Child, Boy, and Student

It was an evening bright with star shine in South India, early in the nineties, and three friends were resting in their deckchairs set out in the compound to catch the breeze which swept up from the sea and cooled the air after a fiery day. The talk, turned by some trivial event of the time, chanced to be about old customs of Sabbath keeping, and this was one of the stories told:

“My great-great-grandfather was in business in Kendal, when one Saturday morning he discovered his partner had absconded with papers and money, and so he started in pursuit. He reached Lancaster that evening by coach and had to wait there, for he would not travel on Sunday; and he used to say he had never spent a happier Sunday. Next morning early he went off to catch the coach to Liverpool, for he felt sure his partner would try to escape from the country by the nearest port. He was running round a corner of the street, fearing to miss the coach, when he ran straight into a man and almost knocked him over. It was his absconding partner, with all the papers and money upon him.”

Such was something of the spiritual heredity of the boy born upon 9th February 1859; fourth son of Richard and Isabella Walker of Matlock Bath. He had six brothers and three sisters.

He was baptised Thomas, but with consistent perversity he abjured his name, condoling with anyone who possessed it.

“There ought to be an arrangement by which children could choose their own names when they come to years of discretion. Fancy saddling a poor unfortunate baby with a name it will never like!”

and his unvarying signature to the general public was “T. Walker.” His mother’s sister and brother and his elder sister show him as child and boy.

“I remember Tom coming to Southport, when he was a little dark-eyed boy of four. The sea came nearer in those days, and when Tom saw the fishing-boats he sang out:

“‘A little ship was on the sea,
It was a pretty sight ‘;

and he sang away, to the delight of my dear old mother and the people round.

“I often stayed with my sister, and put the children to bed. If Tom (a tiny boy) made the slightest mistake in saying his prayers, he would begin again; and I sometimes wished he would hurry over his ‘Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, Look upon a little child.’ Once he began nine times, but got it right at last.”

The next remembrance of early days shows the household gathered together upon Sunday afternoons for hymn-singing, the boy upon his father’s knee; and the next is of him leaning over a railway bridge keen to watch the train pass, then, startled by the sudden roar, all but losing his balance. “His mother caught him just in time, or he would certainly have been killed,” his aunt says, and he never forgot it. Among the piles of sermon notes left behind in English and Tamil, there is a Gospel address in outline, with the story as its illustration.

“He was a bonnie laddie with his smiling eyes,” his aunt continues;” very silent generally, but full of fun. When about ten or twelve he had something wrong with his knee, and had to lie down a great deal; but he never complained though the knee was painful. He came to us at Southport for a time, and I remember well one night we were speaking of our favourite

From a family group, 1872. texts. Tom’s was: ‘Seek ye first the kingdom of God,’ a nice one, his grandmother thought; she was very fond of Tom. He was not brilliant as a boy, but remarkably thoughtful. How he loved the sunsets and the singing of birds! quite uncommonly so for a boy.”

“He was a quiet, thoughtful boy,” his uncle writes, “with a remarkably open countenance and beautifully honest brown eyes; his grandmother Shaw was like him as to eyes.”

These peculiarly truthful eyes seem to have been a family heirloom. A homely story is recalled of his grandmother: she was shopping in a city where her name was unknown, and upon offering to have the goods she had ordered paid for before they were sent to the address she had given, the tradesman, looking into those sincere eyes, declined the offer. He could give no explanation for his faith in the bona fides of his customer except the sincerity of her eyes.

“He was a beautiful child” [his sister is the writer now], “with a lovely rich colour, dark eyes, and black hair. He was very fond of father, and once when sitting on his knee (and he was much there) he said, ‘When we go to heaven, father, I shall ask God to let me sit in a pew with you behind the others.’ As he grew older he liked always to have his own way. He was very fond of long walks, but always wanted to choose the way. In 1883, when I sailed with my husband and children for Australia, Tom was the only one of my brothers who could control himself to see us off. When I caught sight of the ship in which we sailed I turned to go back, saying, ‘I cannot, Tom! ‘He very gently turned me round to face the boat and said, ‘Duty, Pollie! I know my sister will not shirk duty.” Duty,’ it was one of his sacred words.”

