The Cambridge Seven

The True Story of Ordinary Men Used in no Ordinary way

John Pollock

• Publisher: Christian Focus Publication
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781781910979

 

1

TRINITY FRESHMAN

Stanley Peregrine Smith was a slight, fair haired youth, with a determined little mouth, when he entered Trinity College, Cambridge in October 1879. Aged eighteen and a half he had not come up straight from school like most of the freshmen, for a serious illness had obliged him to leave Repton early. He had enjoyed a year of convalescence and freedom.

Smith came from a home which was quietly but unashamedly Christian. His father, a successful London surgeon, had thought nothing of kneeling in prayer with the boy after settling him into his rooms in Market Passage under the shadow of Great St. Mary’s. Stanley himself had ‘accepted the Saviour’ (his own phrase) at the age of thirteen in 1874, while listening at Eastbourne to D. L. Moody, the American evangelist who had stirred all Scotland and was preaching in the English provinces before starting in London. At Repton, Stanley had joined a little meeting for prayer and Bible study formed by an older boy, Granville Waldegrave, in a room over the tuck-shop, and he wanted to be a Church of England parson; yet by 1879 his religion had become an ineffective struggle to live up to good intentions.

He kept a diary describing each day – a little work, much skating during that hard, prolonged winter of 1878–9, the exciting new game of lawn tennis during the summer, and boating, bathing or bicycling on the fifty-two inch Singer penny-farthing with steel-plated hubs and rims, a gift from his father and the pride of his life; but, he could find nothing to say about his spiritual life except ‘poor’, ‘unsatisfactory,’ ‘very poor,’ ‘a little wee improvement,’ ‘character un-Christlike and foolish.’

Moreover he suffered from colds, chills and sore chests, a legacy of his illness; and as he saw no connection between physical ill-health and spiritual decay, and gauged his faith by his feelings, the reports were generally bad.

All this went little further than his diary. His family and friends knew him as an affectionate, happy-natured boy with a strong sense of humour, who might be a little argumentative and contradictory and have phases of moody nervousness, yet never complained of his ills and was remarkably plucky in sticking to games and work despite frequent pain. But Stanley Smith was a defeated Christian and he knew it.

The first weeks at Cambridge passed in a whirl. Smith was soon down at the river, though not having rowed for a year he was placed in one of the lowest boats. He was elected a member of the Bicycle Club and pedalled happily on his penny-farthing to Grantchester and the Gogs. Repton friends were all around, especially Montagu Beauchamp, of tall, athletic build, a year older than Smith but closest at school, who had also come up to Trinity. They were in and out of each other’s rooms and walked together in cap and gown through Old Court (now Great Court) to dine in the Hall.

Beauchamp’s parents, Sir Thomas, who had died five years before, and Lady Beauchamp, a sister of Lord Radstock, the noted evangelist, had made Langley Park, their Norfolk home, a centre of Christian activity. Smith and Beauchamp thus had much in common. They would go occasionally to the Daily Prayer Meeting in the hired room above All Saints’ Passage and to the weekly meeting on Sundays of the recently formed Inter-Collegiate Christian Union, and help at a Sunday School in the slums. In their own rooms they would try to recapture the atmosphere of the Repton tuck-shop meetings.

On the river Smith met again another Old Reptonian, William Cassels of St. John’s, a good footballer and moderate oarsman, who was reading for Holy Orders. A quiet, reserved man, dubbed ‘William the Silent,’ he was already in his third year. Neither etiquette nor inclination drew them much together.

Cambridge undergraduates in 1879 were almost all from public schools or the larger grammar schools and exclusively male: women had just been admitted to lectures but could not take degrees. Stanley Smith made friends easily with Trinity freshmen from other schools, and in particular with William Hoste, up from Clifton College, who was both a Christian and a rowing man. Once Smith met Willie’s younger brother, D. E. Hoste, a shy and taciturn gunner subaltern very recently commissioned, and entirely uninterested in Christian gossip.

Beauchamp introduced Smith to an Old Etonian in his second year named G. B. Studd, already prominent as a cricketer. His younger brother, C. T. Studd was even better at the game, a freshman who seemed to live only for cricket, in season and out. Their father, a retired Indian planter who had recently died, had been converted in the Moody and Sankey London mission of 1875, so the Studds enjoyed Christian chatter and were always ready to have a few ‘Sankeys’ round the piano and a prayer or two to follow.

‘C. T.’, Smith and Beauchamp, with Cassels, the intending parson, and D. E. Hoste, the gunner, would have all been astounded had they seen their future.

