writing one of the first sympathetic columns. This was the Lord’s doing, and it was marvelous in our eyes.
I was also getting opportunities to speak on the BBC. By this time, French, Italian, and other European newspapers, television stations, and radio programs were interested, and the story of the Crusade was being carried around the world. The Associated Press was sending two stories daily back to the United States, and Eugene Patterson of the United Press was assigned full-time to cover the story. Invitations were pouring in to our London office from all over England. I was invited to address the directors of Lloyd’s of London; Mr. Astor, the chairman of the board of the Times (London), invited me to lunch with his editors; and Hugh Cudlipp, the editor of the Daily Mirror (London), invited me to lunch at Brown’s Hotel. Now it seemed that all of London was listening to the Gospel. Before the Crusade was over, we would speak to 2 million people.
One night Charlie Riggs and the London committee had a meeting at which they prayed that God would give them the opportunity to reach beyond London to more of the nation of England. (Although I’d had speaking opportunities on the BBC, my Crusade meetings themselves were not carried on British radio or television.) Bob Benninghoff, an ABC network engineer, happened to overhear them and began thinking about how that might be accomplished. He found that during World War II, the General Post Office had constructed telephone-type message lines throughout the country—lines that they called landline relays. Over these, they broadcast messages about the war to people everywhere.
Somehow the committee negotiated to get hold of those lines and encouraged local churches and groups to broadcast the services in their own villages and towns, often in public halls or theaters. As the idea caught on, four hundred lines went out from Harringay, and 400,000 listeners received the audio signal from the Crusade.
I was also invited to address the various schools and colleges of the University of London, including the London School of Economics.
“This is the first time a minister has been on this platform,” said the professor who introduced me to the crowd. “This school was founded on secularism,” he added pointedly. That resulted in strong applause.
I tried to break the ice with a little humor, but with little success, I felt. Then when it was time for me to turn serious, a student crashed through an upstairs window and stood scratching himself like an ape. I joined in the laughter.
“He reminds me of my ancestors,” I said. Everybody roared. “Of course, my ancestors came from Britain,” I added.
That brought down the house. Now on the same wavelength as my audience, I felt free to preach the Gospel.
As the Crusade gained momentum, I found myself becoming more and more dependent on God. I knew that all we had seen happening in Britain was the work of God. If we got in the way or began to take credit for what was happening, God’s blessing would be withdrawn. I knew it was also due to the work of the many dedicated people on our Team. I was merely the preacher, the messenger. None of what was happening could have happened apart from God and all the help we had.
The wear and tear were beginning to show on me, however. By the six-week mark, I had lost fifteen pounds. Sleep was elusive, as always, and my eyes looked dark and hollow. It was great to have Ruth with me, though. She had more stamina than I. Many evenings I would rush back from Harringay and collapse into bed, only to have her arrive hours later, having stayed to counsel and pray with people until the arena was empty. One of the greatest joys for me was that she could stay in England the entire time. Her encouragement, her counsel, and her prayer supported me more than anything else.
One night she told me about an overly friendly man who had approached her in Hyde Park.
> “I’m busy tonight,” she told him.
He asked her out for the next night.
“I’m busy then too.”
And the next?
“Yes, I’m busy then too.”
“Just what is it that keeps you busy every night?” he asked in exasperation.
“I go to hear Billy Graham speak at Harringay Arena.”
“You wouldn’t be related to Billy Graham, would you?”
“Yes, I’m his wife.”
“Oh, my . . .”
A columnist for the Daily Mirror (London), Bill Connor, under the name Cassandra, wrote a devastatingly clever article against me; it appeared the day we arrived in Britain. I wrote him a note telling him that while I didn’t agree with him, his column had been very well done. He wrote back that he would like to meet me. His conditions were that we come together on neutral ground; he suggested a pub called the Baptist’s Head. A pub sounded less than neutral to me, but he insisted that I could have a soft drink while he had his beer. I accepted. We met for lunch there, and I believe Mr. Connor got a different view of me than he had expected. I got a different view of him as well, when he picked me up in a Rolls-Royce.
