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ABSTRACT
While the contributions of Baptist women missionaries in the nineteenth century were viewed primarily through lenses of domesticity, both men and women who served as missionaries recognised the need to communicate in the language of the indigenous people. This article looks at the work of several female missionaries who published grammars, translated hymns and Bible stories and contributed to the translation of Scripture.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 An overview of the Stennett family is included in L.G. Champion, “The Social Status of some Eighteenth Century Baptist Ministers,” Baptist Quarterly 25, no. 1 (January 1973): 10–14. Champion does not mention the education of the women in the Stennett family, but suggests that the education of the young men reflects a growing social status.
2 The Works of the late Reverend and Learned Mr. Joseph Stennett: in Five Volumes; to Which is Prefix'd Some Account of His Life, Vol. I (London: J. Darey, D. Midwinter and A. Ward, 1732), 7. Joseph Stennett became a well-known linguistic scholar. He married Susanna Gill in London in 1688. (Susanna’s sister was married to the Congregationalist minister and scholar, Daniel Williams). Joseph is credited with teaching his sister Greek and Hebrew. She is not identified except as the wife of William Morton of Knaphill, Buckinghamshire, though one source suggests that her name might have been Mary.
3 Charles E. Wilson, “The BMS and Bible Translation,” Baptist Quarterly 10, no. 2 (April 1940): 97–105 and “The BMS and Bible Translation (Part II),” Baptist Quarterly 10, no. 3 (July 1940): 159–167. See also, Anthony R. Cross, “Reversing ‘The Amazing Ignorance and Stupidity of Some Persons’: Baptists, the Biblical Languages and Bible Translation,” Baptist Quarterly 50, no. 2 (2019): 44–57.
4 ‘Mrs John Drake’, The Editor’s Note-Book, The Missionary Herald, Volume 12, no. January, 1930, 16.
5 The history of this training centre is not known, though it was represented at the centenary conference on Protestant Missions in London in 1888. Report of the Centenary Conference on the Protestant Missions of the World Held in Exeter Hall (June 9th–19th), ed. The Rev. James Johnston, F.S.S., Vol II, 3rd edition (London: James Nisbet, 1889), 575. ‘Sister Vera’ (Vera Addis), a Baptist deaconess also attended this training centre. The Baptist Handbook for 1935 (London: The Baptist Union Publication department, 1935), 270.
6 This appears to have been a mission organisation that began in 1889 and in 1905 reported having 18 missionaries. The Blue Book of Missions for 1905, ed. Rev. Henry Otis Dwight (London: Funk and Wagnalls, 1905), 53. It was still active in 1919 and the contact person was ‘F. W. Howard Piper, L.L.B, “Arden” Bushy Heath, Herts.’ See The Foreign Missions Year Book of North America, 1919, Library of Congress, 327. https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcmassbookdig.foreignmissionsy01fore/?sp=242&st=image&r=-0.424,0.437,1.849,0.883,0.
7 ‘Death of Mrs John (Annie) Drake, in Monthly News Letter, 41 (November, 1929). For more on John Drake see The Baptist Handbook for 1941 (London: The Baptist Union, 1941), 330. See also R.E. Cooper, From Stepney to St Giles: The Story of Regent’s Park College (London: Carey Kingsgate, 1960), 118.
8 “Death of Mrs John (Annie) Drake,” 4.
9 John Drake, A Grammar of the Kurku Language (Calcutta: The Baptist Mission Press, 1903).
10 John Drake, A Grammar of the Kurku Language, v.
11 Ibid., v.
12 Ibid.
13 Sten Know, “The Kurku Dialect of the Munda Family of Speech,” The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland for 1904 (London: By the Society, 1904), 424.
14 The Baptist Handbook for 1941 (London: The Baptist Union, 1941), 330.
15 Drake papers for 1900–38, copy of Resolution of General Committee, 20th November, 1929 on death of Mrs John Drake, /N/52 Angus Library. Reports from the ‘Indian Monthly Newsletter’ cited in The Missionary Herald speak of Annie Drake’s work as a self-taught naturalist and claimed that she was admired by ‘specialists with whom she sometimes corresponded.’ Missionary Herald, Volume 12, no. 1, January, 1930, 16.
16 The photo of Gwen Elen Lewis was taken from George Hawker, An English Woman’s Twenty-five Years in Tropical Africa: Being the Biography of Gwen Elen Lewis, Missionary to the Cameroons and the Congo (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1911).
