Despite the dark clouds gathering, there was one sunny interlude during the summer of 1914. Barkis got married. He had met his wife-to-be, Rachel Smith, two years earlier in Bermondsey when she was working at the Time and Talents Settlement. She came with a fine pedigree, being a descendant of the great Quaker prison reformer, Thomas Fowell Buxton, the brother-in-law of Elizabeth Fry. They announced their engagement in May 1914 and the wedding took place on 25th July in Southwark Cathedral. Stansfeld presided, and Alec was best man. A Saturday afternoon had been chosen ‘to allow our Bermondsey friends to attend, which they did in surprisingly large numbers’. The guests provided a happy mixture of ‘top-hat and cloth-cap coming together’. The cake disappeared ‘under a wave of Bermondsey boys’ before the ‘West End’ could get a look in. There seemed not to be a cloud on the horizon, but the idyll of the newly-weds’ Highland honeymoon would be truncated on the evening of the 4th of August when Great Britain declared war on Germany for violating the neutrality of Belgium. Barkis immediately returned to South London to enlist with his friends. It was an opportunity for consummating his – and Alec's – ideal of Christian brotherhood between the classes. As their friend, Donald Hankey, put it during the war: