Having said his good-byes to St Paul's and with Oxford ahead of him, Sidney spent an extraordinary summer at Grindelwald, a quaint Swiss village surrounded by snow-capped mountains and glaciers. He had been hired as a Classics tutor at the grand Reunion Conference organized by Henry Lunn with the aim of reconciling and uniting the various strands of Protestant Christianity. Lunn's Review of the Churches had been in publication since October 1891. Sidney's father was the Review's Methodist editor and worked very closely with Lunn on the Reunion Conference.

The conference had been advertised as ‘A Twelve Days’ holiday in Switzerland for Ten Guineas, with the option of prolonging the Holiday for a month, available for Christian workers of both sexes’. To drum up enrolment Lunn had held a competition offering twelve free tickets. Keen to add an educational dimension, and impressed by the Chautauqua adult education summer school movement in the United States, Lunn had arranged for four tutors in various subjects ‘to undertake special reading with individuals or the formation of small classes for study’. Sidney was one of the tutors, the only one who did not already have a degree.

It was a smashing summer. Sidney was earning a little income teaching his beloved Classics in a social milieu that he knew thoroughly. His father was one of the leading figures at the conference.