The Great Acceptance: The Life Story of F. N. Charrington

In due course Mr. Keith-Falconer proceeded to Cambridge. A don of that University, speaking of him as he was at this period, and, indeed, he altered but little from this time to the end of his short life, says —

"His appearance at this time, his manner, his tastes, were all strikingly like what they were in later times. He had a remarkably tall, well-shaped figure, whose symmetry seemed to take off from his height of six feet three inches. Physically very strong he certainly was, in one sense, or his wonderful feats of athletic endeavour would have been impossible. Yet, for all those feats, which were partly due, no doubt, to the sustaining power of a strong will, he could not really be called robust.

"His kindly voice and genial smile will live in the recollection of his friends; like good Bishop Hacket of Lichfield, he might have taken as his motto, 'Serve God and be cheerful.' Side by side, however, with his geniality, there was in Keith-Falconer at all times the most perfect and, so to speak, transparent simplicity. Never was a character more free from any alloy of insincerity or meanness. No undertone of veiled unkindness, or jealousy, or selfishness, found place in his conversation. From the most absolute truthfulness he would never waver; his frank, open speech was genuine, the unmixed outcome of his feelings.

"A certain slight, very slight, deafness in one ear made him at times seem absent to those who did not know this, and unknowingly had sat or walked on the wrong side.

"A characteristic habit of his seemed now and then to give a certain degree of irrelevance in his remarks. Sometimes, when in conversation on a topic which interested him, he would, after remaining silent for a short time, join again in the conversation with a remark not altogether germane to the point at issue. He had been following out a train of thought suggested by some passing remark, and after working out the idea on his own lines, as far as it would go, made his comment on the result. Yet whenever the conversation had to do with the interests or needs of those to whom he was speaking, no one could throw himself more completely, heart and mind, into the matter. Talk for talking's sake he cordially abhorred, that talk which is simply made as though silence were necessarily a bad thing in itself.

"This interest in widely different topics of conversation was not, however, simply the result of mingled good-nature and courtesy, a mere complaisance, where it was but a careless good-nature that saved the courtesy from hollowness. Far from it. No one who knew Keith-Falconer well, needs to be told how thoroughly, how constantly, and in what varying ways, he could make the business or cause of another his own; whether it were a friend in need of help, from the most trifling to the most momentous matters, or the absolute stranger whom apparent chance had sent across his path.

"Still, with all this, his kindliness was by no means one lacking in its proper counterpoise of discretion; his strong, clear-headed, Scotch common-sense was constantly manifest, even in his schemes of beneficence. Yet even thus it must be remembered that his was a character in which the warm heart was guided in its action by the clear head, not one in which the clear head did but allow itself to be swayed more or less by the loving heart. Love was the dominant power, discretion the corrective influence."

Mr. Charrington used to visit his friend at the University, and it was there, as Mr. Richardson has informed me, that the evangelist obtained a nickname which stuck to him for a long time. Special open-air services used to be held upon "Parker's Piece" in the University city, and on one occasion Keith-Falconer got his "gyp," as the men-servants are called at Cambridge, to come and join in the meeting. At the close Mr. Charrington was in the habit of speaking to those who had attended, and in earnest expostulation with this man, not knowing who he was, he said to him, "Down on your knees." After that, Charrington was always known – in the University city, at any rate – as "Doyk."

In 1880 Mr. Keith-Falconer took a First Class in the Semitic Languages Tripos. During the whole of his University career, not only was he one of the most brilliant students of his time, but also a well-known sportsman. There was no namby-pamby Christian about this young scion of a great house. Everything he undertook he did well, and he became a leading bicycle racer in England, scoring innumerable successes at Cambridge, in the Inter-University meeting with Oxford, and defeating the professional champion of England by five yards. All this time, and I cannot give more than a mere outline of Keith-Falconer's career, inasmuch as it is unconnected with the Tower Hamlets Mission and Mr. Charrington, he was sitting for innumerable examinations, and building up a record of scholarship which still survives. Yet he was most actively connected with Mr. Charrington's work, and was, now very shortly, to be more a part of it than ever. With his friend he penetrated into the most miserable homes, he conducted many services, and, as will be seen in further chapters, when the luridly exciting story of the Battle of the Music Halls is told, he was Mr. Charrington's right-hand man.

