 Despite his limited French, Maddox travelled to Paris repeatedly between 1936 and 1939, frequenting surrealist meetings at Le Dome Cafe and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and forming long-lasting relationships with Man Ray and Georges Hugnet, whose influences were quickly to become apparent in his work.Maddox's continental contacts were to greatly improve relations between the surrealists of Birmingham and London after mid-1938, when the London Gallery - the nerve centre of London surrealism - fell under the directorship of Mesens, who had been involved with continental surrealism since its inception in 1924.Maddox was invited to the October 1938 meeting of the British Surrealist Group at the personal insistence of Breton, and Mesens invited both Maddox and John Melville to exhibit in the next major London Gallery exhibition - 1939's "Living Art in England".