The Trio - remembered best by secular feminists

Virago Press keeps alive one of the greatest stories of women missionaries, now all but lost to evangelicals.

Hardly known for its love of Christian truth, Virago republished The Gobi Desert by Mildred Cable and Francesca French in the mid 1980s, and has included an excerpt from that in its Book of Women Travellers.

I am reminded of a conversation with Peter Lewis and Elizabeth Catherwood two years ago. Both felt someone ought to research a new biography of 'The Trio' (Mildred Cable and Francesca and Eva French). I resonate deeply with that. Let the story of their inspirational lives be known by this generation. It is certainly known in heaven.

Mildred Cable

Mildred Cable was an adventurer from childhood. In her teens, a mission was held in Guildford, and she went to the first meeting. However, with parental fears that 'anything might happen' she wasn't allowed to go back, until her vicar made a special request that she be permitted to attend the closing meeting. Here she was converted.

Two years later she found herself listening intently to a woman missionary on furlough from China who wore a text embroidered on her collar. Mildred felt that was 'rather embarrassing for the south of England', and told her so! Within a year, she announced her own decision to serve in China.

Mildred went on to study human sciences at London University. As she neared the end of her course, the Boxer Uprising in 1900 brought dreadful news of the slaughter of 'foreign devils', including 58 missionaries and 20 children from the China Inland Mission. The missionary who had visited Guildford, by now a friend, had been the first to die.

Then the man to whom Mildred was engaged, and who had been as committed to China as she, wrote to say that he would not marry her unless she decided not to go there. This almost broke her. Her final exam was the following day. She didn't sit it. Instead she shrank into a period of isolation. But as news crept through that the mission was now sending people to China again, now the Uprising had subsided, she began to rally, and she sailed in 1901, 'letting the curtain fall upon the past'.

The French sisters

Eva French, educated in Geneva, was to describe herself as 'the fervid nihilist, the incipient communist, the embryonic Bolshevist, known to her world as Evangeline French'. Her conversion to Christ was sudden, and shocked her family. Soon afterwards she expressed her desire to serve with the China Inland Mission. There was some doubt as to whether she should be accepted on health grounds, but Hudson Taylor intervened, accepting personal responsibility for her to go to the North, where the climate would be less exacting. She arrived in Shansi in 1893, seven years before the Boxer Uprising, and nine years ahead of Mildred Cable.

Francesca, four years younger, loved music and the arts, and read widely. Their father died the day after Eva sailed, and Francesca resolved to stay at home with her mother. Moving to Richmond, Surrey, they began to attend an evangelical church for the first time. Francesca loved the Sunday sermons: 'Every time he (Evan Hopkins) came into his pulpit, his heart was inditing some great matter. There was never anything slovenly, commonplace or trivial about his preaching.' She was made missionary treasurer, but this was not counted a success, as she actively dissuaded people from giving unless they really wanted to. 'Missionary subscriptions fell off appallingly.'!

When her mother died, she joined her sister and Mildred, who had be-come close friends. It may have seemed their friendship was too close to admit a third party, but this was not so, and to-gether they became the legendary Trio. They first returned to the school Mildred and Eva had run in Hwochow, then in 1923, four years before Chiang Kai-Shek became China's leader, they began their nomadic mission to the tribes of the Gobi. Brave women for an all-demanding task. They were the first missionaries to go to the region since the Nestorians in the 6th century.

Influences and Topsy

Mildred Cable and Francesca French, with their extraordinary energy and wide-ranging gifts, were to become prodigious writers. Shrewd observers of trends and of human nature, they wrote 20 books, for adults and children, many going into eight or nine editions within the first five years.

They continued their writing after they returned to Britain, while working for the Bible Society. Their fluency, imagination, and sheer authority commanded a wide readership. Biography, history, apologetics - all came across with warmth. These women loved Christ, and wanted to grow a deeper love for him in their readers.

In 1925 they adopted a deaf and dumb Tibetan Mongol beggar girl of about seven years old. As she was to reflect afterwards through mime, this was the first time in her life that she had received kindness. For the first time in her life, someone said 'Come!' and not 'Go!'.

