“I would like to do something to serve Christ, but I don’t know what that could be. Do you have any ideas for me?” he asked.
His mother poured two cups of tea and sat down on the leather sofa beside him.
“The church is always a good place to begin. Why don’t you ask the Reverend Barraclough at St. Jude’s if there is something you could do there?”
Wilfred thought this was a good idea, and so on his next day off he went to visit the Anglican vicar. He came away with a new title: Sunday-school teacher for junior boys.
This started out as a simple enough task, preparing a Bible lesson to share with the boys on Sunday mornings and leading them in several songs. But it was not long before Wilfred doubted he was having much effect on the nine- and ten-year-old boys. Somehow he just didn’t seem to be connecting with them. They were polite enough. Most of them came from respectable, middle-class families, but Wilfred could not find a way to get them excited about the Christian faith. Obviously, he concluded, they were bored, and bored boys do not listen well. Then Wilfred struck on an idea. What if he took the boys out of the church setting and taught them some sporting skills? That way he could get to know them better and find opportunities to share his faith with them along the way.
At the time Wilfred was sharing a house with four other medical students, none of whom had any real use for the living room. Wilfred got permission from them to turn the living room into a gymnasium. He bought wooden poles from a carpenter and constructed parallel bars, and someone gave him two mattresses, which he positioned under the bars. When everything was ready, Wilfred announced that all of the Sunday-school boys and their friends were welcome to come to “sports night,” which would be held at his house every Saturday evening. Wilfred promised to teach them boxing, bodybuilding, and gymnastics.
The first Saturday twenty boys were in attendance, and by the end of March, fifty boys were crammed into the house, all eager to learn from Wilfred. He started and ended each session with a Bible reading and prayer, convinced that the boys paid much more attention to the reading than they did to anything he said at Sunday school.
Things were going well until the Reverend Barraclough called Wilfred aside after church one Sunday morning.
“I hear you have a sports club going on Saturday nights,” the vicar said sternly.
“Yes, and it’s going well,” Wilfred replied.
“And what sports are you teaching the lads?”
“I don’t have as much room as I would like,” Wilfred said, “so I have to confine it to boxing and gymnastics for now. However, if you hear of a bigger facility…” His voice trailed off as he noticed the scowl on the vicar’s face.
“That won’t be necessary,” the vicar snapped. “I asked you to take a simple Sunday-school class, not to teach hordes of boys brutal sports like boxing. You will have to stop the lessons immediately.”
Wilfred felt the force of the words as sharply as any well-placed boxing punch. It sent his mind reeling, and it took him a minute to think of an answer. “But when the boys are at my house, I read the Bible to them and find natural ways to talk about my faith. And there is nothing brutal about boxing. Everyone plays by the rules, and it builds strong muscles, and the boys can use it to defend themselves. Why don’t you come by this Saturday night and see for yourself?”
The Reverend Barraclough’s eyes grew wide. “Mr. Grenfell, I thought I made myself quite clear. I have no intention of visiting your gymnasium. You are to stop these Saturday night activities, or I will have to ask for your resignation.”
“Then you have it,” Wilfred snapped as he turned and walked out the door.
Wilfred was still stunned by the turn of events when he arrived back at his house. He poured out his problems to one of his housemates, an Australian named Arthur Bobardt. Like Wilfred, Arthur was a Christian, though he had gone about the task of sharing his faith in a different way. He took his Bible and a small harmonium with him each Saturday night and sang and preached in the most dismal areas of London’s East End.
“Why don’t you join me?” Arthur asked.
Now that his Saturday sports nights had been banned, Wilfred was free, and he agreed to go along.
The experience was more exhilarating than Wilfred could have imagined. He and Arthur ventured into the roughest public houses, where they were spat on and yelled at. Occasionally some drunk would take a swing at one of them, and Wilfred’s boxing skills would come in handy. They preached on street corners and sat in the gutters, talking to dejected chimney sweeps and flower sellers about how Jesus Christ could change their lives.
Soon the two of them felt they had to do more than talk, so they started a club for boys on Ratcliff Highway. The club was a great success from the start, though it did have its problems, of course. Some of the boys stole anything that was not anchored down, and they soon learned to forge Wilfred’s signature and write IOUs to the local shops using it. But such behavior only reinforced to Wilfred that these boys needed Christian men as role models. Before long both Arthur and Wilfred had gained their respect, and one by one the boys responded to the gospel.
When he wasn’t with the boys, Wilfred worked hard at medical school. Now that he was a Christian, he did not feel right about bribing the record keeper to mark him present when he was not. Nor did he feel good about using crammers to get him through the exams. Instead Wilfred decided to learn all he could, and he started attending all of his lectures and practical assignments. This pleased his adviser, Dr. Treves, and the two of them became good friends.
As summer vacation approached, Wilfred began to think about how much some of the boys in the club would enjoy the rigorous life he led during the summer, wading in the estuary and sailing on the bay. He wished he could climb along the wild rocky coast with the boys and introduce them to the taste of freshly caught shrimp and the smell of the salt marshes.
