A letter soon arrived from C.T.’s mother, asking him to come home to England for a break. She had heard from other missionaries about C.T.’s and Priscilla’s dire physical conditions and enclosed enough money to cover all their travel expenses for the journey home. C.T. was not sure, however, that they should all go back to England for a break. He prayed about the matter for six months before he felt it was the right thing to do. But once C.T. was convinced it was the right thing to do, the family quickly packed up and headed east for Shanghai.
C.T. had left England ten years before as a fit and agile sports hero and a single man. Now he was returning in ill health and with a wife and four little girls, none of whom spoke any English! As they boarded the steamer for England in Shanghai, C.T. wondered how they would ever adjust to the ways of his upper-class family. And for that matter, how would he fit back into “fashionable” society?
Chapter 8
India
Daddy, Daddy!” C.T. looked up to see his three oldest daughters, led by six-year-old Grace, enter the cabin. They all had shocked looks on their faces.
“What is it, girls?” he asked.
“We don’t understand those missionaries at all,” Grace said emphatically. “They only play music, and they never sing hymns or pray! What is wrong with them?”
C.T. thought for a moment and then roared with laughter. The “missionaries” his daughters could not figure out were in fact members of a brass band traveling on the ship with them. The band held a concert every afternoon, and the girls were allowed to sit and listen. But none of C.T.’s daughters had ever seen a white person before who wasn’t a missionary.
Eventually, after the children had been holed up in their cramped quarters for too long, the ship docked in London. Kinny, whom C.T. had not seen for ten years, was waiting to meet them.
After they had disembarked, C.T. sent Priscilla and the four girls on ahead to his mother’s house at Hyde Park Gardens while he waited with Kinny for their luggage to be off-loaded.
As the two brothers waited, they had much to talk about. While C.T. had been in China, Kinny had made a successful evangelistic trip to the United States at the invitation of Dwight L. Moody. He told C.T. how many American universities had opened their halls to him so that he could tell the students about the Cambridge Seven. Many of these students caught the vision for missionary service after listening to Kinny, and they began a group called the Student Christian Movement. The Student Christian Movement’s goal was to mobilize thousands of American students to take the gospel to the ends of the earth, with the hope of evangelizing the entire world in a single generation.
C.T. listened eagerly to Kinny. He wished he were well enough to start a similar tour of his own to tell people about the need for missionaries in China. But his health would not allow it. His chest hurt so much that C.T. wondered whether he had tuberculosis rather than asthma.
After the family had settled into the Hyde Park Gardens home, C.T.’s mother insisted that he and Priscilla and the children have a medical checkup. During the checkup the doctor confirmed that C.T. had developed chronic asthma and not tuberculosis. The doctor also discovered that Priscilla’s heart condition had worsened after giving birth to five children and that Priscilla was again pregnant. The girls, though, were thriving.
At the Hyde Park Gardens home, the girls were a source of both frustration and amusement to their parents. C.T.’s mother ran the house according to a firm routine. She had a cook, a butler, and two housemaids to service her needs and the needs of her guests. And when she heard that C.T. was coming home, she hired a nursemaid for Pauline and a nanny for the other three girls. And that is where the trouble began. The children spoke little English, and the nanny had difficulty communicating with them. Many of the things she tried to get them to do made no sense to the girls’ Chinese way of thinking. And when the children became too much for her, she would lock one of them in the bathroom. When she did this, the other girls would gang together and dance around the nanny, chanting loudly in Chinese. The frightened nanny would then have to release the “captive” for the sake of peace.
Gradually the girls began to settle, and Priscilla prepared for the birth of another baby. For the first time a doctor was present at the delivery, although his presence made little difference. The son Priscilla delivered was weak and sickly and died two days later. Once again C.T. and Priscilla mourned for a lost son. The older girls felt the loss of their baby brother as well.
Despite the loss of another son, C.T.’s faith was undeterred, and since he was home in England, he decided to make that his mission field. With rest, his asthma had settled down. He arranged a series of meetings around the British Isles, where he could tell stories of his work in China and challenge his audience with the need for more missionaries to go there and proclaim the gospel. Everywhere he went, people flocked to hear the great cricketer who had given away his fortune to follow Christ.
While he was holding meetings in Wales, C.T. stayed with his cousin, Dollie Thomas. He persuaded Dollie to go to one of the meetings with him, but she was not impressed with his message, and she told him so on the way home.
“Really, C.T.,” she chided him, “what an awful thing you said this afternoon. ‘True religion is like smallpox! If you get it, you give it to others and it spreads.’ What were you thinking, comparing religion to a disease?”
“Well, that is the way I see it,” C.T. replied. “I am trying to present my message in a way the common people will understand. And they would understand that, don’t you think?”
His question was met by a stony silence that lasted all the way back to Dollie’s house. When they arrived there, Dollie had the maid make cocoa for her and C.T. When the cocoa was ready, she held out a cup of it to C.T., but he went on talking to her, totally ignoring the fact that she was offering him the drink. It did not take Dollie long to get annoyed at his rudeness.
