[citation needed] After a time in casual labour, a chance encounter with a distant relative persuaded him to travel to South Africa in 1932, where his mother was now living.
He was still an irreverent agnostic, but at Toc H he soon became friends with Jonathan Graham, a religious brother in the Community of the Resurrection, Bishop Geoffrey Clayton of Johannesburg later Archbishop of Cape Town, and Alan Paton, author of Cry the Beloved Country.
He brought the cathedral building near to completion, but his reputation as an outspoken preacher and an opponent of racism was gathering pace, making him one of the most controversial figures in Ian Smith's Rhodesia in the period preceding the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI).
There he found Alan Paton had his passport confiscated, and many white people he knew and trusted had been imprisoned or exiled for speaking out for freedom.
In 1970, while, on leave in London, he arranged with Canon John Collins[11] of St Paul's Cathedral, chairman of the International Defence and Aid Fund for Southern Africa (IDAF) and a leading figure in the Anti-Apartheid Movement, for the IDAF to send aid through Alison Norman, a mutual friend who ffrench-Beytagh met in Harare, to a humanitarian fund managed by ffrench-Beytagh, as the dean in Johannesburg to help black families in the townships around Johannesburg.
The main prosecution witness was Kenneth Jordaan,[17] an informer placed by BOSS as one of the dean's altar servers and confidants.
On 14 April 1972 the appeal by ffrench-Beytagh against his conviction and sentence under the Terrorism Act, was upheld in the Appellate Division of the South African Supreme Court in Bloemfontein.
This church in the City of London is a parish without resident parishioners, which gave ffrench-Beytagh space to concentrate on writing and spiritual direction.
He retired from St Vedast's in Christmas 1986, and went to live with friends, including Alison Norman, in an informal community in Tower Hamlets.
He died in the London Hospital in Mile End on 10 May 1991, almost twenty years after his forced exile from South Africa.