A Short Visit

“Many waters cannot quench love, Neither can floods drown it: If a man would give all the substance of his house for love, He would utterly be contemned.”

— Song of Solomon 8:7, ASV

Twelve Years Apart

When Studd sailed for Africa in 1916, he and Priscilla had been married for twenty-eight years. They would not see each other again for twelve.

It is hard for a modern reader to take that in, and it ought to be. They were not estranged. They wrote to each other constantly, and every account says that they loved each other to the end. They were separated by a decision that both of them, in the end, accepted: that he would lead the work in Africa and she would lead it at home, and that neither would leave their post for the other’s sake. Priscilla’s health would not allow her to live in the Congo, and Studd would not leave it. So for twelve years their marriage was carried on by letter, across a journey of many weeks, with all the delays and misunderstandings that letters bring.

Their admirers have usually told this as a story of shared sacrifice, and it was. But it is also right to say that it was a strain, and to ask what it cost. The apostle Paul, who had no high view of marriage as a distraction from the Lord’s work, still told married couples not to deprive each other “except it be by consent for a season, that ye may give yourselves unto prayer, and may be together again” (1 Corinthians 7:5, ASV). A season is not twelve years. The Studds had reasons for what they did, and they did it with consent. But the long separation must be counted among the costs of Studd’s way of life, and not only among its glories. It cost Priscilla the companionship of her husband through years of illness and heavy responsibility. It cost Studd the one person who knew him well enough to tell him the truth and be heard. Some of the harshness of his later years may be connected with that loss. It is impossible to prove, but it is hard not to wonder.

Priscilla’s Work

Through those twelve years Priscilla carried the mission at home. She ran the headquarters at Highland Road. She dealt with the letters, the money and the candidates. She spoke at meetings around Britain, and she is remembered as an effective and moving speaker, warm and direct. She did all this while suffering from a heart condition that, at times, left her unable to work at all.

It is not too much to say that without her there would have been no Heart of Africa Mission and no WEC. Studd was the visionary and the pioneer. She was the one who found the people and the money to make the vision real. She is a figure of real courage in her own right, and her story has been told far less often than his. A woman of her gifts in the early twentieth century could not easily have led a mission in her own name. She led one in his.

She also had to stand between her husband and the mission’s friends at home when his letters and tracts caused offence. That cannot have been easy. She loved him and shared his convictions, but she lived among the people who were shocked by him, and she had to keep the mission’s supporters loyal. Some of the strains that erupted after her death had been held in check, while she lived, by her patience and her diplomacy.

The Visit

In 1928 Priscilla made the long journey to the Congo to see her husband. It was the only time she ever visited the field. She stayed only briefly. One account says thirteen days; the others say only that it was a short visit. Then she went home.

No reliable record of what passed between them during those days is available to this book, and it would be wrong to invent one. It is enough to say that they were together again, after twelve years, at Ibambi, among the people for whom they had both given so much, and that it was the last time they saw each other.

One thing about the visit can be said with confidence, because it is in the nature of the case. For a woman with a heart condition, in her sixties, to make the journey from England to the north-eastern Congo in 1928 was an undertaking of real danger and great discomfort: weeks at sea, then a long journey overland by whatever transport could be found, into a climate that had broken the health of many younger travellers. She did it for a few days with her husband. Whatever else is said about their marriage, that journey says that the love between them was not a matter of words only.

Málaga

A few months later, on 15 January 1929, Priscilla Studd died at Málaga, in southern Spain. One source dates her death to 1928, but the date of January 1929 is given by the fuller records. The circumstances of her being in Spain are not described in the sources available here. She was sixty-four.

The news had to travel to Ibambi by the slow routes of the time. What Studd felt when it reached him can only be imagined; the sources available to this book do not record his words. He had given her up, in a sense, many years before, when he went to Africa. Now she was gone in a way that could not be undone, and he had not been with her. He had lost his partner, his defender at home, and the person who, more than anyone, had made his life’s work possible.

The effect on the mission was also great. With Priscilla gone, there was no one in England with her authority, her knowledge of her husband, and her ability to hold the home side together. Within two years the relationship between Studd and the committee in London would break down entirely.

“Weeping may tarry for the night, But joy cometh in the morning” (Psalm 30:5, ASV). The psalm does not deny the weeping. It says that the night is not the end. For Charles and Priscilla Studd, the night of separation was long, and it ended, on earth, in her death far from him. They both believed that the morning would come.

The Daughters

The four Studd daughters grew up in a household where the mission came first, and the separation of their parents shaped their lives as well. When their father left for Africa in 1913, the youngest was eighteen; all four were grown women when he left for the last time in 1916. Each of them chose, in her own way, to share in the work their parents had given their lives to. Edith married Alfred Buxton and went to the Congo. Pauline married Norman Grubb and went too. Dorothy married Gilbert Barclay, who helped run the mission at home. Grace married Martin Sutton, and after his death David Munro, who would stand with Norman Grubb in the crisis of 1931.

Their loyalty to their parents was remarkable. It was also tested. At least one of the four was married to a man who found himself at odds with their father. Edith was dismissed from the mission with her husband. The family quarrels of the late 1920s ran through the daughters’ own marriages. How they felt about it is not recorded in any source available to this book, and it would be wrong to guess. It is enough to say that the cost of their father’s choices did not fall only on him and their mother.

Paul wrote, “And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but nurture them in the chastening and admonition of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4, ASV). Studd’s daughters did not, so far as the record shows, turn against him or against his faith. All four remained committed Christians, and two of them gave their lives to the work he had begun. That is no small thing to say of the children of a man so often absent and so often difficult. It may say as much about their mother as about him.

Love Stronger than Distance

The Song of Solomon is a love song, and near its end it says something about love that Christians have always applied both to human love and to the love of God. “Many waters cannot quench love, Neither can floods drown it.” And then, strangely: “If a man would give all the substance of his house for love, He would utterly be contemned.” Love cannot be bought. A man who offered all his wealth in exchange for it would be laughed at.

Charles and Priscilla Studd had given away all the substance of their house, long before, for the love of Christ. They had not bought anything with it, and they knew that. What they had, they had been given. Their love for each other survived twelve years of separation, the strains of the mission, his illness and hers, and all the misunderstandings that letters bring. It did not survive death, in the sense that death parted them. But they both believed what Paul told the Thessalonians, that those who have fallen asleep in Jesus are not lost, and that God will bring them with him (1 Thessalonians 4:13-14).

It is right to honour them for what they gave, and to admire the faith that made it possible. It is also right to grieve, as Paul did not forbid, for the years they did not have together. Those years were part of the cost. Both of them paid it, and she paid her share mostly out of sight.