The first school was the Works worth Grammar School, three miles from Matlock Bath; so a six-mile walk was part of the daily routine. Then came Sandringham School, Southport, where he is remembered as a “very nice quiet fellow, of a studious turn of mind.” He had the reward of the diligent, his fair share of prizes at both schools, and he seems to have struck all who had to do with him as a lad with a future. A small characteristic touch is found in the inscription in one of his Sandringham prizes: “A prize for not having been late before breakfast during the half-year ending 1872.” Those who knew the man will see him fathered in the boy; it would be difficult to remember him ever late for anything.

But no one who knew him as a man can imagine him a boy of the goody-goody type. He must most emphatically have had a will of his own. “He liked to choose the way,” a word which brings him straight back to those who knew him well. But he was generous, fine-spirited, quick to see the humorous side of things; keen on anything which took his fancy. He appears to have been born truthful, for all through his life he unfeignedly detested anything savouring of hypocrisy or cant.

He was seventeen when the change passed over him which is known by so many names, and stands for so much more than any one of them taken singly can express. Conversion was the word he used by preference; the definite ring of it suited his spirit. He was at Sheffield at the time, and one day while attending a Bible-class taken by his Vicar, the Rev. Rowley Hill, he was impressed by the subject, the parable of the two builders. After the class he went straight to his room, gave himself to God, and wrote to his mother to tell her he had done so. Thus simply but irrevocably the great transaction was effected which changed the current of a life destined to become influential towards effecting the same transformation in many other lives.

Then, without a moment’s hesitation apparently, this lad of seventeen, reserved by nature, and quiet in his ways in spite of the fund of fun behind, took his stand in open-air preaching, and entered with enthusiasm into the missionary operations of his town. From the first he seems to have recognised the power in a good story; but his illustrations were never dragged in by the hair of the head, so to speak, after the exasperating fashion of a speaker who, having nothing to say, fills up the time with anecdote; they were like the coloured picture to a page of solid sense, and they fitted so exactly into the thought of the page that the effect was rather as if they had come into existence, on purpose to illustrate it. Letter after letter says:

“I remember the story he told to illustrate” — and the thing illustrated comes first, showing how the story did its work. Stories told in those first open-air meetings are remembered to this day; and a letter written in 1877 to his brothers and “dear little sister” has a special interest, for it appears to contain the germ of the story told three years later by Tennyson. The original of “Emmie” seems to have been a little cripple, who, frightened at the thought of an operation on the following day, held his little wasted hand straight up in the air and said to his nurse, “Nurse, may I hold up my hand like that and go to sleep?” She was puzzled, and the little fellow explained that he had asked the Lord Jesus to come for him that night, “and when He sees my hand held up like that, He will know that I’m the little chap He’s come for.” As the nurse passed him later she saw his hand had fallen outside the counterpane. Next morning she did not disturb him till it was time to carry him to the operation-room. She found him out of reach of pain, asleep with a smile on his face.

“My first recollections of Tom,” writes the “little sister “to whom that letter went,” date back to the time when, as a very small girl, I used to be well teased by him; but always, even in those early days, I looked up to him and revered his goodness. When I was recovering from fever, I sat day after day with him in his little study in which he was kept a prisoner by a sprained ankle; and even now I can see the bright smile he would give me when he looked up from his books and took pity on the disconsolate little person, who was longing to go out and play, by telling her amusing stories. In his Cambridge vacations he often took me for walks, when he would stride on ahead, deep in thought, whilst I trotted at his heels like a puppy, generally very much out of breath.

“To our mother he was all that a loving son could be. He always said how much he owed to her, and to her prayers. I have heard him tell how when he was a boy, having tucked him up in bed at night, she would blow out the candle, and kneeling down pray so earnestly for him. He had her strong determination and reserve, also her quiet loving unselfishness and thought for others. She had Quaker blood in her veins, and when a girl, had a good deal to do with Quakers, and certainly her ‘Yea ’ was ‘Yea,’ and her ‘Nay” Nay,’ and we children all knew it. I think that this also might be said about Tom.

“One of my happiest recollections is of a holiday spent with him and my mother amongst the Welsh mountains at Barmouth. Tom was a curate then in London, and he just gloried in the beautiful scenery and pure mountain air, after the heat and dust of London. Percy and Jennie joined us too, and by the aid of maps my two brothers explored the country for miles round. We joined in some of the shorter excursions, though even they were by no means short. I remember one afternoon being fetched, an unwilling victim, from paddling and shrimping to go for a walk. To my injured mind the way seemed endless, and I lagged behind sulking. Just then a huge bull put his head over a wall and bellowed. My feet no longer dragged, but flew to overtake the others. But did I ever hear the last of that from Tom? Never! On every possible occasion that bull was introduced. Even when I saw Tom on his last visit to England he began one day to tell my children a tale: ‘There was once upon a time a little girl who did not want to go for a walk with her mother and brother. So she sulked and sulked and lagged far behind, when suddenly a bull looked over a wall

at this naughty little girl ‘But at this point in the story

I fell upon him tooth and nail.

