Notebook: Fifty years on, still hungry for change: Oxfam was set up to help victims of war in Europe. Now its campaigns have wider implications

OXFAM, currently celebrating its 50th anniversary, turns two faces to the public, both clearly visible when one enters Summertown, a northern suburb of Oxford on the busy Banbury Road. On one side of the road is the international charity's British headquarters, Oxfam House, where staff occasionally pick at remnants of a giant birthday cake. On the other is an Oxfam shop, where Millie Young picks through remnants of clothing and household bric-a-brac. Both places bustle in an atmosphere

of give-and-take, uncertainty, watchfulness.

Millie Young is 82, the longest-serving of 30,000 Oxfam shop volunteers. When I called, she was surrounded by large boxes marked 'Baby Window', 'Uniforms', 'Woolly Hats and Scarves Incoming', 'Clocks and Socks', 'Scrap Silver and Gold'. Men's jackets and women's skirts hung near piles of curtains, blankets and duvets. 'You couldn't swing a cat in here,' she said.

'What about mink?' I asked.

'We're not allowed to sell fur coats now, otherwise we'd get a brick through the window from the animal rights people. So when we do get furs, we immediately send them off to cold countries where they're needed.'

There are unexpected bonuses: an old book with pounds 100 in fivers between the leaves, a pair of Chinese bowls that fetched pounds 275 each, two Doulton vases auctioned at Sotheby's for pounds 480 and a pearl necklace for pounds 400. A damaged butterfly brooch, repaired for pounds 5, fetched pounds 1,000 when found to contain five rubies and 40 diamonds.

In her 21 years of sorting and selling for Oxfam, Ms Young, a retired Army sergeant-major, has coped with shoplifters and a burglary. 'It's like stealing in church,' she said. The shop takes nearly pounds 400 a day. The recession has created such a demand for cheap used clothing that there are now 870 Oxfam shops, more than the combined outlets of Dixons and Currys, the electrical retailers. She is passionately committed to the organisation, closely following pronouncements and policy statements from across the road. '(Oxfam's director) David Bryer said the other day that government cuts in overseas aid was like asking the Third World to put the crumbs back on the rich man's table.'

Mr Bryer's staff had gone home when I arrived, leaving the phones switched through to his desk. He is a large man with a booming voice, a scholar of the Orient and expert on the Druze religion. His phone rang.

'What? Who is this? . . . You've come through to the director . . . Somalia? What do you mean we don't do enough to publicise it? . . . Now just hold on] We don't control the media. We can't just order the BBC to . . .' He held the phone away from his ear, stunned by a voice that matched his own in volume. He sounded irritated. 'No, why don't you call the BBC board of governors] . . . The chairman? He's . . .' The director paused, turning to me for help, then boomed into the phone: 'It's Marmaduke Hussey . . . No I will not phone him. You do it]'

Putting down the phone, he said 'Phew]' He had a lot on his mind. The Queen would visit Oxfam House in December. Overseas disasters were coming 'thick and fast'. The end of the Cold War had brought Soviet overseas aid to a halt. Preoccupation with Balkan wars and European economies had eclipsed the 'sombre prospects' for Africa. An examination of Oxfam's role and mandate was under way.

I spent two days in Summertown, watching pensioners hobble into Millie Young's shop in search of bargains. Vagrants bumped into them. Oxfam, provider to the miserable abroad, is surrounded by the miserable at home.

Oxfam's income was a record pounds 73.6m last year - more than three times the central bank reserves of Chad - but, compared with the complexity and geographical spread of their work, the figure is painfully small, just enough to fund 10 miles of motorway into Oxford.

The opening chapter of A Cause for our Times, a new book on the charity's first 50 years, is called 'Fanatics, Soft- heads, and Sentimental Idealists', after the founders of the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief, who met in Oxford in October 1942 to plan help for Greeks starving under the German blockade. Today's heads are not so 'soft'.