The Trio feared for her, as her adoptive mother, an opium addict, beat her. Taking advice from local Christian friends, they managed to purchase her for ten shillings. This would have life-long implications. But for now she had clothes to wear, a bed to sleep in, and 'three mamas' to look after her.

The Trio called her Ai-Lien (Love Bond). However, this was difficult for her to lip-read, so she was nicknamed 'Topsy'. In due course, she would need a British passport and UK citizenship, eventually procured for her under the name Eileen Guy, the nearest equivalent sound to her Chinese name. She would also need to adopt a new culture when the missionaries came home, and to learn to lip-read in a new, different, and difficult language. Each of these aspects of Topsy's new life could be a story in itself.

Realists

The Trio were well-known and admired, and huge crowds gathered to hear them at public meetings when they came home. By 1935 the situation in Central Asia was worsening, but they resolved to return. Kingsway Hall in central London was crammed full as they prepared to leave. An account of that meeting in China's Millions, August 1935, tells its own story.

'With no sense of incongruity, humour and gravity blended together, the Lord being Lord of all.

'Miss Eva French, having thanked friends for their overflowing love, centred her remarks around a question she had been frequently asked, namely: "Are you not thrilled to be going back?" Picturing conditions of the Gobi, its stony floor, the filth of its inns, the hard bread and unappetising food, the uncertainties of life, the rumours, the brigands, etc., these things, she said, made poor thrills. But contacts with needy souls, the evidences that kind deeds did bear fruit, were thrills worthwhile. But the only true thrill was to be able to say, as the Master did, "I delight to do thy will."

'People had asked if Topsy was thrilled at going back to her native land, but Topsy's bitter experiences in the land of her birth were poor preparations for being thrilled at the prospect of return. But there were a few things that Topsy wanted to say, and though she had been born deaf and was consequently dumb, she had been taught to know about 500 words. At Miss French's invitation, Topsy then rose and said "Good bye" and "Forget-me-not", waving her hand as she did so. Topsy will not be forgotten, and the memory of her will speak for her people.

'Miss Cable immediately transported us to the realities of the Central Asian roads. In spirit she had been there while her companions had been speaking. She almost felt the desert grit. At home, all was for speed, but the ancient roads, with their three miles per hour, were better suited for the great business of preaching the gospel. Christ had joined himself to two discouraged disciples on the road, and the talk had been about great things. The great question of the road was: "Whence do you come, and whither are you going?" Think what you lose by your speed, she said. You can't talk of these great and everlasting subjects when speed is the passion. Incidentally, she revealed her love of Bunyan, for what a traveller puts in his hand-luggage could not fail to be a revelation, and Bunyan was her choice.'

Inhospitable desert

The Trio were returning to the most inhospitable desert in the world. They had already crossed it four times, and were under no romantic delusions of excitement. They would once more pack and repack their ramshackle cart, The Flying Turki, to get in as many Scripture booklets as it could hold, along with their bare living essentials. They knew what it was to face terrors from brigands and threats of death from the fearful 'Baby General' who had assumed merciless power, and they had seen many friends executed. They knew what it was to be shrivelled by thirst, taunted by mirages, and blown senseless in windstorms.

The Trio's suffering is reminiscent of the apostle Paul's and as unwillingly recounted. They shared in the fellowship of Christ's suffering in a way which is given to few of us. Mildred Cable died in 1952, and the French sisters within a month of each other in 1960. Topsy died in South London in 1998.

Julia Cameron, IFES

Commemorative meeting
This autumn marks the centenary of Mildred Cable's sailing for China with the China Inland Mission. OMF and several other missions are holding a meeting to celebrate this occasion and bring people up to date with what is happening in Central and East Asia today.
With the title, Cable Vision: then and now, it will be held, God willing, at Westminster Chapel, Buckingham Gate, London on November 3 from 2.00 - 5.00 pm. Further details from Ray Porter, OMF, 01923 247382.