As Stanley Smith’s first term advanced, rowing took more of his time. He entered for the freshmen’s sculls, despite his chest which disliked the Cambridge damp, and was defeated in the final; but found himself to his great delight chosen stroke of First Trinity freshmen’s eight. The scramble to keep lectures, get to the river, and put in a few hours’ reading and the customary amount of idle lounging or singing with friends meant the occasional loss of his ‘half-hour,’ the daily time of Bible reading and prayer on his own. He would make up his losses by sitting before an open Bible on a Sunday, trying to keep thoughts from wandering too far.

During his second term he cut the Daily Prayer Meeting and frequently forgot Sunday School, though not his ‘half-hour.’ In the Lent Races he rowed in First Trinity’s sixth boat, which (‘rather bad luck’) was bumped every day. He sang and danced his way through the end of term celebrations and was then home again, a day before his nineteenth birthday, for the Easter vacation and plenty of lawn tennis in the fine March weather. The ‘half-hour’ of Bible reading was dropping off; but deep in his heart he was unhappy.

On 8^th April, 1880, the Honourable Granville Waldegrave, the Old Reptonian who had formed the tuck-shop meeting four years before, called on Stanley Smith at 13 John Street, Mayfair.

Waldegrave, Lord Radstock’s eldest son and Monty Beauchamp’s first cousin, was a Trinity undergraduate in his second year, but he had been in Russia with his father, who had conducted a remarkably successful evangelistic mission among the Princesses and Grand Dukes of the Court at St. Petersburg. He had missed Stanley’s first two terms. Waldegrave had never ceased to pray for him, and for three and a half hours the two friends walked the London pavements and Regent’s Park. Smith was obliged, grudgingly enough, to admit to Waldegrave that he was no longer too heartfelt a Christian.

The next day was all lawn tennis down at Twickenham, where Stanley’s eldest brother Ernest was in practice as a doctor. On the Saturday Waldegrave, Beauchamp and Smith travelled up to Cambridge together. Waldegrave was biding his time.

Sunday, 11^th April, began ordinarily enough. Smith yawned his way through the Trinity Chapel service, and afterwards Beauchamp suggested breakfast in his rooms, asking Waldegrave too. During the porridge, fish, eggs and bacon and hot rolls which the kitchens had sent up, Waldegrave watched for his opportunity. The conversation turned casually, as it often did, to Christian matters. Waldegrave did not allow it to remain casual. Soon the three of them were deep in talk. At midday they crossed to Market Passage for lunch in Smith’s rooms. Smith sat at the piano and played and sang hymns in his fine voice and they read a passage together. For Beauchamp this informal talk on an April Sunday was just one of many. But for Smith it began a new era.

Nearly six years earlier, listening to D. L. Moody, Stanley Smith had realised that Christ had died on the Cross, ‘the just for the unjust that he might bring us to God,’ and that every man was called to a personal trust in the risen Saviour, to open the heart to His Spirit. As Smith later wrote, ‘I was by grace enabled to receive Christ.’ Nothing in time or eternity could destroy the reality of the new birth nor separate Smith ‘from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord’; but the carefree response of a boy of thirteen to his Saviour had weakened with the years. He had surrendered all his life to Christ in 1874; by 1880 he had taken much of it back. Thus he now served two masters. At heart self-centred, he could not forget that tribute was due, though grudged, to his Redeemer.

Waldegrave, while Beauchamp listened, showed Smith that though Christ had promised, ‘I will never leave thee nor forsake thee’, His spirit could not restore the joy of His salvation nor give strength in temptation until Smith yielded Him all – mind, will, emotions, activities. It was no use pledging more to God; Stanley must give all without reserve, even as God in Christ had given Himself for Stanley.

Stanley’s eyes were opened. ‘I decided,’ as he wrote that evening, ‘by God’s grace to live by and for Him.’ And because Waldegrave, and Smith’s parents, were praying and Stanley was repentant and humble, God took him at his word.

The result was marked. After chapel the three of them went to Waldegrave’s room for tea ‘and had another delightful meeting. Thank God for sending G. W. here.’ Before going to bed Smith hurried round to Willie Hoste to tell him what had happened. In the days that followed Smith felt weak enough but Waldegrave was there to help. For the first weeks they met two or three times a day for brief periods of Bible reading and prayer, which Smith found he ‘enjoyed immensely’. He brought a little pocket Bible. The dreary ‘half-hours’ which had dogged him were transformed into exciting voyages of discovery in a Book which seemed alive. When a bilious attack came he found to his surprise that he no longer grew depressed.