One story of the earlier period was told me recently.

At the close of one of the meetings a little boy was found sobbing. With some difficulty he was induced to tell his tale. It was simple. His widowed mother, his sisters and he, all lived in one room. Everything had been sold to buy bread except two white mice, the boy's pets. Through all their poverty they had kept those two white mice, but at last they, too, must go! With the proceeds he bought street songs, which he retailed on the "waste," and so obtained the means of getting more bread for his mother and sisters. Now they were completely destitute. The boy was accompanied home. Home! It was a wretched attic, in one of the most dilapidated houses. It was a miserably cold and dismal day. In the broken-down grate the dead embers of yesterday's fire remained. On the table, in a piece of newspaper, a few crumbs. The air was close and the smell insupportable. "My good woman," said Mr. Charrington, "why don't you open the window?" "Oh," she replied, "you would not say that if you had had nothing to eat, and had no fire to warm you." The family was relieved.

He was intimately connected with the first beginnings of that famous "feeding of the hungry," which has gone on under Mr. Charrington's auspices for so many years, and is still one of the great living facts of the East End of London.

A-propos of this, Keith-Falconer wrote —

"During the hard times of the winter of 1879 (due to the long frost and depression of trade), a work was forced on our Mission which we had never contemplated taking up. The difficulties and dangers of wholesale charity are very great, and our desire has been to avoid them, except in cases of extreme circumstances. But the distress of that winter was extreme, and for many weeks we opened our halls and fed the literally starving multitudes with dry bread and cocoa. The austere distress began in December. Hundreds of men were waiting daily at the Docks in the hope (nearly always a disappointed hope) of a job. Starving men were found in several instances eating muddy orange-peel picked off the road.

"Our feeding became a very public matter, as there was much correspondence about it in the Times, the Daily News, the Echo and other leading papers, and many people came from long distances to see for themselves. The public supported us liberally with funds, and we were enabled to give no less than twenty thousand meals from January 1st to February 14th, besides which we assisted over three hundred families every week in their homes. We look back to the time as one of very great blessing."

Of this feeding I propose to give as graphic a description as I can in its proper place, for I have attended at it myself, but I must pass on now to the time when the young Professor – for Keith-Falconer was shortly afterwards appointed examiner in the very Tripos where he had so distinguished himself – threw his whole heart and soul into the project for building the present Great Assembly Hall.

For a time had come when Mr. Charrington's success had become so enormous, the whole machine so gigantic, that it was necessary to erect a huge building commensurate with the needs of the mission. Keith-Falconer was an invaluable helper. It is true that the great mass of work devolving on Mr. Charrington required that there should be also a secretary living in the midst of affairs and devoting his whole attention to the work. Still, Mr. Keith-Falconer's post was far from being a nominal one. In writing a business letter he was exceedingly business-like; his facts were put in the clearest and most methodical way. A letter from him asking for a subscription was no effusive appeal; it was a quiet, sensible statement of facts, written by a scholar and a master of English, all the more telling because the writer had shown himself to take all possible pains to do justice to his case.

An enormous sum of money was necessary, and at this juncture Mr. Keith-Falconer made a direct appeal for help in the form of a pamphlet.

This appeal, as his biographer points out, was so characteristic of the writer, so thoroughly earnest, entertaining, as it did, no doubt that the money would be forthcoming, and – as was his way in such things – so quaintly methodical, that I give it here in full. It is certainly one of the many historic documents in the archives of Mr. Charrington's life work.

"We now appeal for funds in order to erect a new and larger hall.

"The present one is altogether unsuitable.

