Chapter 3    

Consolidation 1912 – 1919

3.01

            The Mission’s quarterly supporter’s magazine, ‘The Lakher Pioneer’, is our main source of information from 1912 onwards. It ran from 1912 until 1970. The British Library has a bound collection of these amongst the Lakher private papers.

3.02

            The Lorrain’s Missionary’s furlough in England did not seem to equal holiday! During their home break Reginald wrote, ‘Five years in unknown jungle’ (274 pages). The book’s purpose was to publicise the Mission and to build up support. During their stay, he and Maud travelled many miles, speaking to any church or group who might show interest in their work. Without a tie to any mission societies, they appealed to any church that showed an interest, regardless of denomination. Time spent with the home committee officers and their existing supporters also proved most fruitful. They attended the Keswick Missionary Convention, here Reginald was able to arrange fringe meetings. He was well received and came away with £100 cash and a number of new supporters. The fruit of all this work was that they would return to the Mission Station with renewed backing and more realistic financial support. Reginald also took the opportunity to gather other useful resources.

3.03

            Mission finance was the major issue at the 1913 annual meeting. The assembled company were informed that the total expenditure of the Lakher Pioneer Mission to-date including keeping the Missioners in the field for five years and their passage out and home had been less than £1,000. This was a remarkable feat, only made possible by the frugal management of the Missionaries, and one suspects not a little subsidy from Reginald and Maud’s own very limited personal finances. They had indeed achieved so much with so little. The Mission’s Treasurer now called for a yearly allowance of not less than £250. He also appealed for:- £250 to build a suitable permanent mission bungalow, an annual sums of £50 to be spent on preaching expeditions throughout the Lakher district, and £100 each year to finance the school and associated educational work.

3.04

On the 10^th October 1913, with their home support renewed and the Mission income more than doubled the Lorrains set sail for Calcutta aboard the SS Holywell. They were able to take back with them: - the first batch of St John’s Gospel (printed without charge by the British and Foreign Bible Society), Reginald’s Catechism and his Hymnbook with 70 hymns. From the Religious Tract Society he had obtained, a good number of specially printed coloured leaflets in 8 different designs, as well as several thousand leaflets containing Bible portions printed by the Scripture Gift Mission and 500 copies of Miss N Snowdon’s Prayer from the Daily Prayer Union. Finally, the Day Star Text Mission has produced a 10ft banner text in colour that read; “The Blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from All Sin”. All of these materials printed for the first time in the Lakher language. The Missionaries acquired a portable organ for £10. The mind boggles at the thought of all these items being shipped and transhipped and finally carried for 12 days up and down jungle mountains tracks teetering along the edge of precipices. Soon after setting sail Reginald and Maud received a telegram from the committee informing them that sufficient funds were now in their bank account to build the new bungalow. After spending some time in Calcutta organising local supplies, they set off on the 29^th November by ship for Chittagong. From there they travelled inland up the river system arriving at Demagiri on the 13^th December. Their final days on foot brought them to Lunglei by the 20^th of December. After resolving to enjoy Christmas with Reginald’s brother Herbert and his wife at their Mission Station, the new arrivals promptly went down with fever. The intrepid family recovered sufficiently to set out for Sherkor and home on New Years Day. 

At the end of their first day’s travel they had failed to make the safety of a village. There were tigers in the district so they had to build a temporary stockade out of their boxes and keep a fire going all night. Eight days after leaving Lunglei they crossed the Kolodyne and ascended the hill to Sherkor. In contrast to their first arrival when the village had given the Lorrain’s a cold reception; the welcome just grew at each stage into the hills. They were met first by two of their school students at the riverhead village of Demargiri, at Lunglei there were more, and so on at each stage of the journey until, as they entered the village the entire populace turned out to greet them, and especially to marvel how Tlosai had grown in the year’s absence.

3.05

            Their bungalow had suffered storm damaged and was in a poor state. The journey had cost £200, this was double the homeward trip. The extra expense had to be taken from the £350 set aside for the new Bungalow. Undaunted Reginald immediately set to work on establishing their new permanent mission station and home. Construction of the new bungalow preoccupied him for the next eighteen months. He obtained a lease on a new plot of land straddling a ridge half a mile from the village and 400 feet higher. Levelling the site was gruelling toil with both rock to break out and tons of soil to move, all by hand. Always Reginald led the project from the front. The Bungalow was to be constructed of hardwood; with the cookhouse it consumed the timber of thirty mature trees. 

