 Partly as a result of this the Birmingham group sided strongly and decisively with Mesens when he in turn split acrimoniously with del Renzio over the leadership of the Surrealist Group in England in 1944.Surrealism in Birmingham gained several significant new figures in the immediate post-war era, with Oscar Mellor taking up painting more seriously on returning from service in the RAF and meeting Maddox in 1946, and Desmond Morris (already producing surrealist artworks as a teenager in Wiltshire) enrolling at the University of Birmingham in 1948 and quickly discovering what he termed "Conroy Maddox's surrealist court".The profile of Birmingham artists within wider the wider surrealist movement remained high, with Maddox and Bridgewater featuring among only six English artists selected by Breton for the last major international surrealist group exhibition, the "Exposition Internationale du Surrealisme" at the Galerie Maeght in Paris in 1947 and Bridgwater's paintings and poetry appearing in major surrealist journals in France and Belgium.