Pip’s Patch

In the first few tough years of their marriage Maria and James Hudson Taylor would hardly have dared to believe they would be instrumental in founding one of the most influential Christian agencies in China – the China Inland Mission (now  OMF International). That they survived and managed to develop a new missionary society was thanks to several special friends, including Jemima Bausum and the Rev Edward C Lord.

Maria and James Hudson Taylor were not married long before they were in need of  Jemima Bausum’s hospitality. Soon after their marriage in January in 1858 they moved to a small cottage in a country town about nine miles from Ningbo. But then Maria became ill with typhoid fever and he took her to the home of some China Evangelisation Society (CES) missionaries. Then Hudson Taylor also became ill. For a while they stayed with Dr William Parker and then went  to Jemima’s house to convalesce.

It was not long after they had moved to an apartment above the room that the CES missionaries used as a chapel in Ningbo that they realised they might soon lose the woman who was like a mother to them. Hudson Taylor wrote home that it looked as if Jemima  would be replaced by some American Presbyterian missionaries and added: “I should be sorry for her to have to return to England from want of support. Perhaps some aid might be got here, but unless nearly £40 a quarter could be raised at home, I fear she and her family and the mission work could not be sustained.”

By July he was able to report that Mary Ann Aldersey and the Russells were more friendly if not familiar towards him, and that Burella had started writing to her sister, Maria, again. Little did they realise that they had just one more month to enjoy this renewed relationship with Burella – for the latter died of cholera in Shanghai in August.

It is likely that they received that news after Jemima had left Ningbo. In a letter to his mother on September 16 Hudson Taylor wrote: “Mrs Bausum and three children are now on their way to England nearly six weeks.  She has taken my part in the difficulties I have had and since we have married I have staid (sic) in her house some time. She has promised to come and see you while in England & I am sure you will be pleased with her, and her kindness to me will be a claim on your love. I hope she will come out again ere long.”

He sent a letter of introduction with her to the Tottenham Ladies’ Association, a Christian group which was supporting him. And in England Jemima and her children went to live with Maria’s uncle, William Tarn, and his wife. She needed all the help she could get because, with the loss of her position as headmistress of the school in Ningbo, she was left homeless and almost penniless.

Jemima was kept busy in England getting her children settled and trying to raise sufficient funds so that she could return to Ningbo and open her own school. She successfully applied for a grant from the Society for Promoting Female Education in the East ( SPFEE)  and made many friends, particularly in Tottenham, among those who believed in “living by faith”. Her own husband, John George Bausum, had been inspired by the teachings of Anthony Norris Groves (1795-1853), as had George Muller, the founder of the orphanages at Ashley Down in Bristol. Through prayer and by only accepting unsolicited gifts Muller  saw thousands of children cared for in those orphanages. He  even received sufficient funds to support some missionaries including Hudson Taylor.

By July 1859 the Hudson Taylors were looking forward to Jemima’s return and had sent a list of books for her to bring as well as a compound microscope and other items. He also told his mother: “She is a zealous, useful missionary and her influence has been greatly blessed on those who were under her care. You know how kind she was to me, and that too when others were afraid to aid me, however much they felt with me. And I may add that her loosing (sic)  her position in the school there was probably owing in part to her kindness to me.”

Jemima left her daughter, Mary, and two sons in England. When the Hudson Taylors went to England in late 1860 Mary soon moved in with them and their daughter Grace, who was born in July 1859.  But George and William Bausum did not settle  so well.

By the time Jemima got back to China much of that country was  under the control of the Taiping rebels, led by a man who believed he was the younger brother of Jesus. The Chinese emperor had failed to ratify the Treaties of Tientsin and this led, in October, to  Lord Elgin with the French General de Mountauban ordering the destruction of the magnificent imperial Summer Palace in Peking.  Beset by the Taiping rebels and the foreigners, the Chinese had to submit to the Allies’ demands.  The Peking Convention signed in 1860 treaty even allowed for the British to appoint the head of the Imperial Maritime Customs.

The missionaries were pleased to hear that they would have more freedom to travel inland but were appalled at the enforced  legalisation of the opium trade. Not surprisingly the Chinese deeply resented such “unequal treaties” not just for the imposition of the opium trade but because foreigners often enjoyed more privileges than they did.