C.T. smiled. “Well,” he said, finally looking at the cup of cocoa Dollie was offering him. “That is exactly how you are treating God. He is holding out the gift of eternal life to you, and you are ignoring the offer.”
“I have never heard such a thing,” Dollie said, putting the cup and saucer down on a nearby table before turning and storming out of the room.
The two of them did not have any more conversations about religion after that, but C.T. prayed that Dollie would respond to the gospel.
Two days later, when C.T. returned to London, a telegram was waiting for him. It read simply, “Got the smallpox badly—Dollie.”
C.T. continued his speaking tour of the British Isles until 1896, when he was invited to cross the Atlantic Ocean and speak to students in the United States. He welcomed the opportunity, and in October that year he left Priscilla, who was still not well, and the girls in his mother’s care and set off for what would become an eighteen-month tour.
During his time in the United States, C.T. often spoke in meetings five or six times a day. He also conducted thousands of private interviews with individual students. He wrote to Priscilla regularly, and often included newspaper clippings about his meetings, though he was not always pleased with the way the articles represented him.
One of the newspaper articles gushed about C.T.’s dedication to missions and the amazing sacrifices he had made. In the margin C.T. scribbled to Priscilla, “This is the kind of rot they write in the papers. One day a man got up and said something like this just before I spoke, so I got up and said, ‘If I had known this was going to be said, I would have come a quarter hour later. Let’s bow and wash it out in some prayer.’”
Over Christmas C.T. traveled through Nebraska and Kentucky on his speaking tour. In January he spoke at colleges in Pennsylvania and Ohio. He loved challenging the people who came to hear him to surrender everything to Christ. He wrote to Priscilla, “This life is just lovely. Everywhere souls are lighting up. God has prepared them.”
When C.T. finally returned to England in April 1898, he found Priscilla ill and depressed. She had done her best to raise the children during the time he was away, but the nanny and C.T.’s mother made the job difficult for her. C.T. and Priscilla had very definite ideas about how they planned to live their lives and raise their children. It was a life in which the focus was not on material possessions or even on education but on obeying God’s Word. But living in such a wealthy household, with rich cousins coming and going, pulled the girls toward the pleasures of a materialistic lifestyle.
This situation greatly disturbed C.T. and Priscilla, who both began to long for the missionary life, where their daughters would be far from such worldly influences. It was not surprising that when C.T. learned of an opportunity to go to India, he jumped at it. Mr. Vincent, C.T.’s father’s old friend, offered to pay for C.T. to go to Tirhoot in North India, where C.T.’s father had made his fortune. Since C.T. had become a Christian, he had dreamed of going to India to preach the gospel to the natives who served on his father’s indigo plantations, and now he had the opportunity to do so.
C.T. set out for India alone, with the understanding that when he found a place to settle, Priscilla and the girls would join him. As usual, C.T. made quite an impression when he arrived in British-run India. There were few English people, or expatriates, as they were called, who had not followed his cricketing career and had not wondered what had happened to him over the years.
They need wonder no more. C.T. enthusiastically spoke with everyone he met, Indians and English alike. He took an interpreter and went to the indigo plantations his father had owned to talk with the workers. He was delighted to find that many of the older workers remembered his father.
While he was in Tirhoot, C.T. heard of a group called the Anglo-Indian Evangelization Society, whose work he felt immediately drawn to. The society’s function involved working among the expatriates who were often isolated from Christian fellowship or teaching. Through his contacts with the group, C.T. learned of an opening to pastor a Union Church in the hill country of southern India. The town where the church was located was called Ootacamund, or Ooty, as everyone called it. Ooty was a haven for expatriates: army personnel, government officials, and businessmen. These people all flocked to the cooler climate and mountain air as a refuge from the sweltering summer heat of the plains below. Ooty was 7,500 feet above sea level, and its climate resembled that of England in summer.
C.T. investigated the position further and found that a home and a salary came with the job. He also found that two-thirds of the pastor’s time was to be spent in Ooty, while the other third was to be spent visiting English people in remote locations. This suited C.T. fine, and he applied for the job.
It was an exciting day in May when C.T. learned that he would be the next pastor of the Union Church in Ootacamund. He immediately wrote to Priscilla, telling her to pack up their belongings and bring the children to India.
Priscilla and the children arrived in Ooty in October 1900, along with a governess, who had been employed by C.T.’s mother. For the first time in five years, the Studd family were living together as a single unit. C.T. watched as the girls delighted in the new freedom away from their relatives’ gaze. By now the oldest child, Grace, was nearly twelve years old, and the youngest, Pauline, was six.
As he watched his daughters, C.T. became painfully aware of how much of their childhood he had missed out on, and he tried to make it up to them. He and the girls took part in all of the events at Ooty, which included golf, horseback riding, polo, tennis, and of course, cricket. It was not long before C.T. had regained his old form and was batting double centuries, a feat that had been achieved only once before in India. When a cricket match was over, C.T. would invite the young Englishmen, many of them army officers, back to his house to talk about Christianity. Often they talked so late into the evening that the men had to spend the night at the Studd house.
