Arthur Gook and the trouble with letters

Written by Alex Tunstall (MA student, Library and Archive Studies at the University of Manchester)

As part of my MA in Library and Archive Studies, I’ve had the opportunity to undertake a work placement within the Christian Brethren Archive, housed at the University of Manchester Library. In this role, I’ve been looking at files of correspondence relating to the Echoes of Service missionary magazine, and producing file-level descriptions for these.

The first file I encountered was a piece of correspondence between the editors of the magazine and Arthur Gook, a missionary for the Christian Brethren based in Akureyri, Iceland. Gook undertook a wide range of work whilst based here, including developing a radio station which would spread the gospel to harder to reach areas of the country, working on an extensive number of translations, and providing homeopathic care for the country’s residents.

Gook regularly received monetary support from assemblies back home, sent to him by the editors of Echoes of Service, and was expected to provide receipts for these for accountancy purposes. However, Gook and the editors clearly had different perspectives on what constitutes effective communication, and the timeframe within which one ought to respond, as can be seen in the items I discuss below. These consist of two letters written by Gook whilst he on a break from Iceland at his family home in Bristol, which feature handwritten marginal notes from the editors that are evocative of the tension caused by these differences in expectations.

The first letter, typewritten by Gook on the 20^th of July 1932, is addressed to ‘Esteemed Brethren in Christ’, referring generally to the editors of Echoes, and expresses a ‘regret’ for his ‘long silence’. He explains that ‘the desire to send an appropriate letter has often hindered [him] from sending a hasty acknowledgement of [the editors’] letter’ and says that he is sending ‘four receipts herewith, apologizing for the delay’. In pencil, written alongside this, is a short note from an editor which expresses some frustration regarding the apology; ‘Two of them are useless for the auditor, being too late. Could he not enclose them when writing to his wife & let her send them on?’.

In the second letter, typewritten by Gook to Mr. Vine, one of the editors, on the 22^nd of July 1932, we see hints of how this frustration may have manifested in a response from Vine. Gook writes, ‘I appreciate the force of your remarks about receipts, and will see that they are returned more promptly, even though I am unable at the time to write an appropriate letter with them’. He then goes on to explain that he ‘once wrote in great haste a few disconnected lines when returning a receipt, and was sorry, later on, to see them in “Echoes”’, believing ‘anything in the nature of a “report” as something to be done in a prayerful spirit, only after careful waiting on God’. He concedes, however, that ‘this is no excuse whatever, of course, for not sending the receipts promptly’. This explanation only prompts further ire from the editor Mr. Vine, who again writes alongside the passage in pencil; ‘How can we tell what he writes with less care at one time than another? He should give some indication to his fellow creatures?.’

These items appealed to me owing to the light they shed upon the practical elements of communication which underpin a missionary’s work, and the tension that different priorities and attitudes to communication can provoke. I like the way in which, in them, the relatively mundane task of balancing the books becomes the source of a very human, emotionally-charged drama.

The use of pencil notes is especially interesting in its revelation of the practical limitations of the letter as a medium, and in turn the limitations of what one sees when working with an archival collection. Gook presumably did not see these pencil responses that we see, although the use of questions in them suggests an element of dialogue, perhaps with Vine’s fellow editors – he appeals to an un-present other in venting his frustration.

Vine presumably presented some of this frustration to Gook in the ‘kind letter of 20^th‘, to which Gook responded on the 22^nd of July. However, Vine’s letter is not present in this file. In viewing the file, then, one receives a curious snapshot of an ongoing tension; in some respects, one sees a privileged view of Vine’s experience of the issue, through access to the handwritten additions probably unseen by Gook. On the other hand, one doesn’t see the letter to which Gook is responding. I found myself wondering how Vine might have mediated this frustration in the letter; do we see a franker expression of irritation in the marginal notes, or did he use similar phrasing when writing to Gook? The formalised etiquette of letter writing might therefore become a further limitation of the medium, here problematised by the lens of the archive, which both reveals and conceals elements of a dialogue.

In these ways, the items embody the difficulties which might arise through efforts at communication and its implicit limitations, which in turn shapes the experience of those viewing an archival collection. This idea of the boundaries of communication feels particularly poignant at a time when we are having increased discussions about communicative availability, and the changing expectations around this issue in an increasingly digital world, which effectively offers 24/7 communicative access. This pertinence is just one of many aspects of the Echoes of Service collection which makes it ripe for research potential, and I hope that work like mine can contribute to facilitating this.

---