More near Jamesburg, New Jersey, on the 12th of January, nineteen eighty three, as I am here with John Sinclair and Woody Allen recording and reminiscing about the past, and especially in relation to Stanley, I have been very interested in reading your memoirs of I believe you call it Memoirs of Life in Three Worlds, which refers to your life in England and your life in Latin America and in the United States. I'd like to ask you about your impressions of mission and the church and the Christian life that you received as you were growing up in the Wesleyan Methodist Church in Huff Green.

Yes, I was born into a family, totally committed to the church and all that it stood for. I never could recall I can recall a time when it wasn't part of our life, the church and the missionary movement. I recall that we had to services every Sunday, 10, 30 in the morning of six o'clock at night.

And we had a number of what we call divinity students come from Manchester from time to time who would preach in our church. And they would stay with us from Monday, from Saturday to Monday. And of course, I recall some of the influences from them. And I got interested in a foreign mission enterprise and did some collecting every year.

And in nineteen hundred and eight, when I was nine, I received a prize for collecting more funds than anyone else. Enough green. The prize was a copy of the book of David Livingstone when I was a teenager and even before we and our family were what you might call sermon taster's, I was fascinated by some of the great preachers, mostly Methodists in England at that time. And when I was 17, I gave what I think was my first public talk address on the life of William More Light, Punshon Pew and s h p o.

And I had read a book about him that was in Pinfield in Liverpool later on when I was 17.

And so I was I'm greatly indebted to the Christian influence of my parents. My father was a local preacher for 30 years in the West Church, and I recall as a boy many a time I would walk with him to some company chapel maybe five miles away and spend a day there when he took two sentences.

So I have very fond memories of my dad, close my parents and happy Christian home in which I, for one, and I was exhausted in reading in your memoirs about your maternal grandfather and some of the positions he took as a nonconformist, not only in Protestant religious life, but politically. Do you want to comment on some of your perceptions of the role of a Christian and Society that may have come from those years?

Yes, Thomas, More Light billion of my grandfather on my mother's side, a strong personality, and he was basically a farmer and he applied. I can't recall what he added was to become a tenant of Harewood Mills, which was a flour mill and the cultivation of fields roundabout. And Lord Herbert interviewed him. And among other things, he wanted to know what his politics were and also his church affiliation.

And my grandfather said, well, that's private personal information about my church affiliation. He knew very well that Lord Howard was an Anglican and my grandfather was a Methodist.

With regard to politics, he said, I vote by ballot and he said, I'm not going to tell him I voted for in the last election. But he said, if you want to know who my voted for, you can come to my house and you'll see his picture on on the wall. It so happened that he had pictures of both D'Israeli, the conservative Gortari and Gladstone, the liberal. This was my my grandfather. He had a great influence because I used to spend my vacation with it. And I still recall how he read the Bible, a great big family Bible before we went to bed and in prayer.

So these are some of the influences in my early childhood and why I'm interested in this French Bible that you have just shown me that you received as a prize when you graduated from what had been primary school and received your scholarship. How much did how much international view did you acquire as a young British lad?

Very little since those days, I've been critical of the educational system in which I grew up. In other words, in our history books, the geography, the concentration of wealth on England, the British Empire, we knew very little, for example, about Latin America. I didn't pass did nothing until I went to Peru in 1922 about Latin America. So it was, in a sense, provincial Mr Brook, who gave me this prize in 1912, who was a preacher.

He was a preacher of the Methodist Church and stayed with us when he came to preach in our church. So he was a great influence in my life in those days. I admired him very much and I value this prize that he gave me this great Bible.

I'm interested in your experience that you have written up in your book called Collusion in Midair 1918 style.

And this happened, I understand, when you were about 19 years of age on the German allied front in over Belgium.

How did that close call with death influenced your choice of a career as a teacher and the spiritual impulse which directed you toward missionary service?

Well, let me as a preamble to that, I say that before this incident to which you refer, I leave because I have an observer, a Canadian observer sitting behind me. And to see the plane, we have been shot down twice, once in the in battle with eight German planes and another time by anti-aircraft fire on this occasion to which you refer. We were on a special mission. Have three planes flying very low right over the front lines, protecting our terrorists, putting machines. And we were attacked by anti-aircraft fire and bursting all around us and one at guanciale. They burst in front of the leader's plane and threw his plane right across the tail of ours. And we were out of control. And my observer who lives in this climbed out on the back of the of the machine hanging on to his gun, mounting and came down on the fuselage and enabled me to board the plane into sideslip. And we slipped into the ground place south of EP. And the we learned later that the Germans had retreated from this spot just 15 minutes before we crashed. I was badly injured and some of my observer, I was in hospital for six months. These were traumatic experiences and I can never forget them.

Part of my life, I had narrow escapes and more than one occasion. And so many people know the average life of a pilot in the RAAF in World War One was three weeks. I lasted just seven weeks. I observed, by the way, was decorated twice for this act of heroism. Now, this sank into my consciousness. I cannot say that the following week I decided to become a missionary because of this experience. It took years for this to sink in just what had happened to me in those days, and that I think it had a relationship to my desire to give my life to some worthwhile of work in the church, as a minister or as a missionary.