“I remember, too, my mother’s joy when her two sons would come back from some long excursion with huge appetites, and how Tom used to joke about the quantity of Welsh mutton and stewed fruit that miraculously disappeared.”

But to return to the boy: the Vicar of Sheffield was well supported by three keen curates and an earnest Christian business man who became the natural leader of a band of young men, “among whom was Tom Walker,” as a friend of the time tells us, “then seventeen years of age, very reserved and quiet in demeanour and speech.” This friend remembers his seeking with all his heart to make Christ known to the people of the courts and slums and lodging-houses of that large and difficult parish.

The mission work was of course over and above the duty of the time (for his father had intended him for a business career, and he was then in training for it). In addition to it he was reading hard, rising at four daily to get to his Hebrew, and en. i.j CHILD, BOY, AND STUDENT 9

availing himself of the good offices of a curate friend to make progress in other studies. And as he read and worked month by month the desire grew stronger within him to turn from all ways of earthly gain and to live to win souls. He wrote to his sister to this effect: “It’s no good, Pollie; I cannot be a fisher of loaves, I must be a fisher of men.” His sister told his mother, who soon afterwards went to Sheffield to see him, and he opened his heart to her. That talk led to his return home to prepare for Cambridge.

The Vicar of Matlock Bath then was the Rev. E. Latham. He welcomed the new recruit to the ranks of true soldiership, and recognising with quick insight the spiritual fibre under the unassuming manner, he helped him and encouraged him in every possible way. Miss Walker well remembers the quaintly worded prayer he offered for her younger brother before he left for Cambridge: “Lord, lead him on until he attains a high degree in Thy vineyard.” He did not live to see the answer to his prayer, which is surely only our earthly way of saying he saw it in full from the heavenly hills.

Among the Matlock Bath friends was a saintly old clergyman, Rev. C. Evans, who acted as coach in Greek. “Go in for the Mathematical Tripos,” was his advice to his pupil, who had intended to take Theology as his subject in preparation for the ministry. The old clergyman’s counsel was followed, a decision never regretted: “I was saved from Theology,” was the comment of after years. “Nothing like Mathematics for mental training and discipline.”

A fellow-student and lifelong friend, Rev. R. Chadwick, continues the story:

“Walker went up to Cambridge as a sizar at St. John’s College, the College of Henry Martyn, in October 1878. He had gained at school a fair knowledge of Latin, which he could construe with facility; but Greek and Mathematics had to be acquired. In his first term he passed the Previous Examination, including the additional subjects, being placed in the first class in both parts; and then commenced reading for the Mathematical Tripos. He had excellent health, great powers of application, a most exact and retentive memory, and with the direction of Mr. R. R. Webb of St. John’s, second only to Mr. Routh in fame as a mathematical coach, he soon made wonderful progress. In the College Examination at the end of his second year he was placed in the first class, with the men who were to be the 2nd, 4th, 7th and 8th wranglers of the year. He was then awarded a proper sizarship; and at the similar examination in the next year was made a foundation scholar of the College.

“After this success at the Mathematical College, as St. John’s then was, it was a great disappointment to him, and still more to his friends, when in the Tripos list in January 1882 his name came as the first senior optime (i.e. first in the second class). A foundation scholarship at St. John’s was not awarded to a mathematical student below the calibre of a wrangler. The explanation, well known to his intimate friends, was that he had overdone his great physical strength by working both night and day; he could not sleep during the time the examination was on, or do himself full justice in the papers.

“His life at Cambridge was an extremely regular routine. He kept in the second court, his rooms being approached by a turret staircase close to the kitchens, and from his window there was a view of the Trinity Buildings, and of the Trinity gardens, where after Hall, Dons, whose names were household words throughout the world of scholars, might be seen playing the dignified game of bowls in a dignified way. The attention of these Dons was once attracted to this particular window by loud shouts of ‘Good shot! ’ and a pleased smile and modest blush appeared on the face of the one who had last played, at recognition of his skill by undergraduates of the rival college. The ’ good shot ’ had really been a piece of coal aimed at a marauding cat by one of those at the window.

