Chapter 4    

Consolidation 1920 – 1927   

Over the Burma Border

4.01

            Again in England, Reginald and Maud embarked on a hectic round of speaking and making contacts across all the mainstream denominations. Reginald recorded in his meticulous way, 3,300 miles covered, taking their mission story to any who would give them a hearing. They approached various mission societies but not for the first time, without tangible result. The Missionaries were present on the 4^th of May 1920 for the AGM of the Society. The meeting was held at Sion College on the Victoria Embankment, London. With the Annual Report for 1919 they presented a shopping list of resources that would best help the work forward. Maud needed sewing materials and cloth for her sewing class, Reginald wished for a quarter of a mile of pipe and a pump to bring water up to the bungalow, a dynamo, beehives, a printing press and most important, a doubling of the ongoing general income. He also requested £250 to print the latest edition of his 7,000-word Lakher dictionary. An enlarged and revised, but still incomplete, New Testament was ready to be printed, free of charge, by the British and Foreign Bible Society. Reginald and Maud also declared that they were looking for an assistant for mission work and as a governess to Tlosai. Reginald must have got his way as usual because early in 1922 they set off on their 96-day journey back to the mission with an assistant, 20-year-old Miss Ramsey, a printing press and loads of new resources.

4.02

            The Lakher Pioneer quarterly magazine through 1920 -1927 does not reveal anything like the detail of the Serkawr Mission Station as it had in times past. In the early days Reginald reported for the home supporters each small increment of progress, through these next years much of what can be gleaned is only in the Annual Reports, and that often presented as statistics. Reginald’s interest seems to have been captured by the new horizons over the Burma border and down the Kaladan. 

Reginald's map from 5 years in unknown jungle 

A few revealing pictures from the station do appear through the occasional articles written by Miss Ramsey. One such is a piece about Maud’s ‘Pantry Window’. Each day Maud would transact all sorts of business through this vital portal. She might barter for goods or services, or respond to some urgent or trivial welfare need. This ‘Mutual Friendly Society’ over which she presided, generated or converted resources to help sustain the 40 or 50 people resident and active on the compound. She also acted like Joseph in Egypt, buying surplus in times of plenty and lend back in times of famine. Her enterprise could also provide hard currency for the locals who had become subject to a government poll tax. Maud’s Pantry Window was also the emergency dispensary for those who could not wait until the 4pm clinic. Through her say with the Mission Miss Ramsey appeared to contribute mostly by assisting Maud with her many duties including the sewing class and by partnering the fast maturing Tlosai with the Sunday School and other works.

4.03

The great ‘Spanish Flue’ epidemic of 1919 that killed more people than the whole of the 1914-18 war did not spare these farthest borders of India. For all that; during the Missionaries absence the work in India had continued, making steady progress. The school had been kept busy under Reginald’s Lakher deputy, however with a smaller intake to lighten the load. He was more than pleased with the results when he returned. Ten more names had been added to the Christians roll during the missionary’s absence. Very soon the whole enterprise was back in full swing. Weekly needlework sessions were re-started and the class quickly grew to 26 girls and women. The very next newsletter reported Maud desperate for cloth of any sort for her class to work. Early in 1923 the class rose to 45 and ran completely out of material causing its temporary shutdown. Maud recorded her thanks to the folk in England for sewing materials in the first of 1924’s quarterly ‘Lakher Pioneer’ Journals. She reported that the class was back in business with 22 regular girls and women, of whom 7 were baptized. Reginald soon had his printing press established in its own building. Two of his previous students joined him as trainee printers. Ruefully he admitted that there was much to learn about printing. Their first job demonstrated an essential difference between Lakher and English, they ran out of ‘A’s on the first page, the Lakher language ends every syllable on a vowel, so he needed thirty times as many ‘A’s as would be required for English. More supplies were ordered and he would like £20 for a paper cutter. Soon he was making very good use of his new facility; printing school and church resources books and pamphlets. The new school Geography textbook was one of the first jobs. With the innovation of printing on the Mission Compound Reginald’s finished scripts could be set up and printed in days or weeks rather than the 12 months it had taken to post stuff out to Calcutta, wait for proofs to return and be checked perhaps twice then printed and finally carried into the hills.

