A Goodly Heritage

“The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places; Yea, I have a goodly heritage.”

— Psalm 16:6, ASV

Indigo

The money that made the Studds came from a plant. Indigo, the blue dye that coloured the uniforms and workclothes of half the world, was grown and processed in the nineteenth century on great estates in the plains of Bihar, in north-eastern India, under the management of European planters. The work in the fields and vats was done by Indian peasants, often on terms that left them in debt and with little choice about what they planted. In 1859 and 1860, the year of Charles Studd’s birth, the indigo districts of Bengal were shaken by a revolt of the cultivators against the planters, and the system was investigated by a government commission. The fortune that later paid for Eton, Cambridge, racehorses and, in the end, a good part of the missionary work of three continents, rested on that labour. Studd’s biographers seldom mention it. It belongs at the start of his story all the same, because he grew up on money that other people had sweated for, and he spent his adult life giving it away.

His father, Edward Studd, was born in Bombay on Christmas Day 1819. He made his fortune as an indigo planter in Tirhut, in Bihar, and returned to England a rich man while still in middle life. His first marriage produced a son, also called Edward, who was born in Tirhut in 1849. In 1856, at Bedford, he married again. His second wife was Dorothy Sophia Thomas, known as Dora, the daughter of John Thomas, a Calcutta merchant with property at Bletsoe in Bedfordshire. They had six sons and a daughter. The eldest of the second family, John Edward Kynaston Studd, always called Kynaston, was born at Netheravon in Wiltshire in 1858. George Brown Studd followed in 1859.

Charles Thomas Studd, the third son of that marriage, was born on 2 December 1860. The family was then living at Spratton, a village a few miles north-west of Northampton, at a house the census of the following year calls Spratton Hill House. Three more sons, Arthur, Herbert and Reginald, and a daughter, Dora, born in 1867, completed the family. In the family and among his friends Charles was usually called Charlie. The world came to know him by his initials, C. T.

The Sporting Squire

Edward Studd lived the life that a rich man of his tastes could live in mid-Victorian England. He hunted, he kept horses, and he raced them. His great ambition was to win the Grand National, the steeplechase at Aintree that was already the most famous horse race in the country. In 1866 he did. His horse Salamander, a long-priced outsider, won the race, and Edward Studd was said to have backed it heavily. Racing men remembered it for years.

In 1871 he took the lease of Tedworth House, a large country house at Tidworth on the edge of Salisbury Plain, together with its home farm. He did not buy it; it belonged to a family that let it to wealthy tenants. There he made a racecourse and, for his sons, a cricket ground. The boys grew up with horses, servants, open country and every kind of game. Accounts of the household in these years describe a father who was generous, energetic and fond of his children, but not, in any sense that his sons later used the word, religious. The family went to church as people of their class did. Nobody expected it to change their lives.

It is worth pausing on what that life gave the young Charlie Studd, because it shaped the man as much as anything that came later. It gave him physical confidence and a body trained by games from childhood. It gave him the habit of command, and the assumption, rarely examined, that people of his kind led and other people followed. It gave him a horror, which never left him, of being thought soft. It also gave him a kind of carelessness about money. He never had to earn his living, and he never feared poverty, because he had never known it. Much later he would choose poverty deliberately, and live in it for decades, but he always chose it as a man who could have done otherwise. That was both his freedom and, at times, his blindness. It is easier to demand that others give up comfort when one has never had to fight one’s way into it.

Eton

All the Studd boys went to Eton. Charlie arrived there in the early 1870s and, like Kynaston and George before him, he went into the cricket eleven. Eton cricket was serious. The annual match against Harrow at Lord’s was one of the great social events of the London summer, and a boy who played well in it was talked about in the newspapers and in the clubs. The three brothers became a kind of dynasty. All three played for Eton, all three would play for Cambridge, and all three would captain the University eleven in consecutive years. According to his biographers, Charlie was captain of the Eton eleven in his last year at the school, 1879. He was remembered as a tall, upright, attractive batsman and a useful fast-medium bowler, and the scores bear out that he was already one of the best schoolboy cricketers in England.