In work and sport the faraway Christ, whom he had tried not to displease, now proved a Friend at his side. Smith had been promoted stroke of the fourth boat. His weak chest made training hard, but the May Races were thoroughly enjoyable and on the last day ‘to my great delight we bumped Catherine’s, a little way down the Long Reach. The only bump Trinity made, I am thankful to God for it, as He alone gave me strength.’

Early in the long vacation he felt spiritually insecure again. Then at a conference in North London he met Edward Clifford, the fashionable portrait painter who soon would be closely involved in the founding of the Church Army. Clifford saw at once that this young Cambridge man with his eager yet hesitant faith needed some open service for Christ, and took him to a mission hall in the slums of the East End where F. N. Charrington, a brewer’s son who had sacrificed a fortune and shocked society by turning teetotal, had founded a temperance mission outside the family brewery in Stepney.

For the first time, Stanley prayed extempore in public. The next day he preached, also for the first time, at Clifford’s open-air meeting on the waste ground behind the Temperance Hall. A crowded fortnight began, speaking, listening, tract-giving and praying, interspersed with lawn tennis with his family, a ‘scrumptious’ bicycle ride on the new wooden paving of Park Lane and a picnic on the river in pouring rain.

The thrill of Christian service was on him. As Smith heard Lord Radstock, Clifford or Charrington call men forward to give their lives to Christ, he would be praying with all his might that ‘souls may be born again.’ He knew for certain that his vocation lay in such work. His heart went out to the poor, the ragged, the drunkards. He became teetotal and gave up smoking, a more unusual step at that time when the connection between smoking and damage to health had not been discovered.

Slumming and open-air preaching were no sacrifice; his colleagues were of his own class or higher – Clifford, Radstock, Lord Kintore, Abel Smith the M.P. If it meant late nights, it was the servants at John Street who suffered, as Stanley was late for breakfast. Charrington, his hero, then persuaded him to submit to believers’ baptism, against the wishes of his family and his prospects of ordination as an Anglican clergyman.

Two days later Clifford took him to Aldershot for work at Miss Daniell’s Soldiers’ Home. If Stepney had given him a taste of Christian service, Aldershot showed him the wonder of bringing men to Christ. Speaking came naturally, and to see five or six soldiers respond to his call ‘to decide for the Lord’, and to receive a scrawled letter a few days later from a private of Rifles, ‘thanking me as being the means of his conversion,’ filled the cup of his joy.

His faith blazed up. It seemed almost too easy. The days passed in a stream of open-airs, teas, hospital visits, and country house conferences for deepening of spiritual life.

A new sacrifice lay at hand. Stanley felt more strongly every day that he should throw up Cambridge and go abroad at once as a missionary. He had no particular area in mind. Beauchamp had sometimes spoken of the China Inland Mission, a recent pioneering venture led by a Yorkshireman, Hudson Taylor, of which Sir Thomas and Lady Beauchamp had been among the earliest supporters. But Stanley Smith’s thoughts were not directed towards China or elsewhere so much as to the vital need to win souls. The sooner he was out the more he could win. ‘O Lord,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘save souls and lay upon me the burden of souls, at least twenty-five thousand.’ To continue education, he presumed, was a waste of time. Early in September he wrote to his parents, from Derbyshire where he was staying with cousins, for their sanction. The Smiths were wise and prayerful. They did not write back a peremptory refusal, but they urged caution. Stanley’s first reaction was to believe that prayer would prevail to convince them, but soon he was worried as to the right course, and some of the old depressions came back.

He threw himself into evangelistic work among the cottagers, stifling spiritual uncertainties by unstinting activity. With one of the cousins he spent a night in prayer, at the price of feeling ‘very seedy’ later in the morning. On another night, long hours’ praying for faith brought glorious but short-lived ecstasy. The two young men even sent a letter to Mr. Mello, the local rector, ‘to awaken Mr. M. to his sense of responsibility,’ and shook their heads sadly at his reply, ‘full, I am afraid, of lame excuses and not owning one bit to his lack of energy for the Master.’

As the new Cambridge term approached, S. P. Smith remained uncertain of God’s will and humbly desired guidance. He was taken at his word. On 6^th October the allotted chapter in his daily Bible reading was the third chapter of Ezekiel. As he read, Ezekiel 3:5 seemed to strike out as a clear message from his Lord: ‘For thou art not sent to a people of a strange speech and of an hard language, but to the house of Israel’.

As he pondered, he became clear in his mind that God was not calling him, as he had supposed, to the mission field but to service at home. And that meant remaining at Cambridge until his undergraduate course was done. What is more, reading and discussion with older friends convinced him that he had been wrong to rush into believers’ baptism as binding on all Christians. He could be an Anglican parson with a good conscience.