4.04

            Early in 1924 the mission staged a great Christian gathering at Serkawr. 

people arriving for the 2007 great centenary gathering in Serkawr

The event lasted three days and attracted some 200 Christians. All the meetings took place in the open air except for the Sunday Morning service. There were eight Lakher’s able to share in the preaching. The proceedings were inaugurated with a service of welcome on the Thursday evening. On Friday there was meetings with praising, singing and preaching and in the evening a two-hour magic lantern session. For the slide show Reginald used his time-honoured fromula of: funny slides, followed by the Gospel, finishing up with Pilgrim’s Progress. 

A 2007 playlet of the Missionaries first arrival in 1907

Saturday morning was left free. In the afternoon there followed a great service at which 24 Lakher’s were Baptized. Eleven women and girls and thirty men and boys stood in the congregation to recite their belief, they then trooped off to the watercourse to be baptized. Reginald observed that there must have been many a rejoicing Angel looking on that day. Afterwards tea was taken and the day finished with a great evening meeting. Fifty-five Baptized Christians participated in a service of the Lord’s Supper on Sunday morning. Reginald declared this wonderful service to be the largest gathering to share this Christian ordinance in Lakher land up to that date. The rest of Sunday was taken up with an afternoon service and an evening service with farewells.

4.05

Saiha village is a Lakher community some two days walk away from the mission station.  The mission’s earliest school students came from this village and one of the first satellite schools flourished here for a short time. Reginald was able to report in 1924 that the Christians in Saiha had built a church; they also reopened their school. A decade of ups and downs would follow before this village could boast a steady Christian community. From time to time active members would number more than fifty then relapse until the faithful few could be counted on one hand. Other satellite schools and church groups followed the same early pattern of mixed success. These outlying enterprises would achieve much greater stability and progress after the home visit 1926-1928 when the enlarged team of European Missionaries and the new band of Lakher Evangelists became established. Thanks to Miss Ramsey we have the first account of a dramatic event at Zylow, a nearby village, for whatever reason Reginald had made no mention of this. A very disturbing throw back to the previous century’s head hunting days occurred there in 1917. The village men went out on a raiding expedition to another village and took twenty men from there as their prisoners. On returning home they ritually sacrificed three of these unfortunates and then brutally murdered the remaining seventeen out of hand. Strong government action brought the miscreants to heel and that was the last of such activities. Remarkably by 1924 there was a thriving satellite school in Zylow which in its first ten months boasted eight scholars who learnt to read and write. The school closed at the end of that year for shortage of new entrants but not for very long. When the new Missionary Colleagues arrive in 1928 they were soon recording in the Lakher Pioneer, the doings in Zylow. It is with no little thanksgiving to God that in this last bastion of evil, a band of unwavering Christian saints went on very soon to build their own church.

4.06

            Reginald had long pestered the local Assam Government officials for permission to enter Burma but without success. In 1924 he tried a different approach going directly to the Burmese Colonial Authorities, this time with a better result. On 21^st November 1924 he, set out with Maud, Miss Ramsey, Tlosai and four Lakher men, to blaze a trail down the Kaladan river to the Indian Ocean, a journey of more than 200 miles. The first hundred miles of river was completely uncharted, no European expedition had attempted this journey before. 

Reginald's pioneer journey down the Kaladan River

The unexplored stretch contained many obstacles such as rapids that had to be portaged around through virgin jungle, not to mention the full gamut of jungle creatures, large and small. As they went they visited the Lakher villages on the Burma side. They did not join the Kaladan directly below Serkawr but cut due south through uncharted jungle. This was presumably to meet the river where it flowed west before going south. At the river they were able to acquire two dugout canoes and proceeded downstream. They camped beside the water wherever they could, only occasionally being fortunate enough to find a suitable village that would give them hospitability. They made contact with the Matu tribe and leaving two of their Lakher men there for the two months until their return journey. They were to begin to evangelize this people and to learning their language. Reginald already was froming plans to extend the mission to include this tribe. Eventually they arrived at Kondor which was then the upper limit of the river’s navigation. Here they boarded a small river steamer that plied between Kondor and Paletwa. Thereafter they made their way by established transport down to the coast at (Akyab) Sittwe. On arrival they visited the deputy commissioner before sailing to Calcutta for a short break. On their return journey the Deputy Commissioner again entertained them and on seeing them off remarked that he would not consider their journey without more than 100 rifles and many more coolies. Pushing back up river was hard going with some hair-raising adventures. One night as they settled down in camp they surprised by a rogue elephant. The local’s scattered making for large rocks beside the river, knowing that the elephants could not penetrate such difficult terrain; Reginald and his three ladies took to one of the canoes and sat the night out in midstream. The party finally arrived back home after three months. Reginald was soon appealing for fresh funds to support work with Kumi and the Matu tribes, which they had encountered on their epic river journey. He immediately began to devote a great deal of time to a translation and literacy programme for these fresh contacts. Throughout the story of the Lakher Mission the Burma India border would recur as a constraining factor. That year Reginald also visited the great exhibition in Calcutta. Three Lakhers accompanied him; these men had never left the hills before. The next edition of the Lakher Pioneer contained a lovely account of the journey and the visit retold by on of his ‘Innocents Abroad’. His unedited description of the journey, the great exhibition, and all the wonders that he encountered in the great city, is a classic piece.

