Humble and inspiring men Sir James Frazer and C F Andrews

My memory of meeting Sir James Frazer, O.M. is one of sheer embarrassment. Lady Aberdeen had invited me to be one be her guests at a League of Nations dinner at the Lyceum Club, and on the morning of the dinner had, after much persuasion, induced me to speak, as Sir Joseph Cook, the New Zealand Commissioner in London, had fallen ill and could not fulfil his promise. In the reception hall Lady Aberdeen. introduced me to a Lady Frazer who I was to take in to dinner. The lady explained that she was stone deaf, and that it would be useless for me to talk to her until,we went in to dinner, when she would put a microphone on the table between us and I could talk into that. At the dinner-table, with that instrument of torture between us, Lady Frazer asked me if I knew her husband. I had to explain that I really did not know which Lady Frazer she was. "My husband," she then. explained, "is Sir James Frazer." "The author of 'The Golden. Bough':" I asked. "Yes," answered Lady Frazer. I told her that I knew "The Golden Bough" (in the abbreviated edition) and had also read Sir James's book on "Totemism," and that I greatly prized his "Passages of the Bible: chosen for their literary beauty and interest." "Then you must meet him," said Lady Frazer, and she promptly introduced me to Sir James, who was sitting on the opposite side of the table. I felt first that it was an honour to meet the world-famous anthropologist; then came the horrible thought that I had to make a speech with Sir James in my audience. My appetite disappeared, in sheer fright at the impending ordeal. I did not eat any dinner. When my turn came to speak I began by telling an American story of a man who went to sleep during a curtain lecture by his wife, woke up, heard his. wife's voice, and asked: "My dear, are you talking yet, or again:" Glancing across at Sir James Frazer I saw, to my relief, that I had at least amused him. When the oratory was over, Sir James thanked me for my "interesting speech," a remark which I interpreted as mere politeness. He added, how¬ever, that he would like us to meet again. The opportunities for such meetings were few, but we exchanged some friendly letters, and by his invitation I was one of the thirty-five guests at a party given by Sir James and Lady Frazer to celebrate the thirty¬ fifth anniversary of their wedding-when the cake adorned with thirty-five candles was cut at 5.35 p.m. Sir James was fast going blind, and Lady Frazer's hearing was almost gone. They were a very united couple-interdependent, because Lady Frazer read aloud to her husband to spare his eyes, and he acted as ears for her in her deafness. When they were up at Cambridge, living in Trinity College, where Sir James had his Fellow's Chambers, he was occasionally seen with a basket in his hand, . going to the shops to do the household shopping for Lady Frazer. She wrote fairy stories, and on their thirty-fifth wedding day both she and her husband published a new book, and presented a copy to each other. They were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and happily in death they were not divided, for Lady Frazer died a few hours after her husband.
Sir James Frazer came of a Presbyterian family in Glasgow, but as the years went on, he confessed, the dogmas of Christianity ceased to have any hold on him. I think he would have described himself as a reverent agnostic. That he was pious, at least in the sense that he placed spiritual values first in his thought and living, is patent from the introduction to his volume of "Passages of the Bible: chosen for their literary beauty and interest," where he says: "Though many of us can no longer, like our fathers, find in its- (the Bible's) pages the solution of the dark, the inscrutable riddle of human existence, yet the volume must still be held sacred by all who reverence the high aspirations to which it gives utterance, and the pathetic associations with which the faith and piety of so many generations have invested the familiar words." The exquisite simplicity of Sir James Frazer's literary style reflected the essential simplicity of his character. He made no parade of his vast learning, and no one who did not know his high standing in the world of scholarship would ever have imagined that the little old gentleman with such a quiet manner and soft voice was the author and scientist to whom all the world gave honour and homage.
Two well authenticated stories about Sir James Frazer show his possession of an extraordinarily sensitive conscience. When someone detected a slight misquotation in "The Golden Bough" he wrote at once to the authorities at Trinity College offering to resign his Fellowship-he thought that his little lapse discredited the reputation of his College. When he found that for some years he had been carrying a bag of books on his train journeys between Glasgow and Edinburgh which exceeded the weight allowed as free luggage, he calculated carefully the amount out of which, unconsciously, he had deprived the railway company, and sent a cheque for that sum. Moreover, in face of the reluctance of the directors, he insisted that the cheque must be accepted and finally wrote telling the directors that they were neglecting their duty to their shareholders, whose money it was that he was refunding. Carried into his immense research work this absolute integrity made Sir James Frazer one of the most reliable of authors. I think he died a poor man: in his last years, when his eyesight had completely failed, he was glad to accept an offer from one of the London City Companies to pay for the services of a secretary to help him finish his last book "The Fear of Death."