17 George Hawker, An English Woman’s Twenty-five Years in Tropical Africa: Being the Biography of Gwen Elen Lewis, Missionary to the Cameroons and the Congo (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1911), 3–4.
18 Ibid., 5–6. The school where the ‘Misses Hewitt’ served as principal was located at 36 Hilldrop and was noted in 1879 as one of the schools in the Islington Vicinity by Charles Eyre Pascoe in: Schools for Girls and College for Women: A Handbook of Female Education Chiefly Designed for the Use of Persons of the Upper Middle Classes, Cambridge Library Collection (Cambridge University, 2013), 58.
19 Ibid., 11.
20 Ibid., 8.
21 Ibid., 22.
22 Carrie Comber was appointed by the BMS as a missionary in 1880. Stanley claims that ‘the successful service of Emily Saker and Carrie Comber gave the Committee confidence to appoint accept other single women for service in the Cameroons’. Brian Stanley, The History of the Baptist Missionary Society, 232.
23 Carrie Comber married the missionary R. Wright Hay, but died in 1885. Several letters from Comber to her former Sunday School teacher at Camberwell, Mrs Gray, may be found in the Angus Library, A/1/1/ii.
24 Hawker, An English Woman’s Twenty-five Years in Tropical Africa, 46.
25 Thomas Lewis, These Seventy Years, 100.
26 Ibid., 100–101.
27 Hawker, An English Woman’s Twenty-five Years in Tropical Africa, 186.
28 Ibid., 241.
29 Works by Thomas Lewis were listed as Mundulia a nfila -The Pilgrim’s Progress Part I (Religious Tract Society); Nzayiilu a trza – Geography book Part I Astronomical and Mathematical (Baptist Missionary Society); Bible translations not mentioned.
30 Hawker, An English Woman’s Twenty-five Years in Tropical Africa, viii.
31 Thomas Lewis, These Seventy years, 245–6.
32 The photo of Anne Maria Forfeitt is used with kind permission of BMS World Mission, Angus Library, Regent's Park College.
33 Collier’s Grovelands brickworks operated from 1870 until 1966. Their family home, ‘Westgrove’ in Grovelands Road was located next to the brickworks. A family photograph album containing photographs giving images of mission work in Africa is at the Reading Museum. http://collections.readingmuseum.org.uk/index.asp?page=record&mwsquery=%7Btotopic%7D=%7BFour%20Bs%7D&filename=REDMG&hitsStart=2.
34 Married on 11 July 1893. She was ‘the second daughter of the late Mr Samuel J. Collier of Reading’ Bedfordshire Mercury, 22 July 1893, 7.
35 See ‘Memoirs of Ministers and Missionaries’, Baptists Handbook for 1940 (London: The Baptist Union, 1940), 335–6.
36 John Brown Myers, The Congo for Christ, The Story of the Congo Mission (London: Partridge and Co., 1905), 111.
37 See her letter to the ladies of the deputation to Upoto requesting single women to work with them if they did not get an increase of five married couples at the station. September 13, 1919, Angus Library, A/43/1/(xiii).
38 Frederick Starr, A Bibliography of Congo Languages, The University of Chicago department of Anthropology, Bulletin 5 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1908), 40–41, 83.
39 W.L. Forfeitt credited his wife with this work in a paper headed ‘Rough list of books and translators for your guidance’ in William Lansbury Forfeitt papers A/13/1 Angus Library. There are additional letters in this file which confirm her work in the translation of books into Lingombe.
40 Brian Stanley, The History of the Baptist Missionary Society 1792–1992 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1992), 349n53.
41 Hampshire Advertiser – Saturday 02 November 1940, 5.
42 “Helen Saker and the Cameroons Mission,” in John Telford, Women in the Mission Field: Glimpses of Christian Women Among the Heathen (London: Charles H. Kelly, 1895), 135.
43 William Grant Milne, “The Baptists at Cameroon,” in The Missionary Herald, 1866 (London: Elliot Stock, 1866), 65.
44 Ibid., 232.
45 When she arrived in Africa, Gwen Lewis was schooled in Dualla by Saker. George Hawker, An English Woman’s Twenty-five Years in Tropical Africa: Being the Biography of Gwen Elen Lewis, Missionary to the Cameroons and the Congo, 17; 66.
46 Taka Pande gu Santo Keke Pai Tipa Agude Verona Printing Press, 1921 (Bible Stories) Mienge ma Yehova. Psalms and Hymns in the Dualla Language. Chiefly by Emily Saker. Arranged for the Bristol Tune Book (Baptist Missionary Society c. 1900).