4.07

            Reginald was keen to return to Burma to the Kumi and Matu country as soon as the rains finish in 1924. He had spent the past months turning out a primer and other material in the Kumi language on the new printing press. As he left to visit and evangelize some of the villages of his new territory, he also dispatched two Lakhers to evangelize the Pachypi people. This tribe lived to the to the south and spoke Lakher. Reginald had now extended the mission’s influence over a further 3,000 square miles of remote hill country thereby doubling the area to which they were the sole outreach agency. His report in the Lakher Pioneer inevitably finished with an appeal for more funds to resource these new mission fields. Despite these further pioneer endeavours a note of tiredness can be detected, he declared that their typical working day was now just 6am to 7pm. For the first time he began to record the years that they have given to the mission. This strain would recur in his reports together with a yearning for a co-worker through to the next furlough in 1927. Reginald undertook another epic journey early in 1925. He took twenty men and cut a path through 100 miles of jungle directly south to Paletwa on the navigable reaches of the Kaladan River. This route followed no existing line and was made entirely by compass. Later that year after the rains he was invited to join an official expedition by, the new District Superintendent, Mr Perry. They travelled into closed Lakher country over the Burma borders. The party was a large one of over 100 with twenty-five Sepoys (Indian Soldiers). Reginald remarked that it was very strange to march with fixed bayonets. On their way out they passed Reginald’s path cut to Paletwa, it had obviously become a new and well used route showing all the signs of constant traffic, probably to fetch salt. The Superintendent’s party travelled ten days east and then into the Khahria range, making the summit at 6,350 feet. From here Reginald could see the whole of the Lakher tribal Land and well into Chin Hills. Quite soon they were again on the Burma border, this time on a mission tour of the Lakher villages to the northeast. He took along Maud, Tlosai and Miss Ramsey and the magic lantern. There tour included an ascent of Pypi, (the Blue Mountain), height 7,100 feet. The altitude brought a welcome relief from the lower hill climate and they saw many interesting botanical specimens on the way. Again the view was breathtaking over their own and the Chin Hills. It should not come as too great a surprise that Reginald’s report on the Mission for 1924 is rather downbeat. He must have been absent from the mission station on his several expeditions for a significant part of the year. He complained about behaviour in the school, about training Lakher staff only to lose them almost immediately, of converts who came on for a time and then return to their old habits. To add to their difficulties money from home was decreasing. Reports from the mission station during 1926 echo with tiredness and the need for a furlough was in the air. Reginald’s writing in the Lakher Pioneer, apart from his annual report tell less and less of the main work of the mission, such enthusiasm that he displayed seemed to be confined to his escapades into the new territory. For all this there were some great new developments coming out of the Mission Station. One of the temptations that ensnare their new Christians was the frequent beer fests.  To these Reginald resolved to offer an alternative activity. He devised a monthly social which they started in the mission’s meeting room. It consisted of an evening of: party games, hymn singing, magic lantern show during which Maud’s famous scones and lemonade was served. These events were very successful right from the first evening. They started with over a hundred attending and the numbers grew a little every time. Another initiative was a monthly magazine that they printed and sent out to the Christians in the villages. Later the publication would be titled ‘The Bugle Call’. The first print run was just 150 but soon extended to 200 and more. There were reports of the magazine being passed around the villages and even an account of a person learning to read in remote places with the aid of just a borrowed copy. The other events of Harvest Festival and Christmas with the Christmas tree continued to be highly valued and very effective in the home village.

