There was general laughter among the gathered Christian Socialists when Maurice announced that Thomas Hughes had joined them. That was in the autumn of 1848, some months after the beginning of the movement. ‘We are not going to start a cricket club’, someone said. For Hughes was known as an extrovert and a sportsman, distinguished at Oxford not for his learning or his participation in ecclesiastical controversy, but for rowing and being a cricket blue. Of ‘the high regions of scholarship, criticism, or science’, he confessed, ‘I have neither head nor time for such matters’. There has been a general agreement among observers of the Christian Socialist movement that he was ‘intellectually the least gifted’. He was, Raven noted, ‘unperplexed with doubts’. Yet the case for his inclusion among the most influential of the leaders is a strong one. Hughes never lost his early faith in Christian Socialism, and devoted a lifetime to political activity to further the cause. He laboured extensively to preserve religious ideals within the developing co-operative movement, and, as a Liberal Member of Parliament, he became a central spokesman for working-class aspirations. After Kingsley, he was, through his writings, the great popularizer of the ideals of social reform which the Christian Socialist group had projected. He embodied, in fact, all that Kingsley sought to be – but never was: practical, athletic, and with an easy and unselfconscious rapport with the working classes. ‘For many years I have been thrown very much into the society of young men of all ranks’, Hughes wrote in 1861; ‘I like being with them, and I think they like being with me’.