Wilfred Thomason Grenfell (1865 - 1940)
GRENFELL, Sir WILFRED THOMASON (1865-1940), medical missionary and author, was born at Parkgate, Cheshire, 28 February 1865, the second of the four sons of the Rev. Algernon Sidney Grenfell, headmaster and proprietor of Mostyn House School, Parkgate, by his wife, Jane Georgina Hutchinson, daughter of a colonel in the Indian army. He was educated at Marlborough, and resided at Queen's College, Oxford, for the Michaelmas term of 1888, during which he played Rugby football for the university. He studied medicine at the London Hospital medical school and London University, under Sir Frederick Treves [q.v.], and qualified M.R.C.P. and M.R.C.S. in 1886. While studying medicine he came under the influence of Dwight Lynam Moody, the American revivalist, and of the brothers J. E. and C. T. Studd, and for a time conducted a Sunday school class, to which he gave instruction in the art of boxing. He was at the same time secretary in succession of the cricket, football, and rowing clubs in London University; and he thus became at an early an exponent of that 'muscular Christianity' which Charles Kingsley had made popular.

In 1887, the year after qualification, Grenfell joined the Royal National Mission to Deep-Sea Fishermen as a medical missionary; and after serving for five years in this capacity from Iceland to the Bay of Biscay, he became a master mariner, and fitted out the mission's first hospital ship. In 1892 he visited Labrador, and he was so greatly shocked by what he later described as 'the poverty and ignorance and semi-starvation among English speaking people of our own race' that he decided to devote the rest of his life to the betterment of the lot of the people of Labrador. In 1893 he established at Battle Harbour the first hospital of what came to be known as the Labrador Medical Mission.; and as time went on he not only built other hospitals, but he also opened nursing stations, schools, orphanages, and social welfare centres. When, over forty years later, he retired, he had built up an organization that included six hospitals, seven nursing stations, four hospital ships, four boarding schools, fourteen industrial centres, twelve clothing distribution centres, a co-operative lumber mill, and a seaman's institute at St. John's, Newfoundland. What his lifework, , as an example of practical Christianity meant to the people of Labrador, whether whites, or Indians, or Eskimos, it would be difficult to exaggerate.

At first the Labrador Medical Mission was financed by the Royal National Mission to Deep-Sea Fishermen; but from an early date most of the necessary funds were raised by Grenfell himself. He made speaking tours through both Canada and the United States of America; and he roused such interest and support on these trips that the Labrador Medical Mission came to be almost better known in America than it was in England. In 1912 the Mission to Deep-Sea Fishermen withdrew its support; and Grenfell then organized the International Grenfell Association, with branches in England, the United States, Canada, and Newfoundland; and it was this association that stood behind Grenfell's work during the latter part of his life.

Not only be his lecture tours, but also by his books, Grenfell aroused support for it. Beginning with Vikings of To-day (1895), he published between 1905 and 1938 a succession of books about Labrador and a number of religious books, which, although not outstanding for their literary qualities,' have an engaging simplicity and modesty that endeared them to many people. Recognition of Grenfell's work came to him in the form of numerous honours. The university of Oxford elected him her first honorary M.D. (1907), and he received honorary degrees from St. Andrews University and many universities and colleges both in the United States and in Canada; in 1915 he was elected an honorary fellow of the College of Surgeons of America, and in 1920 a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England; he was appointed C.M.G. in 1906 and K.C.M.G. in 1927: in 1928 he was elected lord rector of St. Andrews University; in 1935 he was awarded the gold medal of the Royal Empire Society; and in 1936 he was elected an honorary fellow of Queen's College, Oxford.

In 1935 ill health compelled Grenfell's retirement from active work; and he died at Charlotte, Vermont, 9 October 1940. In 1909 he married Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (died 1938), daughter of Colonel Edmund Burke MacClanahan, of Lake Forest, Illinois, and had two sons and a daughter.

Text reproduced from the Dictionary of National Biography 1931 - 1940 edited by LG Wickham Legg, by permission of Oxford University Press.

Capt. Julian Francis Grenfell (1888 - 1915)
GRENFELL, JULIAN HENRY FRANCIS (1888-1915), soldier and poet, was born in London 30 March 1888, the eldest son of William Henry Grenfell, afterwards first Baron Desborough, by his wife, Ethel Anne Priscilla, daughter of the Hon. Julian Henry Charles Fane [q.v.]. He was educated at Summerfields School, Oxford, and at Eton College, where he reached the sixth form, and became one of the editors of the Eton College Chronicle and of a clever but ephemeral periodical called The Outsider. His contributions to these magazines, and, while he was still at Eton, to the London World and Vanity Fair, give an indication of his literary talent. In October 1906 Grenfell went up to Balliol College, Oxford, where he spent four happy years, surrounded by a brilliant company of friends. Only a temporary breakdown in health prevented him from taking a degree in the honour school of literae humaniores. A man of splendid physique and vitality, he excelled in every kind of sport, and in many branches of athletics, rowing in the college eight, which won the Wyfold cup at Henley in 1909, and boxing for the university.

Grenfell had always set his heart on a military career. In 1910 he obtained a commission, and joined the Ist (the Royal) Dragoons at Muttra; a year later, the regiment was transferred from India to South Africa. Shortly after the outbreak of the European War, Grenfell, with his regiment, returned to England, and early in October 1914 accompanied it to France. Within a few weeks his gallantry and soldierly abilities had won him a great reputation : 'he set an example of light-hearted courage which is famous all through the army in France,' wrote a distinguished officer in a contemporary letter, 'and has stood out even among the most lion-hearted'. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Order, for a daring feat of individual reconnaissance in November1914, and in January 1015 he was mentioned in dispatches. On 13 May 1915,near Ypres, he was wounded in the head, and on 26 May he died in hospital at Boulogne. He was buried in the military cemetery on the hills above Boulogne.

On the day his death was announced(27 May), a poem by Grenfell, Into Battle, appeared in The Times. It was at once recognized as one of the finest of the many fine poems inspired by the War. Sir Walter Raleigh wrote of it, 'I don't think that any poem ever embodied soul so completely.... Those who glorified War had always, before this, been a little too romantic; and those who had a feeling for the reality of War had always been a little too prosaic. It can't be done again.' The poet laureate, Mr. Robert Bridges, included it in his anthology, The Spirit of Man (1916). The few other poems which Grenfell left, such as, To a Black Greyhound, Hymn to the Fighting Boar, and The Hills, are in a lighter vein, but all show the same power of expressing poetically his intense love of nature, his vivid delight in life, and light, and energy.

Apart from his poetry and his great military promise, Grenfell's short life. is memorable for the deep impression which he made on his contemporaries of all ages. Old and young saw in him the personification of triumphant Youth. This impression is finely conveyed in a sonnet to his memory by Mr. Maurice Baring, while in a family history compiled by his mother, and privately circulated under the title Pages from a Family Journal, there survive not only a series of tributes to him from, many pens, but also a delightful collection of his own letters. Of his two brothers, the elder, Gerald William (born1890), a scholar of Balliol from 1909 to 1913, who won a Craven scholarship in 1911 and obtained his 'blue' for tennis, was killed in action in July 1915, and the younger, too, died from the results of a motor accident in 1926.

[E. B. Osborn, The Muse in Arms, 1917; R. Bridges, The Spirit of Man ; Maurice Baring, Poems, 1926; The Balliol College War Memorial Book, 1924] A.F.L.

Text reproduced from the Dictionary of National Biography 1901 - 1911 Vol. 1, by permission of Oxford University Press.

Enter supporting content here