It was my privilege to enjoy for twenty years an intimate friendship with C. F. Andrews, the Indian missionary, the friend of Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore, and one of the truest saints of modern times. Andrews, or "Charlie," as he insisted on being called by his friends, knew India as few Europeans have ever known it. He got nearer to the heart of the Indian people than any man of his generation. He gave his own heart to them, understood them, and allied himself with their aspirations. His was a strange career. He went up to Cambridge as a scholar of Pembroke College, a member of the Catholic Apostolic Church (Irvingites, as they were once called) but joined the Anglican Church, and held high Church views. Taking a double first-in classics and theology-he seemed destined to stay at Cambridge as a don, but an urge toward service as a foreign missionary took him to India. Charlie Andrews, it was soon clear, was not going,"" to be a conventional missionary. He would not proselytise. His idea was to live the Christian life among the Indian people, and be a "good diffused, and in diffusion even more intense." Nor would he conform to denominational conventions. When a Baptist missionary fell ill Charlie Andrews offered to conduct the Sunday services in the Baptist Mission Chapel. His Bishop forbade him to do so, and threatened to inhibit him if he persisted. Andrews kept his promise to preach for the Baptist brother, and then sent his resignation from the Anglican Church to the Bishop. Thenceforward, he was an interdenominationalist -"Mr." not "Rev."- the friend of all missions, and a man welcomed on all religious platforms. His conception of Christianity challenged many conventions. For one thing he utterly refused to recognize any colour bar. In India he was the friend of all Indians-caste and outcaste-wore Indian dress, ate Indian food, and lived in a close sympathy with the common people - while retaining the friendship and confidence of men of high caste. I should not describe Charlie Andrews as an ascetic, because asceticism is a policy, and Andrew's asceticism was the outcome of an utter disregard of the good things of the world. He wore shabby tweed clothes--I never saw him except in what looked like the same old suit-and he gave no thought to food save that he did not eat meat, and really ate very little of anything. Whenever he lunched with me he asked for the same fare-green vegetables, curried rice, an orange (perhaps two) and a few nuts. He was a bachelor with no settled home-not even a pied-a-terre, until a few years before his death Pembroke College gave him an honorary fellowship, which carried with it a suite of rooms in the College. He travelled over the world-travelling cheaply it is true-but where he got the money for his journeyings I never could ascertain. He never had any money.
Once he came to see me to tell me that he wanted to go to the Southern States of America to study educational methods at Hampden and Tuskegee: but he had no money to pay his trans-Atlantic passage. I promised to see what I could do, and wrote to my friend Dr. Jesse Jones, the Secretary of the Stopes-Phelps Fund (a foundation set up by two American ladies for the study and promotion of negro education), and Dr. Jesse Jones sent me the necessary money for Andrew's expenses. Andrews went to the United States intending to stay three months: he stayed over a year. Americans made an idol of this humble man of God. A photograph of him was published with the caption "C. F. Andrews-the missionary who resembles the Apostle John." Andrews published a sort of spiritual autobiography entitled "What I owe to Christ," and to his amazement it proved a best seller. The handsome royalties earned for him by the book bewildered him. "I have never had so much money," he told me, "and I scarcely know what to do with it." I am quite sure that he was not tempted into a single personal luxury.
Finding that his book "What I owe to Christ" met a felt need, Charlie Andrews planned to write a Life of Christ. Believing that he could do it better in an Oriental atmosphere-he often reminded us that Jesus was an Oriental, but was always inter¬preted by Occidentals-he went out to India in 1937 to settle down to writing the book. Why it was never written I cannot say. His last letter to me, written from Pembroke College, had a definite farewell tone, and he may have suspected that we should never meet again. He died in 1940, and on his desk was the manuscript of a study, in ten chapters, of the Sermon on the Mount (with an introduction by his friend Rabindranath Tagore) which he may have intended to incorporate in his projected "Life of Christ." As his friend Agatha Harrison says in an introductory note to the volume in which this study was published: "C. F. Andrews did not write his 'Life of Christ’: he lived it." Charlie Andrews was a gentle, good, unselfish, and affectionate man about whom there clung the fragrance of spiritual loveliness ¬one of those rarely beautiful souls who live on in the minds and hearts of those who knew and loved them.


Take from pages 160-164 of the book More and more Memories by Arthur Porritt