           

4.08

            In his review Reginald reported on a number of disjointed subjects. He had to overhaul the bungalow, replacing several of the post on which it stood. It had been a very dry season with fire spreading wildly on the hill slopes. More than once they come very near to having the mission compound burnt out. He set to work to organize the cutting of a fire break road right around the hill two or three hundred feet below the mission. Men came in constantly from villages near and far in search of paid work to ease their desperate needs. Reginald had plenty of work but very limited funds forcing to ration his offers of employment. He reported for the first time in some detail on the medical work. There were three conditions which made up the bulk of their hundred of so daily dispensary calls: anaemia which was often caused the poor rice based diet, thyroid trouble dew to the lack of iodine in the natural water supply, and endemic malaria. Maud would manage the dispensary leaving surgery to Reginald. Bamboo was used everywhere for building and for all sorts of domestic applications. Splitting bamboo could resulted in a razor sharp edge, this could be used to skin animals or as spikes in animal traps, but it could also caused horrific accidents. Such trauma provided the high drama of the Mission’s medical practice, on these occasions Reginald would be called in to clean out and sew up these often-extensive injuries. During 1926 the mission arranged a great students reunion to which 80 past graduates came. Reginald’s best man in the print shop was called back to his home village just as about half of Pilgrim’s Progress had been printed when. He was annoyed to lose a good man who he had spent so long training. Eventually Reginald completed the translation of the whole New Testament. The previous edition had lack several of the epistles, some of these Reginald had found the most challenging of all his translation work during this nineteen-year project. The revised manuscripts of his earlier work and the newly completed translations would now go to the British and Foreign Bible Society for printing. This volume is possibly Reginald’s most enduring achievement.

4.09

When it was time to leave for their furlough Reginald decided take the Kaladan River route out to Calcutta. This time they made the journey with full baggage. They came to grief shooting some rapids with fully loaded canoes. One of the boats was swamped as it passed through on of the rapids causing all in it to be tipped out into the water. The baggage was all retrieved further down stream without loss but a Serkawr man was drowned. The whole party was thrown into great distress, eventually several men were sent back to the village carrying the body. At the next village the party was at first refused hospitality because they were still tainted by the death of their man. The night was wet and cold but only after a long discussion was a compromise reached; it involving Reginald paying for a pig for the village to sacrificed, they were only then allowed shelter for the night. At Calcutta they met Reginald’s brother Herbert who was still with the Baptist Missionary Society at Longley. During the journey voyage to England they visited the Pyramids of Egypt and Jerusalem, and the way celebrate Tlosai’s eighteenth birthday.    

4.10

Reginald and Maud were clearly great pioneers of the most heroic sort, the epitome of the best of the Victorian Colonial Missionary bread. By the mid 1930’s their dedication and self-sacrifice would have firmly established the twin blessings of the Christian Gospel and literacy amongst the Lakher people, neither were yet universal but the way was opening for this achievement. The good news of the love of God for every corner of humanity was being heard and was transfroming lives in those remote hills. The Lorrain’s teaching and most of all their lives proclaimed afresh: “that God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever shall believe on him will be saved”. As the Mission passed beyond its 21^st year the tide was flowing stronger and stronger: the church was numbered in thousands, Baptisms each year would grown to three figures, Christian marriages became more common and literacy and Christian learning be disseminated into a band of indigenous preachers and teachers. Pioneers bring success because they are single minded, focused and doggedly persistent, that is, until they achieve the breakthrough that is their goal; then success itself could be fraught with difficult. It is one thing to scale the impossible but quite another to settle into domestic life and build on that which they have pioneered. Reginald was no exception! Through the past seven years his attention has been grabbed by new challenges beyond the Burma border with the result loss of impetus in the established mission. A note of tiredness has crept into his reporting, he longed for a colleague, counted the passing years he confesses to no longer working the heroic dawn to midnight hours. The school had experienced disruptive students, he struggled to find time for his New Testament translation and he was dispirited by setbacks in the growth of his new Christian community. In Miss Ramsey’s place Reginald and Maud would bring back two assistant missionaries. The new talent would reinvigorate the mission. Reginald also would have a fresh challenge, which would be to induct his new staff into the work, culture and language of the Lakhers. In true from he would layout a course of study and set them exacting examinations for which they would be required to commit long hours through their first two years. As they became competent they would join the new team of Lakher Evangelistic and together would transform the work. Taking the scale of the Mission’s achievements from addition to multiplication. By the next furlough in 1934 the full potential of Reginald and Maud’s pioneer work would be clearly discerned as the Gospel of Jesus laid claim to a growing band of followers.