And what developed later after that?

As much long for me to relate now to when you went back to when you went to the University of Liverpool, you became involved in the student Christian movement and the student volunteer movement. What are some of your impressions of people and meetings that directed you further toward missionary service?

Yes, I was soon from 1999, I was a member of the Student Christian Movement, which is called the ACM, and became a member. The committee and I went to the two of three summer conferences in Swanwick, SWG and WIC Kay in Derbyshire, and that I was exposed for a week or two to some of the great Christian thinkers of those days. Some of them returned missionaries and others ministers of the church.

And I drank in a lot of the Christian thinking of that time. And later on when in 1921 I went as a delegate or a member of the Conference of Student Students in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Scotland.

And that was a great experience. And I recall that the lectures given by a man, William Temple, who was then bishop of Manchester, later to become the famous Archbishop of Canterbury. And he had a great influence on my thinking. One thought that he left with me was that you can not approach the Christian faith on intellectual grounds and try to prove that Christianity is the right kind of faith. It is. It is not opposed to that, of course, but it is a question of the heart and that commitment and emotion that becomes very strong in your life.

So this influence of that conference was very great. And in 1921, I became a student volunteer, which meant that I expressed a desire to go into missionary work when the opportunity presented itself.

How and where did you first meet John McKay?

Well, I was in touch in 1910, the early part of 1922, and I graduated from Liverpool University in the summer of 92. I was in touch with the Methodist missionary Society and even went so far to have an interview with one of the secretaries in Liverpool coming from London. And he had mentioned the possibility of my going to Hooshang, China, as a teacher and one of their schools. But a friend brought a magazine called A Christian Hat off to my father, who was by that time bedridden with paralysis. And my sister, looking through this magazine, found an ad of two or three lines saying the Free Church of Scotland wanted are required to teach us to go immediately to their school in Lima, the collective anger of Veterano. And so I wrote in May, I think it was to Edinborough. And the result of that correspondence was that I was asked to go up to Edinburgh to meet Dr John McKay, who was on furlough from the school after being five years in Peru, and that I was directed to meet Dr Macci in one of the streets of Edinburgh. And they described up to me to be a tall, good looking man with a classic, a color and a black suit. And that was my first meeting with Dr Macay and I later met him when I was asked to go before the Committee on Foreign Missions and not only myself, but a friend of mine called Lesley Cutbill. And within a few months we were both on a boat to Lima, Peru.

You went to Lima and worked with John McKay for about four years.

What are some of the experiences and impressions that you recall of John and Jane McKay as sort of senior missionaries then?

Yes, when I reached Peru in October, October 17th, 1922, Dr. Mackay was still in Edinburgh and a New Zealand doctor via Rashelle Brown was the acting director.

Dr Mackay came back the following year and March 1983 as a director of the school.

Mr Mackay, in the early days of the school, did some teaching. But when I when she was no longer a teacher in the school, Dr Mackay was in town. Personality and I was greatly impressed from my first time I met him and in subsequent meetings and in Lima, I saw his influence not only in the school but in the academic circles in Lima. He related himself to some of the great figures of that time and politics in the university and so on. And he was the guiding spirit, of course, in my life at that time as the director of the school. He left Lima in 1925 to become a lecturer with the YMCA in Uruguay and later in Mexico.

You indicated that you met your wife Margaret in Peru in the first years of your missionary service and that she has described herself to me as a radical young woman.

What about your meeting your wife and under what conditions?

Well, in the first place, one of my jobs when I reached a school was to take charge of the office. That was very difficult because my Spanish was very limited at the time. And my wife then my Rob had been up to that time, had been the secretary at the school. She had left to take a job in a bank in Lima. But she explained some of the mysteries of the bookkeeping system, which her father, by the way, was a. They had accountant of W.R. Grace and Company. So she sent this bookkeeping system up on the side and up to Nova.

And in 1925, we were married and Dr. Mackay was out of the country at the time. So we're made by Dr. Clyde Brewster of the Methodist Church.

And that is interesting, Stanley, because he participated in our marriage in 1974 in the college church in Baldwin City, Kansas. Back to your wife, Margaret. She was a courier for some documents that had to be transported in a rather secret way. Tell us about that.

Well, this is all related to a Ottway deadlocked over deal w e, who was a young student from the north of Peru who came down to Lima to study in the university. And Dr. McTighe got him to become a teacher in our school to an IRA, and he was a teacher of Spanish, another subject in the school.

And he started a university, popular, popular university for workers. And these would consist of courses which some of which we gave night for the needs of the workers. And he was president of the Student Federation and the Southern Baptist University. So he was quite well known in those days. And he was out of the country, down in Uruguay, Argentina and Chile giving lectures. And he had taken with him some photographs and documents taken at the time of a big rally, often in the streets with many thousands of students and workers. Well, to protest the action, which the government was about to take to consecrate the country to the sacred heart of Jesus, that was not just an idea. It was a great brahms' image of the heart of Jesus. And just outside the cathedral in Lima and during this rally where I was the main speaker, the troops came and tried to disperse the crowd and did some shooting, killed a worker and a student.