Rear of the 1913 Bungalow in 2007 with cook house to the right

The timber was all felled from the jungle, often at some distance. He had a team of four local men who became his sawyers, recruiting and motivating them proved an ongoing worry. After a fair quantity of wood had been cut and stored in the old bungalow, disaster was only narrowly averted when  its cookhouse caught fire and quickly burnt down, it took a heroic effort to prevent the old bungalow with its precious store going too. The onset of the monsoon season slowed the work to a crawl, it was late in 1914 before the post and beam frame could be erected. Reginald reported that his carpenters only had sufficient skill to assist him and he laid every piece of wood and drove every nail with his own hands. The corrugated iron sheets for the roof were on the way but required 200 men to carry them over the hills. During the rainy season Reginald turned his hand to making their furniture. Next he went in search of bamboo from which to make wall and ceiling panels. Bamboos are split open along their length then flattened out into strips, about 3 inches wide. These are then woven into wall panels. Lakher’s have long used this system. Providing the panels are under a weatherproof roof they will last many years. Reginald located a good thicket of bamboo deep in the jungle and had around 7,000 cut and carried back to the compound.  The first building to be completed was the freestanding cookhouse. Reginald had nailed down his corrugated iron roof but not yet screwed it with screwed when a tropical storm blew in and ripped the roof off. He retrieved the iron sheeting and refitted it, this time fixing each piece with screws and nails, later complaining that working on the hot metal roof under the tropical sun was the most exhausting job of all. When the bungalow was finished he declared that his new home should service for 30 to 50 years. I can testify that both his furniture and the original building bore sturdy testament to his workmanship in 2007 nearly a Centenary later. It is still there today, his beautifully sawn and planed hardwood floorboards, each a foot wide and running the width of the building, windows and doors all made on the spot and nothing that would disgrace a craftsman with all his machinery to hand. The family’s health dramatically improved when they moved into their new home. 

2007 visitors on the veranda of Reginald's original bungalow

The building caught the fresh breeze, the hard floor made living much cleaner and the roomier accommodation made their life much less stressful.

3.06

One of the first events on the new Mission Compound was to Tlosai’s 5^th birthday party. The chief of Sherkor village and one hundred and fifty guests attended the young lady’s anniversary. Tlosai certainly was a popular young lady and long before she knew it she was becoming a very effective missionary. The Lorrain’s began to share their celebrations of Christmas too. They produced a semblance of a Christmas tree and stocked it with presents for all the schoolboys and other attached villagers. A great project had to be put in hand each year to find and wrap enough goodies for each person, items such as pencils, small knives, any of the boxes and tins that had come with supplies, combs and any other trifle which would serve to make each of their folk know that they were part of the Christian family.

3.07

Soon the 1914-18 War began to have an impact even upon this remote mission. Food and raw material prices rose sharply. Reginald was very moved by the plight of some of his missionary colleagues who were German Nationals. He observed that they were in a desperate state having been cut off from all home supports by the naval blockade of Germany. Reginald made an appeal in the Lakher Pioneer for funds to support German Missionaries in India.  A fund was set up and ran for a year or so until he reported that the Indian Government took this responsibility. No explanation is given as to whether the German Missionaries were interned or allowed to work on with government support. The Lakher Pioneer Mission’s income for 1914 was £513, a vast improvement over their subsistence in the first five years of the mission. Money was transferred in cash by the Indian Post to Lunglei were it was collected by the Mission. On one occasion Reginald sent two men to fetch his mail from Longley. When they arrived it was too late in the day to set off back so they left the mail sack on the Post Office porch until next day. On their return they found that the sack had been opened and £40 cash taken. On hearing their woeful tale Reginald set off in haste to Lunglei to see if he could trace the culprits but without success. The loss of nearly 10% of their year’s income was a heavy blow to the mission. As the war dragged price of basic commodity prices were forced, fundraising at home was more difficult and a bad harvest in the hills was causing a local food shortage too. Reginald began devised a sort of community bank. Previously he had been able to buy more rice than he needed and when the harvest failed he lent his stock back to families in trouble. He supplied 2,400lbs of rice to the needy during the year, claiming it back for his community reserve when conditions improved. 