“I thought you and your paper represented the working class,” I said.
“Shhhh! Don’t say anything,” he replied. “This is the boss’s car.”
That afternoon he put me into his next column: “When [Billy Graham] came into The Baptist’s Head. . . he was absolutely at home—a teetotaler and an abstainer able to make himself completely at his ease in the spit and sawdust department, . . . a very difficult thing to do. Billy Graham looks ill. He has lost [fifteen pounds] in this nonstop merciless Crusade. . . . But this fact he can carry back to North Carolina with him. . . . It is that in this country, battered and squeezed as no victorious nation has ever been before and disillusioned almost beyond endurance, he has been welcomed with an exuberance that almost makes us blush behind our precious Anglo-Saxon reserve. . . . I never thought that simplicity could cudgel us sinners so damned hard. We live and we learn.”
The Archbishop of Canterbury invited us to tea at Lambeth Palace. I accepted, of course, but was very nervous about it. “Honey,” Ruth reassured me, “any man who has six sons must be quite ordinary.”
How right she was. Dr. Geoffrey Fisher was a charming and delightful man, wholly without pretense. He became a great friend, although not all of the Anglican clergy approved of our method of evangelism. By meeting with us he was giving tacit approval to our work.
In his book documenting the Harringay meetings, Frank Colquhoun gave an example of one clergyman’s reluctance to accept me: “A rector in central London found fault with Graham’s belief in ‘sudden conversions.’ He said in a Sunday evening sermon: ‘I do not know of a single case in the whole Bible of a sudden, complete conversion.’ Oddly enough he was preaching in a church dedicated to St. Paul (whose conversion in all conscience was sudden enough)—and to a congregation of thirteen.”
A whole book could have been written on the stories we heard of people whose lives were changed by Christ. Repeatedly, in various parts of the world, I have met people who came to Christ during those days, and who are continuing to serve Christ, often as dedicated laypeople. When we returned to London for a Crusade at Earls Court in 1966, we had 52 Anglican clergymen sitting on the platform one night, all of whom had been converted in the Harringay meetings twelve years before. While working on this chapter, I was in California for our 1995 Sacramento Crusade. During our time there, I met two pastors now serving in that state who had come to Christ during Harringay.
California is also home to one of our long-time Team members, Bill Brown; he headed our World Wide Pictures unit for many years. In 1954 the name of Joan Winmill was well known on the London stage, and she had a brilliant future ahead of her. But down inside, she was miserable and on the brink of suicide. One night at Harringay she gave her life to Christ, and she was transformed. A year later she married Bill Brown, whom she had met through the Crusade; since then she has been a steadfast witness to Christ’s power to change lives. Her autobiographical story, No Longer Alone, was made into a feature-length film that God has used to bring many to a commitment to Christ.
Richard Carr-Gomm was already a believer, but during the London meetings he realized that he needed to rededicate his life to Christ in a deeper way. He never could have anticipated how God would lead him, however. At the time he was captain of the Queen’s Guard at Buckingham Palace; in time he sensed that God was calling him to leave that prestigious position and devote his life instead to the poor. Noticing the loneliness of many older people, he began to scrub floors to help them, then bought a home and invited four of them to live with him. In time he established the Abbeyfield Society, which owns one thousand homes for the elderly, and later founded the Carr-Gomm Society, which uses many volunteers to help the staff of the hundreds of homes it oversees.
Most people who came forward did not have the public visibility of Joan Winmill or Richard Carr-Gomm, of course. They were simply ordinary people moved by the extraordinary love of Christ.