The more Wilfred thought about it, the fewer reasons he could come up with not to take a dozen or so of the boys back to Parkgate with him for the summer. He began urging the boys to save their pennies, and he promised that if they did so, he would take them on a camping trip they would never forget.
That summer Wilfred brought thirteen boys back to Parkgate with him. They crossed the bay and set up camp on the Welsh coast, where they slept in tents. Wilfred required all the boys to take a bath in the ocean every morning before breakfast. He also taught them to swim, and when he was satisfied their swimming skills were good enough, he took them fishing out on the bay, where they caught their dinner. The boys and Wilfred had a wonderful time together, but before long it was time to head back to London, where in the fall of 1885 Wilfred began his last semester at medical school.
He had no sooner arrived back in London than the Reverend William Davies, the new vicar at St. Jude’s, paid him a visit.
“I have heard about the work you did with the boys in the parish,” he began, “and I must say, I am very impressed. It is difficult to keep young minds occupied. They are, after all, attached to young bodies. It sounds to me as if you found a good balance.”
“Thank you,” Wilfred replied, not sure where the conversation was heading.
“I suppose you are wondering why I have come to see you. It’s simple, really. We are starting a new club at church. It’s for boys, a kind of brigade, and I was wondering if you would consider running it.”
“Tell me more about it,” Wilfred said cautiously.
“It’s up to you how it develops. We just need something to keep the lads occupied and teach them a thing or two in a Christian environment. Just about what you were trying to do with your sports club, I imagine.”
“I suppose you know I did run into some, um… problems with the last vicar,” Wilfred said.
“Of course, we each have our own way of doing things. I am sure he meant well, but from my point of view, a boys’ club is sorely needed.”
“I’ll try then,” Wilfred said. Since leaving the church, he had often wondered what had happened to the boys, and he was glad for the chance to see them again.
This time a proper club was set up, with Dr. Treves as the president, Wilfred as the vice president, and his friend Henry Richards as the secretary. Everything went well from the start, and many boys, both from inside and from outside the church, joined.
In February 1886 Wilfred passed his final exam and was entered as a Member of the Royal College of Physicians and a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons. At twenty-one years of age he was entitled to call himself Dr. Wilfred Grenfell, M.D. His mother and Algernon traveled to London for his graduation ceremony. Wilfred’s only regret was that his father was not there to see him graduate.
Now that he was a doctor, Wilfred was offered a position as a house surgeon at London Hospital, under the guidance of Dr. Treves. He accepted the position, and his duties at the hospital and his ongoing involvement with the boys’ club kept him busy.
In the middle of 1887, however, Wilfred quit the job of house surgeon and took another group of excited boys from London back to Parkgate for a summer vacation. At the same time, Wilfred was making plans to fulfill a longtime dream. At the end of the summer, he set out for Oxford to study at Queen’s College. There he excelled in sports, earning a Rugby Blue, an honor conferred on those who demonstrated great skill in the sport. But while he excelled at rugby and other sports in Oxford, Wilfred found the lifestyle there unsatisfying. So after one semester at Queen’s College, he decided to leave the university.
The question for Wilfred soon became what to do next. He knew he could go back to London and work among the poor in the East End, or get a job as a physician in some country area. But none of the positions he heard about appealed to him. Somehow he was sure God had something quite different for him to do; something that no one had ever done before awaited him. If only he could find out what it was.
Chapter 5
On the North Sea
Sit down, Wilfred. I have something I want to discuss with you,” Dr. Treves said.
Wilfred obediently sat himself down in an overstuffed leather chair in the doctor’s office.
“I have something exciting to talk with you about, something I think might be just your cup of tea. You are familiar with the deep-sea fishing fleets in the North Sea?”
Wilfred nodded. “Yes, I’ve treated quite a few fishermen from the North Sea fleets at the hospital. Mainly broken bones and septic gashes. Some of the men were in bad shape because of the length of time it took to get them to the hospital. The longest I recall was fifteen days; we had to amputate his leg.”
“Precisely what I want to talk to you about,” Dr. Treves continued, leaning forward in his chair. “Six years ago a Mr. Ebenezer Mather was approached by the owner of a fishing fleet and asked to do missionary work among the fishermen on the North Sea fleets. There’s up to twenty thousand of them on the water at one time, you know, and the dreaded coper ships from Holland and Belgium are sailing out to them and selling them liquor and tobacco. The tobacco’s not so bad, but a trawler on the high sea is no place for a drunken sailor. There’s been no end of trouble with brawls and lost working time. Some of the fishermen have even swapped their fishing gear for grog and then told the boat owners that their gear was lost in a storm. It’s a bad situation all around.”
“It sounds so,” Wilfred replied. “Did Mr. Mather ever get the mission work going?”
“Yes. He called it the National Mission to Deep-Sea Fishermen and raised enough money to buy a small smack called the Ensign. It goes out among the trawlers, and the men on board give Bible readings and talk to the fishermen about the gospel. It’s had some effect, and they have even convinced a few of the owners to declare Sunday a no-fishing day. The boats that stopped fishing on Sundays brought in bigger weekly tallies than those that worked seven days a week.”