3.08

The school was soon as busy as before. In the 3rd quarter of 1914 Reginald reported that he had 36 boys in school, at the year’s end they celebrated their fiftieth graduate through the school since the work started. Reginald complained that he was finding it increasingly difficult to run the establishment without a decent building and appealed to the home committee for a further £150 to fund this project. In the same letter Reginald reported that Laila one of his (40 year old) schoolboys has asked for his name to be added to the roll of Christians. Soon there were twelve names of the Christian roll; almost entirely due to the work of the school. He was now able to use one of his past students as a trainee teacher; this freed more of his time to build and equip the bungalow. He built a temporary school house measuring 22’ x 10’, this was the classroom; sleeping arrangements for the students were split between the stranger’s house, which Reginald had built in the village to cater for visitors to the Mission and a temporary hut on the compound. 

Two schools were set up in distant villages with past students acting as teachers. One of the new branch schools was at Shiaha. Shiaha became the capital of the Lakher district. Reginald paid a visit to his outlying schools and was very pleased with the progress. At Shiaha School he found that all but the five youngest could read the Gospel of St John, recite the Lord’s Prayer, the Apostles’ Creed and write in a good hand. The five young ones could write their letters and read the first pages of the school Primer. He resolved that any village that wanted its own school could start one. Within a year he lost confidence in his staff and closed all the satellite schools until better-trained teachers become available. A Lakher from beyond the Burma border came to the school. This was a great breakthrough because although the Lakher tribe straddles the border the Lorrain’s could not get government permission to enter Burma. The Mission Committee Treasurer and Editor made strong appeal for £250 to build the schoolhouse in the Lakher Pioneer pointing out what a vital tool the school was in the work to bring the Lakher’s to faith. About this time one of Reginald’s youngest pupils, an eight year old, asked for his name to be added to the list of Christians. Reginald questioned him closely to see if he understood the significance of his actions. He pointed out that he could no longer join in, or even be present when his family made sacrifices or other pagan rites. The little fellow said that he understood all this very well, in fact a few days previous his father planned a pagan ceremony and he had told him that he could not stay in the house that night, he left to find another place to sleep. Towards the end of 1916 the Mission reported that there were forty-three names on the Christian Roll. They came from seven villages but almost all were first associated with the school. Another significant breakthrough came when the first girl asked to be enrolled as a Christian. She intended to marry one of the Christian lads, until that time the Christian boys could not find girls of faith to marry. Through the Mission’s early years the Lakher women had been the most resistant to the Gospel. On numerous occasions women had held their men back from conversion. The old Serkawr village chief’s wife in particular was an implacable objector to the Christian Gospel.

3.09

 At last during 1917 Reginald had the resources to build the schoolhouse. Again a hilltop site had to be levelled with a considerable amount of rock to break out and remove. He constructed this building to the same high standard as the bungalow with a hard wood post frame, planked floor, plated bamboo walls and iron roof, laying every piece of wood and iron with his own hands. The building was first planned to be 20’ x 40’ but ended up being extended by another 20’. It could be divided into two separate rooms as well as a study from which Reginald could see into both rooms. 1917 saw 42 students in school with the added satisfaction of Serkawr’s village chief sending his son to be educated. School numbers levelled off at 41 in 1918, the number of names on the Christian roll rose from 60 to 74 then fell back to 73 when a student fell prey to a great measles epidemic which swept through the hills. Reginald now produced desks for the schoolroom and the stranger’s house in the village was rebuilt and a decent sleeping house for the school erected. The student’s lodging room measured 38 x 20 x 13 feet. Even though Reginald was clearly becoming more and more exhausted the project still kept rolling off. Soon there are 92 Christians on Roll and to their great joy two have been Baptized, and the first Christian Marriage had taken place.

3.10

Mrs Lorrain began a weekly sewing class for girls. Her new project had a remarkable effect enabling the Mission to begin to gain the confidence of Lakher women, but the class created a new logistic problem; they were dependent on receiving a steady supply of fabric pieces from Mission Supporters at home. Frequent appeals went out in the Lakher Pioneer for fresh supplies. Through the sewing class the girls began to ‘Gossip the Gospel’ taking a lively interest in Maud’s instruction. They also began a Sunday School which quickly attracted a good number of villagers, mostly thanks to Maud’s Sewing Class. Like Richard Rake’s Ragged Sunday Schools, the agenda was divided between Christian instruction and learning their letters and practicing their reading with Bible passages.