One night Ruth was asked to help a woman who was standing in the hallway outside the counseling room. At first the woman showed no response when Ruth asked if she could help her. Grad-ually, however, her story came out. For many weeks she and her husband had planned to come to London for a vacation and to attend the Harringay meetings. Just the week before, however, he had died suddenly. In bitterness, she had come to London anyway, but life seemed utterly empty without her husband, who had been a strong Christian. Ruth tried to assure her of God’s love and presence, even in times of great heartache, but she felt totally inadequate to say anything that would take away the widow’s pain. Twelve years later, Ruth received a letter from that woman. “You won’t remember me,” it read. “My husband had died suddenly the week before, and I came to London to end everything. But in the meeting, as I listened to the message, God spoke to me. . . . My life is busy—am still singing in the Salvation Army Songsters, and trying to love and serve my Lord!”
Many other stories told of lives that had been changed through the power of Christ. A doctor confessed that he had been ruled by his passions, even to the point of filling his waiting room with pornographic literature. After giving his life to Christ, he immediately gathered the pornography up and threw it into the Thames. He became an active layman in London.
A committed Communist came to Christ one night, and in the six months after his conversion read the Gospel of John a hundred times.
The assistant manager of our hotel cynically watched the lives of our Team during our first days in London, assuming that it was all a show. But he began to realize not only that we were genuinely happy but that we had something he did not have, and that he longed for. One night, after one of the meetings, Dawson Trotman led him to Christ in his hotel room. Later the assistant manager said, “My doubts and fears and the sense of futility have all gone.”
Another night a man came very reluctantly to the meeting and was very vocal in his scorn of all that was taking place. When Bev Shea got up to sing, he made yet another wisecrack. But halfway through Bev’s song, “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands,” the man became serious. As Bev quietly sang the words, “He’s got the tiny little baby in His hands,” the man bowed his head. At the Invitation, he came forward to open his heart to Christ, later telling his counselor that his child was at home seriously ill and that it was Bev’s song that had touched his heart.
One night Charlie Riggs was supervising the landline relay meetings at the Trocadero Cinema, located in a crime-ridden area of South London. A gang of tough youths arrived outside determined to break up the meeting. They were stopped at the door by a broad-shouldered Christian police officer named Tony.
“You fellows are a bunch of cowards,” he told them boldly. “If not, you would all accept Christ as your Savior.”
“You’re not a Christian, are you?” one of them asked in disbe
lief. “I’ve never heard of a Christian copper. How’d you get to be that way?”
So with his back against the wall, Tony shared with them how Christ had saved him and changed his life.
With that, one youth stepped forward. “What do you have to do to become a Christian?” he asked.
Tony told him how he could accept Christ, warning him that it would take courage.
“I’ve got the courage, and I’d like to become a Christian,” he replied while his fellow gang members watched.
Tony led the young man into the theater just as the Invitation was being given.
Some incidents had their humorous side. One evening I preached from John 11 on the miracle of the raising of Lazarus from the dead—and an undertaker was converted!
Richard Bewes, later the rector of All Souls, Langham Place, told me some years afterward of a man who arrived late; the doors of the arena had been locked because of the crowd. Loitering nearby was a “teddy boy,” one of London’s rebellious youth, who asked if he needed help. The man said he wanted to get in, but the door was locked. After the teddy boy calmly picked the lock, the man went in and was converted.
One night a friend of ours noted two men who came in and sat near the back. They apparently did not know each other but within minutes had loudly agreed on two things: they did not like Americans, and they especially did not like American evangelists. They had come to see the show, they agreed, just so they could make fun of it. But the Holy Spirit spoke to them both. When the Invi-tation was given, one of them turned to the other and said, “I’m going forward.” The other one said, “I am too. And here’s your wallet back—I’m a pickpocket.”
We had hundreds of other meetings in all kinds of interesting places throughout the greater London area and in the rest of England. For example, more than 12,000 people gathered at the foot of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square on April 3 to hear me preach. Even larger was the crowd at our Good Friday afternoon service at Hyde Park. Across the street from the park was the Odeon, one of the leading cinemas in London; during the morning, after each movie showing, I spoke to the audience for five minutes. Traffic came to a standstill in London because Hyde Park was surrounded by what the newspapers said was the largest religious crowd since the end of the war.