Despite his booming voice, David Bryer, who took over Oxfam in January, is regarded by his staff as 'a quiet academic'. 'We are a much larger organisation than when I joined (as a Middle East field director) in 1975,' he said. 'That allows us to run more and bigger relief and emergency programmes. But we need to be seen to speak with gravitas - not to be strident.'

Like Mr Bryer, who once taught in Lebanon, many staff lived abroad before joining up. Dianna Melrose, head of the public policy unit, was born in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and spent time in Peru and Argentina, where her father was a British embassy attache. After organising British Council tours, she was 'delighted to join Oxfam as a researcher in 1980, even with a reduced salary'. Marcus Thompson, head of emergency relief, is a bank manager's son who spent a year in northern India before going to London University to study history and anthropology. 'When Oxfam advertised for a youth officer I said, 'Here I go]' ' Rob Wells, acting head of fundraising, worked for a publisher before moving to Oxfam as a campaigner/fundraiser. In the past, he said, charity fundraisers tended to be nearing - or in - retirement. 'Now they're quite young, highly qualified, career-oriented; a different breed.' Tricia Parker, Oxfam's Asia co-ordinator, is a former teacher, 'brought up with a Christian background and a social conscience'. In Bangladesh with the Save The Children Fund, she switched to Oxfam 12 years ago. She said she was about to set up a new Oxfam programme in Vietnam. Carol Wills, whose trading section sponsors production and marketing of food and handicrafts by poor Third World communities, was with the National Council for Voluntary Organisations before joining Oxfam in 1983.

Oxfam people are more casual in attire than in assignment. A few boast of buying most of their clothes from Millie Young, including Tricia Spanner, head of public relations. But in promoting Oxfam's work, the organisers have to be sharp. Challengers lurk everywhere, it seems. One of them is the right-wing International Freedom Foundation which regards some Oxfam activities as subversive. When Oxfam openly backed sanctions against South Africa in 1989, the IFF prompted the Times to raise it with the Charity Commissioners, suggesting that Oxfam was abusing its charity status. The commissioners agreed, forcing Oxfam to slip into one of its books, Front Line Africa, a postscript making it clear that 'Oxfam may not now campaign for sanctions against South Africa'.

That intensified Oxfam's internal debate about its controversial 'advocacy' policy, aimed at eradicating conditions in which poverty flourishes. The ambition of the group that met in the Old Library of Oxford's Church of St Mary- the-Virgin in 1942 was to collect cash for the relief of wartime needy. Its successors see a wider role: by all means help the skeletal orphan shown in newspaper advertisements; but also address the cause, official corruption or repression of human rights. A side-effect of 'advocacy' may be enhanced political awareness among beneficiaries of an Oxfam project in a country under a repressive regime: in Indonesia, for example, where Oxfam treads delicately.

What happens if a government accuses Oxfam of political subversion? Once you teach a community to stand on its own feet, you teach it to think independently. When it thinks independently, it becomes politically conscious, a threat to tyrannical government. 'You've put your finger on it,' Dianna Melrose said. 'There's a constant strand throughout Oxfam's history of getting involved in political controversy, but the important thing is to avoid party political involvement.'

Oxfam has already spawned a number of autonomous offshoots, among them Oxfam Belgique, Canadian Oxfam, American Oxfam. Now staff in India are pressing for a separate Indian Oxfam, saying that fat cats on the sub- continent should be squeezed for funds, rather than the hard-pressed British public. 'Oxfam has become very large,' said Maggie Black, freelance journalist and Third World expert, who wrote A Cause for our Times. 'Therefore the effort of achieving consensus within the organisation tends to clog things up.'

There are reports that Oxfam is in the running for the Nobel Peace Prize. How does the future look from Summertown? Dianna Melrose points to the volatility of Eastern Europe, proposals to set up a Russian Oxfam, increasing ferment and disasters afflicting Africa. 'The future is a big question mark,' she said.

(Photograph omitted)