3.11

Reginald set himself the great task of translating the whole of the New Testament by the end off 1917, the 10^th anniversary of the Mission.  The Bungalow’s construction preoccupied him for the first year and only when this was complete could he really devote time to this vast project. By the middle of 1916 he reported his progress: - 7 chapters of the Acts of the Apostles, the book of Jonah, the epistles of Jude, John, Peter James and Romans, even parts of the Book of Common Prayer. Reginald added 10 new hymns to the small hymn book, these were: Jesus lover of my soul, How sweet the name of Jesus sounds, Stand up stand up for Jesus, All thing bright and beautiful, There is life for a look at the crucified, O Jesus I have promised, There’s a home for little children, When morning guild the sky. Reginald declared that hymns are a very effective way to teach the faith. He revised and enlarged the school primer adding much reading of general knowledge, also a new catechism with questions and answers on the Bible from Genesis to Revelations. He had ready to print some eight-page assortments of scripture portions. 1918 became the target year to complete the New Testament translation. During that year Saro, Reginald’s stalwart help for the earlist days with translation asked to have his name added to the roll of Christians. By the end of the year they were able to Report to the Mission Supporters; two thirds of the New Testament printed as separate books, work in progress to complete the remainder, an Arithmetic Book at the printers and a Geography Book being written. The Book of Common Prayer (Church of England) largely translated. His eight page booklets, at the Indian printers at a cost of 13 shillings and sixpence for 300. Later in the year the new Hymn Book is in use with 174 hymns, but the New Testament still needed Mark, Luke, 2^nd Corinthians, Galatians and Ephesians, and the new School Primer and Arithmetic Books are in use. Finally Reginald reported that there were 40 workers employed on the Mission Compound.

3.14

Each year in his Annual Report Reginald gave a very short paragraph to the Medical Work of the Mission. It seemed that he delegated much of the run of the mill prescribing to Maud. They record seeing over 2,000 patients in one year. Only two events merit special mention. One of Reginald’s sawyers got his leg caught under a heavy trunk and was carried in with about eight inches of lower leg bone exposed. Reginald immediately set too to clean the wound and sew back the large flap of skin. In due course the man recovered full use of his leg. On another occasion two boys were sent across the river to fetch a wizard because their family has been having a lot of bad luck. They began to mess about as boys are do beside the river when a bear came out of the jungle and attacked one of the boys. After mauling the lad’s head the bear made off leaving the lad’s companion the badly mauled boy the village. The family call on the Missioners for help. Reginald found that the boy had several large puncture wounds through his scull. He cleaned up the wounds then stitches and dressed them leaving the boy with his family to see what time would bring. When news came to the wizard that the family had been calling for him he set out across the river to visit them. Upon arrived he learnt of the lads injuries and promises to do his best for him. First he said that the family must remove the dressings and wash off the missionary’s medicine, the wizard would then spit in the wounds. The family refuse and sent the wizard away, the lad recovered. Adding to the communities growing confidence in their missionaries.

3.15

A woman in the Serkawr died in childbirth leaving a newborn infant. Lakher tribal custom dictated that the baby sould be placing in the jungle in a clay pot and abandoned. Reginald had been called to the birth and aware of the child’s predicament, requested that he should take the baby and care for it. After some argument the father agreed but few days later he appeared at the bungalow demanding his child’s return. Reginald reluctantly agreed with the proviso that the child should be brought each day to be bottle fed by Mrs Lorrain. This worked well for a time until Maud contracted Scarlet Fever, ‘they suspected from the filthy rag in which the baby was wrapped’. Reginald still insisted that the baby should be brought to the bungalow each day to insure that it came to no harm. Now the family was issued with the daily bottle of milk with strict instructions for it’s feeding. This was possibly the first Lakher child to survive its mother’s death in childbirth. Although Maud became very ill, the episode was another small triumph for the love of Christ. Christmas 1915 was not a happy time. The strain of the year’s incredible achievements took its toll. Maud was still isolated with Scarlet Fever when Reginald went down with Rheumatic Fever. To add to their troubles Tlosai went down early in the year with Typhoid. These disasters would have sent many a lesser couple running for home. Herbert and his wife came to their rescue. His journey from Lunglei was much easier because the track had been upgraded to a standard government bridal, path one yard wide prescribed gradients. The journey was reduced from eight days to five. Herbert was amazed at Reginald’s achievements; he found the compound full of order with many remarkable developments in the School and the Mission.