After the Peking Convention the opium dens grew faster than the schools in China. In early 1860 Jemima had 11 girls mainly under 10 in her school. She told the SPFEE: “They had been sadly neglected, never comfortably clothed or fed, and looked much such a picture of starvation and misery as we are familiar with in our ragged schools at home. One poor child was brought to the house, and the message left that the teacher might do what she liked with her. Then three are afflicted – one with total and two with partial blindness, while a fourth was a cripple. But they are not wanting in intelligence, and a few months after their admission, five out of the eleven had learnt to read Chinese as it is spoken in Ningbo. Their time was very pleasantly spent – very different to their former days of wretchedness. They learned to be useful children, to cook their own rice, make their clothes, and clean their rooms.”

The circle of friends around Jemima and the Hudson Taylors included an American Baptist Union missionary, the Rev Edward C Lord.  Lord had gone to Ningbo in 1847 with his first wife, Lucy Lyon who was a niece of Mary Lyon, the pioneer of women’s education in the States and  founder of  Mount Holyoke College. Lucy gave birth to two children but both died in infancy and then, in 1852, became ill. Her  husband took her to back to Fredonia in New York State where she died in May 1853 of “intestinal tuberculosis”. In November that year he married her younger sister, Freelove, and they went to Ningbo together. Lord was bereaved yet again in early 1860 when Freelove died soon after their fifth child was born.

He was obviously a man who enjoyed having a soul mate and companion for, in December 1861, he married Jemima. Hudson Taylor had worked with Lord and obviously  highly respected him. He asked Lord  to oversee and help the young missionaries who had been sent out by the CES (John  and Mary Jones and James and Martha Meadows) while he and Maria were in England.  They left in late 1860 and would not return until 1866 – after the China Inland Mission had been founded.As Jemima had not signed a marriage pledge with the SPFEE she did not have to return any of the society’s grant. That was fortunate because her vision was to build an even bigger and better orphanage and school. These plans soon had to be put on hold because the Taiping rebels were heading towards Ningbo.  By mid 1861 thousands of  Chinese were fleeing to Ningbo as the Taiping rebels attacked nearby towns and Dr  Parker’s new hospital was over-flowing with casualties.

Jemima decided to close the school in the city and send the girls to a safe place across the river. She ventured forth from the American Baptist compound in September to visit the Jones as John was very ill. On the way back she found the canals full of boats overflowing with refugees. Streams of fearful people were passing the Lord’s home sharing stories of how the rebels had slaughtered so many and burnt their houses. The panic was palpable but Jemima commented: “I do not indulge in fear.” At a Bible class she managed to keep the attention of the few Chinese women there by discussing “Fear not them that kill the body…”  For the next two months there were so many terrifying  rumours about what the rebels would do.

Then, in December 1861 Jemima wrote to the SPFEE: “The rebels have entered and sacked the city to a house, and laid waste all the surrounding country. No pen, much less mine, can describe the ten-thousandth part of the wretchedness to which our eyes and ears are witness. All trade is stopped, and vast numbers look forward to nothing but starvation and death, even should they escape the rebels’ knife. Many are robbed of all they have while seeking a place of safety. The people are distressed beyond description. Might is right.”

The missionaries were not attacked by the rebels but Jemima had the agony of turning away many orphans because she did not have the funds to take care of them. The only foreign woman who stayed in the city was Mrs Mary Leisk Russell. She and her husband provided a refuge for about 200 Chinese and fed the destitute. Mrs Russell was known as a timid woman but still successfully stood up to the rebels when they tried to carry off some of her school girls.

The rebels were besieged by Chinese Imperial forces in May 1862 and made the mistake of firing upon French and British ships. The ships fired back and so helped the Imperial forces to force the rebels to leave Ningbo. The British had already decided to help the Imperial forces defeat the rebels and by 1864 that was fully  accomplished, one of the heroes being “General” Charles Gordon who would later be killed at Khartoum in Sudan.

In April 1863 the Lords decided that Jemima should take his  five children (Lucy Lyon, William Dean, Franklin Lyon, Fannie Adaline and Mary Freelove) to his sister in New York State. It would be more than a year before she returned to her husband and her work.

Sources: I am especially grateful to OMF International and to the staff at the special collection at SOAS for the chance to access some of the letters of James Hudson Taylor. This made it possible to be certain exactly when Jemima left Ningbo in the late 1850s, and again in the early 1860s.

Other sources:

The Female Intelligencer 1858 – 1860, published by the SPFEE

A J Broomhall If I had a Thousand Lives – Hudson Taylor & China’s Open Century Vol III Hodder & Stoughton 1982.

Dorothy Lord Bausum Evans He Led All the Way Xulon Press 2007.