The Dear Old Man

“God setteth the solitary in families: He bringeth out the prisoners into prosperity; But the rebellious dwell in a parched land.”

— Psalm 68:6, ASV

Manchester

In 1889 Amy Carmichael and her mother moved to Manchester. The rest of the family was scattering. The Carmichael fortunes had not recovered, and the younger children were making their own way; in time several of them would emigrate and make their lives overseas. For Amy and her mother, Manchester offered a fresh start and a new field of work. They had been invited to help in a mission among the mill workers of the city, and Amy threw herself into it with all the energy she had brought to the Welcome Hall.

Manchester was the first industrial city of the world. Its cotton mills had made it rich and famous, and they had also made parts of it among the most wretched places in Britain. Ancoats, the district where the earliest great mills had been built, was a byword for overcrowding, dirt and poverty. Its streets were narrow and dark, its houses damp, its air thick with smoke. Mill girls lived there in great numbers, and so did the poorest of the city’s poor.

Amy chose to live among them. She took a room in the district, in a house that, by the accounts that survive, was dirty and infested with vermin, so that she would be near the people she wanted to reach. It was an unusual thing for a young woman of her background to do, and it showed the same instinct that would later lead her to wear Indian dress and live in an Indian village. She wanted to be among people, not above them.

Breakdown

The work in Manchester did not last long. Amy’s health, already uncertain, could not stand the strain. The neuralgia that had troubled her in Belfast grew worse, and the long hours, the poor food, and the foul air of Ancoats wore her down. Within months she was exhausted and ill, and she had to stop.

It was a bitter experience. She had given up the Welcome Hall to come to Manchester, and now she could not do the work she had come for. She had to accept that there were limits to what her body could bear, and that zeal alone would not carry her. It was the first of many such lessons. Again and again in her life, illness would stop her, or slow her, or send her somewhere she had not planned to go. She never found it easy to accept, but she came to believe that God used it.

Robert Wilson

It was at this low point that an old friend stepped in. Robert Wilson was a Quaker, a Cumberland businessman, and one of the founders of the Keswick Convention. He was a much older man, a widower who, by the usual account, had lost both his wife and his only daughter, and he lived at Broughton Grange, a country house near Cockermouth, with his grown sons. Amy had met him through the convention movement, probably in 1887, and he had taken a warm interest in her. Now, seeing her worn out by the work in Manchester, he invited her to come and stay at Broughton Grange.

She went in 1890, and she stayed. What began as a convalescence became a new life. Robert Wilson came to treat her as a daughter, and she came to treat him as a father. She called him by an affectionate nickname, “the Dear Old Man,” and in her letters often simply “D.O.M.” In time she began to use his name alongside her own, and her early books were published under the name Amy Wilson-Carmichael. She was never legally adopted, but the relationship was, for both of them, real and deep.

Her mother agreed to the arrangement, and that too was an act of generosity. Catherine Carmichael was a widow, and Amy was her eldest daughter. To let her go to another household was to give something up. But she seems to have seen that her daughter needed rest, and that Robert Wilson needed companionship, and that the arrangement might serve them both. It was not the last time that she would let Amy go.

A School of Another Kind

Broughton Grange was a school for Amy in a way that Harrogate had never been. Robert Wilson was at the heart of the Keswick movement, and through him she met many of the leading evangelical figures of the day. Missionaries on furlough, speakers at the convention, and leaders of mission societies came and went at the house. She heard their stories, listened to their discussions, and saw the needs of the world through their eyes. Among them, she would later meet or hear Hudson Taylor, founder of the China Inland Mission, whose appeal for workers had already stirred her at Keswick in 1887.

She also absorbed something of the Quaker spirit of her adopted father. Robert Wilson was a man of quiet, practical faith, and he valued silence and waiting on God. The Keswick Convention he had helped to found was deliberately interdenominational; its motto was “All one in Christ Jesus.” Amy, the Presbyterian girl who had been schooled among Methodists and who would later work with Anglicans, took that spirit to heart. Dohnavur would never belong to a single denomination, and she would insist that its members be united by their love for Christ rather than by their church labels.

At Broughton Grange she learned, too, the practical business of running a large household. She helped Robert Wilson with his correspondence, acted as his companion, and in many ways ran his home. It was experience that she would draw on later, when she found herself at the head of a household of hundreds.

A Missionary Age

The years Amy spent at Broughton Grange were years of extraordinary missionary enthusiasm in the English-speaking churches. In 1885 seven young men from Cambridge, among them a famous cricketer, had sailed for China with Hudson Taylor’s mission, and their story had been told in every evangelical newspaper. In America, the Student Volunteer Movement had taken as its watchword “the evangelization of the world in this generation,” and thousands of students were signing pledges to go overseas. Women were beginning to go out in large numbers, not only as missionaries’ wives but as missionaries in their own right, to teach, to nurse, and to visit women in their homes where no man could go.

The Keswick Convention was caught up in this movement and helped to drive it. Its teaching on surrender, on giving the whole of oneself to Christ, led naturally to the question of where Christ wanted that self to be given. Speakers at the convention appealed for missionaries, and the convention began to consider whether it should send missionaries of its own. By the late 1880s missionary meetings had become part of the convention week, and before long it would form a committee to send missionaries of its own. Robert Wilson was at the centre of these discussions, and Amy, living in his house, heard them all.

She was not yet thinking of going herself. Her health was poor, and she had a home and a duty at Broughton Grange. But the air she breathed there was full of the needs of the world, and of the conviction that those needs were a summons to every Christian who heard of them. Sooner or later, the question would become personal.

Set in a Family

The verse at the head of this chapter says that “God setteth the solitary in families.” It is a verse about the care of God for those who are alone: the orphan, the widow, the stranger, the prisoner. Amy Carmichael was not exactly solitary in 1890. She had a mother and brothers and sisters who loved her. But her father was dead, her family was scattering, her health had broken, and her work had been taken from her. In Robert Wilson’s house, God gave her a new family at the moment she needed it.

She would spend much of her life doing the same for others. At Dohnavur she would gather children who had no family at all, or whose families could not or would not keep them, and make them into a family. She insisted that it was a family, not an institution. The children were not inmates or cases; they were sons and daughters, brothers and sisters. She was their Amma. It is not too much to say that she was passing on what she had received at Broughton Grange, where an old man had taken in a worn-out young woman and made her his daughter.

The Shadow of a Question

There is one more thing to say about the Broughton Grange years, and it would come to matter a great deal. Robert Wilson came to depend on Amy, and he hoped that she would stay with him. He was growing old, and she had become the light of his home. When, two years later, she believed that God was calling her to go overseas, she faced a painful choice between the call and the man who had been a father to her.

Some of those around them thought she should stay. Robert Wilson needed her; she had a duty to him; there were plenty of people who could go to the mission field, but only one who could care for him. It was a reasonable argument, and Amy felt its force. The next chapter tells how she resolved it, and what it cost her and him. But it is worth noticing that the question arose because the relationship was so real. Amy Carmichael was not a woman who sat lightly to human love. She loved deeply, and she would have to learn, again and again, what it meant to put Christ first without loving others less.

For now, in 1890 and 1891, she was at peace. She had a home, a father, and work to do, and she was recovering her strength. She was also listening, though she did not yet know for what.