3.16

            The ‘Lakher Pioneer’ conveys glimpse of the hostility of their tropical environment. Several Tiger stories tell of their encounters with the king of the jungle. Tigers often raided domestic stock dragging the kill off into the jungle. If the carcass could be located a platform would be built in a nearby tree. Reginald would mount a nightly stakeout waiting some times two or three nights for the beast to return to its prey. Sometimes the night was too dark to get a successful shot off and ‘Mr Stripes’, as Reginald called him, lived to hunt again. Cobras were a constant danger; they reported killing more than 20 assorted snakes about the compound in just one season. When the rains came the jungle would come alive with leaches. Any penetration into the deep foliage required frequent stops to remove the creatures before they got established. Leaches gorge on blood until their matchstick size is transformed into something as thick as a thumb. Failure to pay close attention results in a wound that may ulcerate for months. Tropical storms too were a constant hazard. Over 100 inches of rain falls most years. Occasionally there are hailstorms with dangerously large hailstones and from time to time wild earthquakes.

3.17

When Reginald had completed the bungalow project he leased 28 acres of land to cultivate for his own Jhum. He, as always, sets out to revolutionise the way things were dune. The normal method of cultivation was slash and burn. The jungle vegetation would be cut down and left to dry for about six weeks. When all was tinder dry, the hillside would be set light, burning furiously. Crops would be planted as soon as the ashes had cooled and if they had times everything right, the rains would very shortly begin. The local practice was to plant an assortment of seed all together:- rice, maze, Job’s tears, sesame, sorghum, beans, etc. Reginald was a man of order and planted each crop separately. His first year he harvests a big crop of sweet potatoes, enough for six months and was able to give about 1,000 away. With his staples of rice and maze he harvest ginger, melons, edible hollyhocks and mustard. Crop husbandry, theory and practical, became part of the school’s curriculum, thereby ensuring that he had no shortage of labourers. Reginald’s new methods became quite a talking point, villagers from near and far came to observe and comment. Reginald also grew anything he could to supplement his family’s and the school’s diet. He planted bananas, discovering how vulnerable these trees were to tropical storms when heavy with fruit. He found he could grow both citrus and coffee in the hills; a century later the government is making grants to villagers who will plant these. Many of the European plants he tried needed to be protected from the power of the tropical sun; he found a bamboo lattice cover would do this. The horticultural enterprises led him to introduce an annual Harvest Festival, this quickly caught on and attracted a good crowd of villagers.

3.18

In March and April 1917the Lorrain’s went on a district tour, visiting and preaching in several Lakher villages, setting foot where Europeans have never been seen before. Reginald used his Magic Lantern slides to great effect. His two-hour programme would start with amusement and entertainment then progress through instruction to a call to let the Good New of Jesus Christ change his hearer’s lives. For such a novel open-air event the whole community could be guaranteed to turn out.

3.19

The Great War affecting Mission giving; their income for 1917 was just £450. Postal deliveries were badly affected, sometimes delayed and sometimes lost at sea. The school came under war strain too. A rumour went around that the government would take any man who could read and write and send them to serve in France. There was political unrest all though the North East Frontier hills, the Lakher’s could not be isolated form this. The neighbouring Chin tribes to their North were in revolt for a time, and food everywhere doubles in price. During 1919 the Lakher Pioneer journals indicate that The Lorrain’s were becoming more and more exhausted, their Furlough later that year could not come soon enough. Maud Lorrain down with Typhoid and was ill for two months. The harvest and Christmas events were cancelled due to sickness. Two ex schoolboy who had been conscripted into the military come back from France and before they left there was an unusually terrifying earthquake. Reginald described the experience as if the hills were being shaken just like a speeding railway carriage.

3.20

Whilst taking nothing from the heroism of the ‘Five Years in Unknown Jungle’ era, the achievements of this five years were staggering. When they left for England in 1912 there were just two Lakher Christians on the roll, this time they would leave nearer two hundred. Maud’s work with the girls sewing class had dramatically changed the mission’s impact upon the village community. Reginald had built a permanent Mission complex of buildings that would stand the mission in good stead well into the era of the Mara Church’s independence. Despite this major building project, he continued to direct the growing schoolwork and kept up a formidable output of translation and publishing. The work had taken dreadful toll on their health. When they arrived in Calcutta they could not precede to England for some weeks; Maud in particular needed time to recuperated. Brother Herbert Lorrain left for England a little time before them and happened to be present when his and Reginald’s father, died. Before their furlough was over the brothers and Maud had lost two more parents between them. The Mission continued steadily in the Lorrain’s absence with a past student in charge of the school and others responsible for worship and keeping the compound functioning as a going Mission Station.