His other interests were few. He was not a scholar and never claimed to be. He was popular, cheerful and well liked, and he seems to have taken it for granted that life would go on much as it was: school, university, cricket in the summers, and some suitable occupation afterwards for which no one was in any hurry.

Muscular Christianity

The world of Eton and its cricket had its own religion, and it is worth understanding, because Studd absorbed it long before he was converted and never entirely shook it off. In the middle of the nineteenth century writers such as Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes, the author of Tom Brown’s School Days, had popularised an ideal that its critics nicknamed “muscular Christianity.” It held that manliness, physical courage, team spirit and fair play were Christian virtues, and that the games field was a school of character. Headmasters built chapels and cricket pavilions with equal enthusiasm. Boys were taught that a gentleman played hard, did not complain of pain, did not let his side down, and served his country.

There was much that was good in this. It taught courage and loyalty, and it made thousands of young men willing to serve in hard places. It was also, in many ways, a religion of the English upper class, more concerned with character than with grace, and more at home with duty than with mercy. It despised weakness. It made it hard to admit fear. It confused the kingdom of God, at times, with the British Empire, and the Christian soldier with the officer on the frontier.

Charlie Studd grew up inside that ideal. When he became a wholehearted Christian, he did not reject it so much as turn it towards Christ. His later writing is full of its language: pluck, heroism, soldiers, the team, the refusal to give in. Paul too could speak of the athlete and the soldier, and wrote that “bodily exercise is profitable for a little; but godliness is profitable for all things” (1 Timothy 4:8, ASV). But Paul could also boast of his weaknesses, and say that God’s power was made perfect in them. That was a lesson Studd would have to learn, slowly and painfully, and some of it he never learned at all.

A Family of Cricketers

The Studd brothers were a sporting family to an extraordinary degree. Edward, the half-brother born in India, played first-class cricket. Kynaston, George and Charlie all played for Cambridge and for Middlesex, and George and Charlie for England. Two of the younger brothers also played first-class cricket. Kynaston would later become one of the great figures of the cricket establishment as well as of evangelical work in London, and he served as Lord Mayor of London. In the 1870s and 1880s the name of Studd on a scorecard was enough to draw a crowd.

It is worth remembering that background when reading the rest of this story. Studd did not give up cricket because he was bad at it, or because he had grown tired of it, or because it had nothing more to give him. He gave it up at the height of his powers, in a family where it was the very centre of life and honour. That was what made the decision so striking to his contemporaries, and why it still impresses people who know the game.

What a Heritage Is For

The psalmist who wrote, “The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places; Yea, I have a goodly heritage,” was not talking about money. In the next breath he says, “I have set Jehovah always before me” (Psalm 16:8, ASV). The lines, the boundary-lines of a man’s portion of land, are pleasant because of the God who drew them, and the heritage is good because the Lord himself is its best part. “Jehovah is the portion of mine inheritance and of my cup,” the psalm begins (Psalm 16:5, ASV).

Charlie Studd had a goodly heritage in every sense his world recognised. He had health, wealth, a famous school, a father who loved him, brothers he admired, and a gift for the most admired game in England. He did not yet have the thing the psalmist meant. When he found it, it would turn the rest of his inheritance upside down. Few people have taken the words of Jesus to the rich young man more literally: “go, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, follow me” (Mark 10:21, ASV). The young man in the Gospel went away sorrowful, “for he was one that had great possessions” (Mark 10:22, ASV). Studd, as this book will tell, did not go away. But the habits and assumptions of a rich man’s son did not vanish when he gave his money away. Some of his greatest strengths, and some of his worst faults, were learned at Tedworth.

The change, when it came, did not begin with Charlie. It began with his father, and it began at a meeting the father had to be persuaded to attend.