(a) It is far too small. On Sunday nights hundreds are turned away for want of room. When, during two successive winters, the adjacent Lusby's Music Hall (one of the largest in London) was opened on Sunday nights simultaneously with our own hall, the united congregation usually amounted to 5000 persons. These facts tend to show that if we had a building sufficiently large, we could gather as many persons as the human voice can reach.

(b) It is a temporary structure, which by the Metropolitan Buildings Act must come down sooner or later.

(c) The corrugated iron is becoming dilapidated, and lets in the rain, so that rows of umbrellas are often put up during the service.

(d) The cold is intense.

(e) The acoustic properties are inferior.

"Please add to this that our site is the very best in all East London. It ought surely to be utilised to the fullest extent. The present building only half covers it.

"We have got the site, and we have got the people. May we not have a hall to accommodate them? The willingness to hear is very remarkable, and it is distressing to see hundreds and thousands turned away for want of mere room.

"The guarantees which the public have that the work is a proper one, and that the new hall will be properly used, are: —

1. The testimony of trustworthy persons who are acquainted with the mission. Mr. Spurgeon has written a warm letter. Lord Shaftesbury is an old friend of, and worker in, the mission. He has delivered several addresses in the hall. The late Lord Kintore was a warm and constant friend of the work. Mr. R. C. L. Bevan has both promised £2000 and consented to act as treasurer.

2. A trust deed has been drawn up and signed, transferring the property to Trustees, – namely: F. A. Bevan, Esq.; Richard Cory Esq.; Frederick N. Charrington, Esq.; Hon. Ion Keith-Falconer; James Mathieson, Esq.; Samuel Morley, M.P.; Hon. Hamilton Tollemache; Joseph Weatherly, Esq. – and specifying the objects for which it is to be used.

"It may be objected that the East End ought to supply its own wants. This is impossible. The population of the East End consists of the working classes, who, though they furnish the sinews of wealth which resides elsewhere, are poor themselves. Thus the East End has a double right to look outside for help. It is poor and cannot help itself adequately, and the wealthy are responsible for the well-being of their servants, the toiling thousands through whose labour they derive their incomes.

"The character of our Mission is evangelistic, unsectarian and sober. I say sober, because of late years some have despaired of reaching the masses except by using certain unseemly and sensational methods. Our work is an emphatic protest against this practice, and a standing disproof of its necessity.

"Finally, the building for which we plead will cost £20,000, a small sum indeed when we consider what amounts many are willing to spend on their own comforts and pleasures. This sum will not only build a suitable Hall, but a Frontage in addition, embracing a coffee palace, and a book saloon for the sale of pure literature. The site has already been paid for."

A beautiful letter was written by Keith-Falconer to a private friend during this period of his friendship with Mr. Charrington. It was written from the house at Stepney Green, to which I have already referred in an earlier part of the book. Nothing could more adequately show the young man's personal spirituality, and also his enthusiastic love for the friend whose own pure and self-sacrificing life was such an example to his own.

    "Stepney Green.

"It is overwhelming to think of the vastness of the harvest-field, when compared with the indolence, indifference and unwillingness on the part of the most so-called Christians, to become, even in a moderate degree, labourers in the same. I take the rebuke to myself… To enjoy the blessings and happiness God gives, and never to stretch out a helping hand to the poor and wicked, is a most horrible thing. When we come to die, it will be awful for us, if we have to look back on a life spent purely on self, but – believe me – if we are to spend our lives otherwise, we must make up our minds to be thought 'odd' and 'eccentric' and 'unsocial' and to be sneered at and avoided.

"For instance, how 'odd' and 'unsocial' of my heroic friend (Mr. Charrington) to live in this dirty, smoky East End all the year round, and instead of dining out with his friends and relations, to go night after night to minister to the poor and wretched!.. But I like to live with him and to watch the workings of the mighty hand of God and to catch a spark of the fire of zeal which burns within him, in order that I may be moved to greater willingness and earnestness in the noblest cause which can occupy the thoughts of a man. This is immeasurably better than spending my afternoons in calling on people, my evenings in dinners and balls, and my mornings in bed… The usual centre is Self, the proper centre is God. If, therefore, one lives for God, one is out of centre or eccentric, with regard to the people who do not."