“One of the disciplinary rules of the College required each student to make five attendances at the College Chapel every week. Walker’s invariable custom was to attend the service at 7 a.m. and to attend every day. On Sundays, after the ordinary morning service in Chapel, at which there might or might not be a sermon, he would go to Trinity Church, of which the Rev. J. Barton, an ex-Indian missionary, was Vicar, and in the evening he would be there again. The Rev. Handley C. G. Moule, now Bishop of Durham, was in residence in Cambridge at this time, and held the Evening Lectureship at Trinity Church. Walker much appreciated his sermons. On Sunday afternoons he would often be at Great St. Mary’s to hear the

CH. i.l CHILD, BOY, AND STUDENT 11

University Sermon. He was a regular attendant at the daily prayer-meeting, at the Church Missionary Union, and at the College Saturday night prayer-meeting; and he gave some assistance in a Sunday school at Barnwell under Mr. Trotter, the Vicar of Christ Church, Barnwell, whom he had known in Sheffield.

“Walker did not take up any form of athletics at Cambridge, chiefly because his one object was to prepare and furnish himself for the sacred ministry he had in view. He was not, however, without a keen interest in games and some capacity for them. The small circle of which he was one, devoted the afternoons to physical recreation, playing tennis during the May term, and spending many afternoons on what was called the freshman’s river. His favourite recreation was, however, a long walk with a congenial companion.

“He possessed sufficient mental capacity and energy to take up serious studies as recreation in addition to his Tripos work; in this way he very much enlarged his classical knowledge, and acquired a working knowledge of Hebrew. This brought him into touch with the Rev. P. H. Mason, the senior Dean and teacher of Hebrew, from whom the teachers of that day, such as Sinker the Librarian of Trinity, and Kirkpatrick, afterwards Professor, now Dean of Ely, had learned their Hebrew. Once in the Hebrew class some question with regard to the meaning of Joshua x. 12 had arisen, and Mr. Mason had explained that in his view the supposition that by a miracle the solar system was brought to a standstill, was not required. Walker probably gave some sign, which the lecturer was quick to notice, that he did not agree; and he immediately turned to him and pointed out the physical difficulties involved. Walker replied, ‘Nothing is impossible with God.” Certainly not,’ said the lecturer. Mr. Mason was a most devout and implicit believer in the inspiration of the Bible, and so much concerned was he that one of his students could have supposed him to be advocating anything contrary to God’s Word that he again and again referred to the matter in conversation with Walker, a circumstance which Walker himself several times in after life recalled.

“Something must be added about his personality and

1 The incident was thoroughly characteristic of his honest courageous nature, but it was hardly one he would have recalled with pleasure; for he became increasingly able to understand the view-point of others, especially when, as here, reverence was united with scholarship.

influence. The circle of his friends was made up almost entirely of men of strong religious views, who were intending to take Holy Orders. They all stood more or less in awe of Walker, who had not in those days the sunny smile or the calm serenity which all who knew him in later life will remember. He held aloof from most of the social life of the College; yet those who knew him best were well aware of the affectionate and kindly nature which a shy reserve kept out of sight, and even of a vein of humour and love of fun. This was brought out by the advent of a brilliant young Irishman, who came to the rooms next to Walker’s. He was absolutely irrepressible, bubbling over with Irish wit and high spirits; he stood in awe of no man, and Walker was obliged to meet his chaff and banter with chaff and banter, and even to submit to personal violence, until amid peals of laughter the aggressor was ejected from the room.

“Looking back over the thirty years that have elapsed, it is not difficult to see how well and truly Walker laid, while at Cambridge, the foundations on which his future life and work were to be reared. There, plain to us all, was the stem denial of self, and the absolute severance from what was of the world. He was forming the habits of devotion, prayer, and systematic Bible study, the results of which, carefully noted at the time, have no doubt appeared and borne fruit in his valued Bible Readings. There was again the mental training, and the storing of the memory with all that would render the man of God thoroughly furnished unto all good works.

“Only four months elapsed between his degree and his ordination to an East London curacy by the Bishop of St. Albans, not a long time to get up the theological subjects so diverse from his Tripos work; nevertheless his name headed the list in the Ordination Examination both as deacon and priest; and the Bishop, speaking to his Vicar of his papers done in the examinations, referred to him as ’ a very remarkable young man.’”

“As when a shutter stands ajar
My Call’s thin sunbeam glints afar.”

IBSEN’S Brand.

1882-85]