For the second post in our bicentenary series, we’re pleased to share a guest contribution by Prof. Jean DeBernardi, who highlights key findings from her research on the Missionary Helps postcards, held in the Christian Brethren Archive.
Around 1905, Joseph Smithard (1858–1951), a Brethren elder at the Crete Gospel Hall in Liverpool, founded a publishing business called Missionary Helps that produced posters, postcards, and glass lantern slides. In 1907, he copyrighted a set of ten ‘combination pictures’, and identified himself as the owner and author of the designs. These visual resources promoted enthusiasm for missions, proposing missionaries like David Livingstone as models, and connecting Brethren missionaries to the larger history of evangelical Christian missions. Smithard ran Missionary Helps as a business, but the aim was inspirational, and the revenues from the sale and rental of Missionary Helps products were donated to support missionary work.
Smithard and his wife Emily Grace Penwarden Smithard (1856–1912) also ran a business carting and forwarding fruit and provisions that provided goods and services to missionaries. Among their customers was Frederick Stanley Arnot, Echoes of Service’s most famous missionary, who made Liverpool his base for a number of years. While living in the region, Arnot widely promoted interest in missions in Central Africa; he also supported an international student movement that took as its watchword “The evangelization of the world in this generation.”
By 1905, Brethren assemblies had launched Missionary Study Classes for youth in Dublin, Bristol, and Liverpool. In support of the new student movement, in 1911 the Open Brethren began to publish Links of Help with Other Lands. That year, the newly launched magazine published an article entitled ‘How to Commence the M.S.C’. The article was illustrated with a specially taken photograph that shows the members of the Crete Hall Missionary Study Class in a well-furnished classroom setting. Joseph Smithard sits on the left, together with a formally dressed group of men, women, and children. A magic lantern slide projector is prominently displayed on a table in front of them.
The Crete Hall classroom displayed a large global wall map, a popular symbol of the wide scope of evangelical Christianity. Five of the wall posters reproduce Missionary Helps combination pictures that had been printed as large posters for classroom use. Smithard’s method of creating these ‘combination’ pictures continued a nineteenth-century method of assembling graphic images to create glass lantern slides. Both were made by combining multiple images, including photographs, lithographs, and text, into a unique collage. Advances in technology allowed these collages to be photographed and inexpensively reproduced to create posters and postcards.
One of the posters on the wall of the Crete Hall classroom, which was entitled ‘Simple Ways of Helping Foreign Missions’, urged young people to ‘pray work give’. This combination picture recommended that people undertake money-making activities like bee-keeping, blackberry picking, and foreign stamp collecting that could provide them with funds to donate to missions.
Another poster offered the compelling caption ‘Women’s Appeal: The Wail of the World’s Weary Womenhood’. The ‘Women’s Appeal’ offered images and narrative that portrayed the ‘downtrodden’ situations of women in many parts of the world, describing foot binding, slavery, lack of access to education, and low status in non-Christian societies. This postcard described issues of inequality in many world areas, including China, but appealed for donations for Bible women in India.
Two female Christian Indians are also featured here, continuing a pattern of recognizing and promoting indigenous Christians. One of the Indian women pictured is Pandita Ramabai (1858–1922), a Christian convert who is widely-recognized as a pioneer feminist. In 1887, Ramabai published a book in English, The High Caste Hindu Woman, in which she advocated for social reform in India, including promoting women’s education. She travelled widely in the United States and Britain, raising funds for projects like the founding of a school for child widows.
This postcard centrally features another Indian Christian convert, Chundra Lela, whose sufferings as a Hindu Priestess are described in the text surrounding her portrait. She was the subject of a popular biography, Chundra Lela: The Converted Fakir, which was written by an American missionary Mrs Ada Lee. Lee claimed that Chundra Lela narrated her life story to her, and a full-page advertisement following the text the book claims that the book had been translated into twelve languages and widely sold. But unlike Pandita Ramabai, Chundra Lela has left little trace apart from this book.
In a 1914 report on the launch of a new Missionary Study Class in Liverpool, the writer reports that ‘Our beloved brother, Mr. Smithard, of Crete Hall Study Class, set us going by giving us a most interesting and inspiring lantern lecture, entitled ‘Missionary Acorns from which great Oaks have Grown’. Smithard undoubtedly used in his presentation the same image of ‘Missionary Acorns’ presented in a popular Missionary Helps postcard and also displayed as a poster on the walls of the Crete Hall Missionary Study Classroom in the 1911 photograph above.
A magic lantern slide held in the Christian Brethren digital archive at the University of Manchester combined the same image together with the lyrics to a hymn by Horatius Bonar. As noted above, postcards were but one visual medium through which educational messages were sent, and perhaps not even the primary one. We might even want to consider the possibility that the postcard was viewed as a miniaturization of the poster and magic lantern slide.
The Missionary Acorns postcard is a who’s who of eighteen evangelical Christian missionaries combined with three images of Christ and one of Paul the disciple, described as ‘the tentmaker, THE FIRST INDUSTRIAL MISSIONARY’. Whoever created this postcard emphasized that these Christians all had humble origins: servant, teacher, boot last maker, shepherd, farmer’s daughter, miner’s son, blacksmith, engineer, gardener, cotton piecer, postman, cobbler, weaver, and tinker.
Whether the reasons were economic or theological or simply a matter of changing taste, interest in the Missionary Helps program of visual education waned in the 1920s. But because of their visual interest, a number of Missionary Helps postcards have been preserved in Christian, historical, and map archives, including the Christian Brethren Archive at the John Rylands Library. Although their influence may have been ephemeral, these postcards have caught the eye of modern researchers, who have used them in their publications to illustrate the missionary ethos of early twentieth-century evangelical Christians.
For more on Missionary Helps postcards, see Jean DeBernardi, “‘Missionary Studies–By Use of Eye-Gate’: Missionary Helps Postcards, 1907-1921”, Brethren Historical Review 20 (2024), 78-123.