47 E.M. Saker, Alfred Saker Pioneer of the Cameroons (London: The Carey Press, 1908, 2nd ed., 1929), 170.
48 E.B. Underhill, Alfred Saker, Missionary to Africa: A Biography (London: Baptist Missionary Society, 1884), 160. There is an error in Underhill’s work which identifies the scholar as E.N. Oust. The quote was actually from Robert Needham Cust, A Sketch of the Modern Languages of Africa, vol. I. (London: Trubner, 1883), 71. Cust (1821–1909) was a noted orientalist who spoke more than eight languages and scholar who published more than 80 volumes between 1870 and 1909.
49 Underhill, Alfred Saker, Missionary to Africa, 160.
50 See the discussion in Stanley, The History of the Baptist Missionary Society, 116–117.
51 Her departure, along with that of two other women who were trained as medical missionaries (Lilian Blackwell and Miss Dean (d.1891), on the steamer Ganges was noted in an article in the Edinburgh Evening News Wednesday 24 October 1888.
52 The photo of Margo Bentley is used with kind permission of BMS World Mission, Angus Library, Regent's Park College.
53 H.R. Williamson, British Baptists in China (London: Carey Kingsgate Press, 1957), 22. ‘Marriage announcement’ of H.Z. Kloekers, missionary to China to Emily Page eldest daughter of Lindsay Winterbotham of Stroud. Cheltenham Examiner – Wednesday 19 October 1859, 8. Williamson spells the name Winterbottom, though it was in fact Winterbotham, prominent Baptist family in Shortwood and Stroud. Lindsay Winterbotham was the manager of the Stroud and Gloucestershire Banking Company. (Several members of the family served as members of parliament, see D.W. Bebbington, “Baptist MPs in the Nineteenth Century,” Baptist Quarterly 29, no. 1 (January 1981): 23 (Emily Page died at the age of 35 in Shanghai in 1861. Stroud Journal – Saturday 16 February 1861, 4.)
54 ‘Autobiography of Mrs H.M. Bentley, Vol. 1, 18501886, MSS A/34/, 19 Angus Library.
55 Stanley, The History of the Baptist Missionary Society, 178–179.
56 Brian Stanley, “Bentley, William Holman (1855–1905),” in Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions, ed. Gerald H. Anderson (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 1999), 55–56.
57 Margo H. Bentley, W. Holman Bentley The Life And Labours Of A Congo Pioneer (London: The Religious Tract Society, 1907), 148.
58 Ibid., 157–158.
59 Ibid., 158.
60 R.N. Cust, Linguistic and Oriental essays Written From 1840–1903, 130.
61 W. Holman Bentley, Dictionary and Grammar of the Congo Language (London: BMS, 1887), xix.
62 For a detailed study see, Robert Phillipson, Linguistic Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
63 Michael Meeuwis, “Linguistic Gentrification: The Baptist Missionary Society and Bobangi (1882–1940),” Afrikanistik Aegyptologie Online. https://www.afrikanistik-aegyptologie-online.de/archiv/2023/5659.
64 Lamin Sanneh, “‘They Stooped to Conquer’: Vernacular Translation and the Socio-Cultural Factor,” Research in African Literatures 23, no. 1, The Language Question (Spring, 1992), 101–102. See also, Lamin Sanneh, Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1989, 1990).
65 Ibid., 29–30.
66 Letter from Bentley to Baynes 24 April 1888 as cited in B. Stanley, A History of the Baptist Missionary Society, 127.
67 Letter from Elen Lewis to her mother, 1 March 1888, Angus Library.
68 John Briggs, ed., Open to God, Open to All: The History of Tyndale Baptist Church, Bristol 1868–2018 (Bristol: Tyndale Baptist Church and The Baptist Historical Society, 2018), 205.
69 Thomas Lewis, These Seventy Years, 284.
70 Letter from Tom Lewis to Margo Bentley, 30 May, 1906, Angus Library.
71 Bristol Evening Post, Tuesday, 3 January 1939 and Eastbourne Chronicle, 31 December 1938.
72 Periodical Accounts Relative to the Baptist Missionary Society, I (1792–1799), 347; Carey to the B.M.S., ‘Houghly River’, 28 December, 1796 as cited by E. Daniel Potts, British Baptists in India, 1793–1837: The History of Serampore and its Mission (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 18.
73 European Missionaries refers to male missionaries. Form of Agreement Respecting the Great Principles Upon Which the Brethren of the Mission at Serampore Think It Their Duty to Act in the Work of Instructing the Heathen (Serampore, 1805), 7.