I escaped with his life by coming downstairs through some dark streets and crossing the river river Remak and finally made his way to the boarding department where I lived in Miraflores. Amiry f o r e. S. And he was there in hiding for four months. And meantime, Dr Macara gone away to the. S And during that time on October 2nd, I had a daughter who was in our boarding department, failed to come home one night, and the next morning when I got to school, I got a telephone call saying I had been picked up by the secret police and he was taken prisoner and exiled. He was away from Peru for eight years later, returned to become a candidate for the presidency. Well, when he was taken prisoner, this was a very serious situation because there was an understanding that ever happened to us all over the country would go on strike. And the government evidently linked him to Dr. Macay and what he might be doing. And we heard through the grapevine that when Dr. McKay returned, he would not be allowed to land at the port of CIA, double A. Oh. So Leftwich and myself conferred with Mr. McKay about what to do in this crisis and other times in prison. Another teacher associated with him.

We had to let go on orders of the British ministry, our embassy, and the situation was critical. And we felt that someone had to go down to give Dr. McKay an understanding of the situation and the possibility it might not be able to land.

And we decided to ask Miss Margaret Robb if she would go left a couple. And I went to the bank and asked her to go across the road to a cafe to have a cup of tea with us. And we put the plan to her. Would she leave the following day when a boat was going down the coast, which would arrive in the port in the south? When Dr. McKay was coming from Chile, we were advised him by cable and he was already on his way out his boat and would be stopping at that port where Margaret's boat.

That's right. And the timing was perfect.

She agreed to do this and she was born in Peru and she didn't need any piece of anything and she wasn't going to any foreign country, just going from one another.

So she went on this trip and when she got on the boat going south to have to suffer, no question, one was, well, how am I show that doctor, Dr. McKay is on this boat. How can I find out? So she sent a telegram, a radiogram with to to a fictitious name, Graczyk, which is a middle name, knowing that nobody would be on board with that name and sent a message and the radiogram came back, not on board, and that she sent another agent down to Dr. McKay in which she said Destroy Fay would explain why she felt that Dr. McKay would understand that he was mail saying, I hate this man we're talking about. And that radiogram never came back. And when she got down to the to the Port of Miami and More Light and the oil, there was not a ship. And she transferred to that and told him the whole story. Now, he destroyed some documents and others he gave to her and she stitched them into her dress. So one day her boat arrived in Kadia a couple and I went on board to meet Dr. McKay. And he was kept by the authorities, the immigration authorities, until almost five o'clock when the boat was due to leave. And the meantime, Bill went to try to find a British shivshankar affair, and he was at a service in the Anglican Church. He got to come out and make representations to the government to let Dr. Mackay lead the ship. So just before the boat sailed, he was allowed to come aboard, to come ashore. They kept his luggage.

They kept his bags for two weeks, went to them and didn't find a single thing that they were interested in my wife, and brought all the documents and pictures with her.

So that was what he did. And that was, in a sense, the beginning of our romance. And two years later, we were married.

That's a wonderful spy novel.

When you were working in Peru, you set out to study at the University of San Marcos. As an amateur S.O.S, which I understand is the oldest university in the Western Hemisphere, and you gained your degree there.

Why did you do it? Well, let me go back and say that due to the recommendation by Dr. Mackay in 1924, by that time I was a professor of philosophy in San Marcos. He recommended me to be as a teacher of English at the university that started my relationship with San Marcos. And the following year I began my studies. I had to take certain courses to fill in to the degree. And later on, many years later, they were introduction because the university was closed. I graduated with a Ph.D.. Now, Dr. Macci had in 1989 had qualified for the degree of doctorate lit in San Marcos with a thesis on Unamuno. When we had met during the year he spent in Spain in 1915, I believe it was, and very much impressed by the moment he wrote his doctoral thesis on. And Dr. Macci began to relate himself to the academic world and became quite well known. He gave lectures in different cities in Lima and especially in the South. And in other words, he gave us missionaries an example of that. To make your contribution as a Christian missionary, you have to be accepted as one of them as much as possible. You are a foreigner the way you dressed as we to talk and everything was foreign. But you have to use what Dr. Macci called the incarnational approach. You must try to understand that culture, get immersed in that culture, learn the language as much as you can. And this is just what he did, because Dr. Macci had a wonderful grasp of the Spanish language more than any other foreigner that I've ever known. So this was the example he gave us that there was another man who was the vice, the older he is director of the school for a time, Dr Danger. And we are from the United States who took his degree in history, a doctor of history at the university. So this was the example which we younger missionaries have before us. And of course, it was a great experience to study there and to be a part of the university. I had trouble getting my degree because of the fact that it was closed for three years. The university is closed. And finally in 1938, I took my degree at the influence. Dr Macci said to me this was lasting and I never forget his example to all of us of his outstanding personality and his influence in the community and can. By the way, in 1964, when he went back to Lima, the government decorated him with the highest decoration for following that, for his contribution to the.

Stanley, you said in your book, Memoirs in Three Worlds, that, quote, I came to the United States from Peru via India, end of quote. I know what you refer to that you went.