ABSTRACT
My mother, writing in 1931, reported how she had been to tea with Maude Royden who was ‘not at all dowdy and used lipstick’. I am not sure whether half a century later Miss Royden’s name is widely familiar. At the time it was: she was minister at the Guildhouse, had been preacher or assistant preacher at the City Temple, was a social worker of distinction. And recently she had been Gandhi’s hostess, I suppose at the Guildhouse, when he was in London to attend a session of the Round Table Conference. The talk, my mother said, had revolved on him and one thing had startled her much more than the use of make-up (which she herself heartily approved) in this deeply religious woman, and that was her remark that Gandhi was not properly to be equated with Our Lord, no, not with him, ‘because Jesus of Nazareth was unique in his perfection.’