It was therefore a chastened and humble S. P. Smith who began his second year at Cambridge. But ‘when I look back on the year past I see nothing but a continued stream of mercies.’

2

CAMBRIDGE BLUE

A third Studd had come up to Trinity as a freshman, the eldest, Kynaston, who had been in business. Like his younger brothers, J. E. K. Studd was a fine cricketer; whereas G. B. and C. T. put Christ last of their loyalties, J. E. K. had a strong sense of service. Smith was drawn to him at once, and soon learned to value his age and experience. He became a closer friend than either William Hoste or Beauchamp, with their casual Christianity which Smith had left behind.

Monty Beauchamp, the third son in a large family, had always lived in an atmosphere of Christian activity and unpretentious devotion. One of his earliest memories, as a boy of five, was Hudson Taylor’s visit soon after he had founded the China Inland Mission. Taylor and his missionaries wore Chinese dress and pigtails when on the field (at the price of Westerners’ contempt) and thus could go where others could not. Monty remembered Hudson Taylor showing the children chopsticks and a pigtail and other curiosities and telling them of the millions who knew nothing of the Lord Jesus.

As the Beauchamp family grew up each of the sisters adopted particular Christian concerns, and sometimes Monty would join Ida’s meetings for London policemen, or go with Hilda round the flower girls. Lord Radstock was his favourite uncle, and he was always ready to hear him preach. Yet somehow, year by year, Monty had remained a formal stunted Christian.

During the Christmas vacation the three Studds, Smith and Beauchamp frequently skated together on the frozen Serpentine in Hyde Park. Next term, early in February 1881, Smith and Beauchamp were helping Kynaston Studd hang pictures in his Cambridge rooms. Monty, not feeling too well, left early for bed. After the pictures were hung, Smith and Studd had a brief prayer. As they rose from their knees Studd asked Smith if he would ‘come and pray for Beauchamp every day’. Smith, recalling Beauchamp’s lukewarm faith, his occasional tempers, his stunted spiritual growth in such contrast to physical height and strength, and realising afresh how fond he was of his Repton friend, readily agreed. They decided to meet for a quarter of an hour each evening after hall.

Smith then suggested that they should ‘form a little society, the object being to speak to at least one unconverted soul (who must be an undergraduate) a month’. Studd accepted wholeheartedly and, a few days later, Waldegrave. On 28^th February William Gallwey, a Reptonian who had been a freshman with Smith, ‘gave his heart to Jesus – answer to four months’ prayer’, and the next day, after they had read Romans 5 together, Smith was thrilled to join Gallwey’s first faltering extempore prayer, ‘I thank Thee God that at last I can accept Thy gift of eternal life.’ Gallwey, son of a soldier and grandson of an archdeacon, was ordained in 1883 and spent a lifetime in parish work.

When Smith won the Macnaghten Sculls by twenty yards, despite his health, he used the prize money to buy a copy of Holman Hunt’s picture The Light of the World as an aid to evangelism. Rowing, however, began subtly to choke Smith’s spiritual life. Academic work was not too demanding but the river, which would later contribute so much to his great appeal to contemporaries, became a danger, partly because all his rowing exploits were achieved with a weak chest.

He won the University pairs (‘It is fine beating these Varsity oars’) and his boat did well in the Mays; but even the hour of quiet prayer and Bible reading was dropping off, and the teetotal fervour of the previous summer was drowned, temperately enough, in Henley champagne. By the end of June he was realising that ‘my soul is in a wretchedly poor state.’ He did not go near Stepney or Aldershot in the Long Vacation and when he visited the Derbyshire cousins there was more tennis than tracts; the worthy rector might have supposed that he had the last laugh.

Decline was more apparent than real. On 1^st August Smith recorded in his diary, ‘Got up at 7 and for the first time for some months, started the day really well with nice prayer. What a difference it makes.’ Soon afterwards he wrote out a list of all his friends and Christian activities and saw to it that he remembered regularly each name. Yet if Smith was too deep to fall away, he might drift ...

Table of contents

• Title
• Indicia
• Contents
• Prologue
• 1. Trinity Freshman
• 2. Cambridge Blue
• 3. The Brothers
• 4. The Man of Prayer
• 5. 'I Will Send Thee Far Hence …'
• 6. Test Cricketer
• 7. A Torch is Lit
• 8. Spreading Fire
• 9. Inextinguishable Blaze
• Epilogue
• Extract from: Hudson Taylor & Maria
• OMF Publishing
• Christian Focus