In 1884 Mr. Keith-Falconer was married at Trinity Church, Cannes, to Miss Gwendoline Bevan, daughter of Mr. R. C. L. Bevan, of Trent Park, Hertfordshire. Mr. Charrington was present upon this occasion, and acted as "best man" to his friend.

In 1885, together with his young wife, he sailed for Aden, resolving to take up missionary work there, being peculiarly fitted for it owing to his intimate acquaintance with Oriental languages. I am not going to expatiate upon his life and work there. I am writing the biography of his friend. In 1887 he passed away, and was reverently laid to rest in the wild and dreary cemetery there, far from home and those he loved, yet among those for whom he laboured, and for whom he counted no loss too great, if only he might win them for Christ.

I may quote, perhaps, those words from The Pilgrim's Progress, which describe the death of Valiant-for-Truth.

"'My sword I give to him that shall succeed me in my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can get it. My marks and scars I carry with me, to be a witness for me, that I have fought His battles, Who will now be my Rewarder.'… So he passed over, and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side."

The loss to the Tower Hamlets Mission was incalculable, and it is pathetically expressed on a certain page of The Record, Mr. Charrington's official organ.

Mr. Edwin H. Kerwin wrote: —

"Another faithful soldier of Jesus Christ has fallen at his post – the post of danger and honour. Those of us who knew him are weighed down with sorrow to think we shall hear his voice no more. We loved him from the first time we ever saw him. My thoughts go back to the year 1873, when, as a young man of seventeen, his beloved father, the late Earl of Kintore, brought his son and interested him in Mr. Charrington's work. From that date until the day of his death he was devoted to the Tower Hamlets Mission. Amid his arduous studies at Cambridge he delighted to break away from them for a day, and run up to Mile End. In a letter before me, dated July 1880, and written to me while his beloved father was lying dead, he says, 'It is pleasant to me to reflect that it was my father who first introduced me to Charrington and his work, and that he so cordially supported the Mission. I hope that his sudden departure may be the means of blessing to the careless, perhaps to some who heard him speak in the Assembly Hall.' How strange that the son should also be struck down suddenly! May the prayer he breathed at his father's death become a reality in his own sudden departure. In another letter, written to me in 1879, in answer to one I had addressed to him respecting some young men who had been impressed with an address he had given at Mile End, he said: 'I was so thankful about those five young men. The best of this work is that so few of the conversions are directly traceable to any particular person; we all help.'

"About ten years ago he was staying at Mr. Charrington's residence. I picked up his Bible, and found written upon the fly-leaf this motto —

'Henceforth, Lord, I wish to be
Wholly given up to Thee,
That in life and walk I may
Glorify Thee day by day.'

"Surely those who were acquainted with him can testify that he carried this out!

"His brilliant achievements at the University of Cambridge, his linguistic proficiency, together with his exceptional abilities, were all devoted to the cause of Christ. He worked hard in the interests of purity and temperance. He often spent nights with Mr. Charrington in watching the music halls. I shall never forget the night when Mr. Charrington was taken off by the police, falsely accused of disturbance outside Lusby's Music Hall. I was not there, but, hearing of the incident, I went off to the police station, and, on nearing it, saw a large crowd. In the dark I could see one tall man standing in the centre, head and shoulders above every one else, and perfectly white; this was Falconer, who had been covered with flour by the frequenters of the music hall. He gave evidence on this occasion, and it is within the recollection of many that he was entered to run on this very day in the University Champion Bicycle Race; also the stir he made in the sporting world by telegraphing to the course – he was staying with Mr. Charrington on Stepney Green at the time, and Mr. Charrington suggested it – the following words: 'The race is safe with Dodds. I have made up my mind not to run, having started in the race spoken of in Hebrews, chap, xii, verses 1, 2.'