David Jonathan East, after completing forty years as
President of Calabar College, departed Jamaica for England, his native land. Many
sang his praises because he had been an outstanding leader – a gift from
Baptist Missionary Society (BMS) to Jamaica Baptist Union (JBU). Whom would BMS
select as the successor to this revered and venerable man?
At first, the BMS Committee settled on Rev. W. Venis Robinson, B. A., of Bournemouth. He was a grandson of William Robinson, a missionary to India, Java and Sumatra in the early nineteenth century. However, Robinson was compelled to decline the invitation owing to an adverse medical certificate. As a result of this, Rev. Arthur James was appointed the third president of Calabar College.
James was born on March 6, 1851, at Buckingham, England and his early training was at Trinity Church School. He also benefited from private tuition. He chose a business career and was very successful at it, moving from the position of clerk to that of manager. He decided to discontinue business and resume his studies.
In 1879, at the age of 28, he was baptized at Derby Road Church, Nottingham. He had been an avowed Christian, but waited until he developed the firm conviction that immersion as a believer was the right mode of baptism.
James entered Queen’s College, Galway, Ireland, where he earned the B. A. degree. Then, he commenced theological studies at Regent’s Park College, London. After graduation, James received and accepted a call to the pastorate of the Baptist church at Thrapston, Northamptonshire. He remained there twelve years.
In February 1893, Baptist
Missionary Society (BMS) of London, recognizing James’ ability, character, scholarship
and Christian influence, appointed him as successor to David Jonathan East, as
President of Calabar College. James accepted the appointment and left for Jamaica
that same year with his wife, Eliza, whom he had married in 1883. Mrs.
James was to prove herself a true partner during James’ 18 years as Calabar president.
The Jameses arrived in Jamaica in April 1893 and, over the first ten years of their time in Jamaica, Mr. James worked assiduously to relocate the Calabar institution from East Queen Street to Chetolah Park on Slipe Pen Road .
Chetolah Park consisted of
nearly eleven acres (4.45 hectares) and was purchased from Pierre Théoma
Boisrond-Canal, a former President of Hayti (Haiti), in 1901, four years before
Boisrond-Canal’s death. The land cost £900 and it was acquired for the purposes
of the College. A contract for the proposed new building was assigned to Messrs.
Mais and Sant of Kingston for the sum of £2,316.
The highlight of James’
leadership at Calabar was his coordination of the process whereby, in 1904, Calabar
was moved from East Queen Street to Chetolah Park, a site
that was on the outskirts of the city of Kingston and which offered scope
for the expansion of the College facilities. This was a demanding process which
James executed with admirable efficiency.
On April 22,1903, Captain L. I.
Baker of the United Fruit Company laid the cornerstone for the new Calabar
College in a ceremony over which BMS Missionary Rev.
John Kingdon presided. In attendance were former Calabar students – Rev.
Patrick O’Meally being the oldest of them. Also present were representatives of
several church communions in Jamaica. The gathering celebrated James’
sacrificial labour at Calabar.
Addressing the gathering at
the stonelaying ceremony, James described the developments between 1893 and 1903 as “a story
of successive difficulties successfully overcome.” The project had been
undertaken almost debt-free and James expressed the conviction that “the work
to be done at the College would be a blessing not only to the denomination, but
to all denominations of evangelical Christians in Jamaica.”
The work of transferring Calabar to Chetolah Park being successfully concluded in 1905, James served for a further five years and then, in April 1910, submitted his resignation to the BMS Committee in London and, with his family, he departed Jamaica mid-1910.
Nineteen years later, in 1929, the planned unveiling of a portrait of Arthur James took place at the library of Calabar College to honour James for his contribution to Baptist life and witness in Jamaica. At the function that took place on the lawns of Calabar, Rev. Robert Gillett Chambers paid tribute to the late Principal James. Chambers referred to Principal James as a “sainted gentleman” and said he “proved himself a worthy successor of illustrious predecessors.” He continued:
He [James] was a man of
special attraction and one was unconsciously influenced by his imposing
personality. His was a quiet and irresistible charm. A friend of his testifies
that, “Arthur James was a man with a personality worthy of recollection. His
temperament at once, sweet and shrinking and yet, with quiet force under the
surface, was just the kind of temperament that evades full recognition.”
During his term of office, the
new Calabar College was established in 1905, largely through his indefatigable efforts.
He retired in l910 when it became
necessary to extend the work and scope of the college.
Having done so much during his
time to assist the development of Calabar, James felt he had expended all his
energies and would not be able to undertake the project of re-establishing the
Calabar High School that had been closed, in addition to the Calabar Normal
School which had been closed in December 1900, during the Schools’ years at
East Queen Street.
At the portrait unveiling
ceremony, Gillett Chambers said that Arthur and Liza James endeared themselves
to the theological students who loved, respected and honoured them.
He
continued:
His early application became a
lifelong habit, and he continued to the end to enjoy the companionship of books
and was a diligent student who endeavoured to satisfy his enquiring mind…. He
was well educated, cultivated, refined, a deep thinker, of rare thoughts, which
he clothed in choice language. The quality of his mind was superb. There was no
slackness about his presentation of the truth. Those who were most thoughtful
appreciated him best. The unlettered could not always follow him because his
thoughts were so closely interwoven that it was difficult to take up the
threads, but they were affected by his earnestness and enthused by his fervour.
There was nothing cheap about his sermons and addresses. They showed signs of
hard labour…. He was not wedded to theological thoughts of any particular time,
but was a seeker after truth, and was not afraid to study the latest works of the
“Higher Critics,” for he himself was of a critical turn, and could not be unbalanced
by their conclusions. He knew therefore what to receive and what to reject, so,
whilst giving freedom to his critical faculty, he held fast to the faith and stood
firm on the bedrock of the fundamentals.
In an article written by
himself, he said that he regarded it as one of the highest privileges of his
life to have laboured for eighteen years at Calabar College “among a people
whom I can never cease to love.”
Addressing the same gathering,
Rev. Thomas Gordon Somers, another past student of Arthur James' said this:
A man’s life could not be
gauged merely by the position he occupied but by his deep thoughts, translated
into actions and by the life of usefulness he lived; by the good he did; by the
lives which were influenced by the examples he set and by the fruits of his life’s
work, either during his existence or after his death.
Gordon Somers explained that “though
he [James] had passed away so many years ago, they felt they must meet to pay
tribute to the memory of what he had done at old Calabar, and at what was now
new Calabar. Mr. James formed a link between the days of David Jonathan East
and Ernest Price, and his spirit lived in the lives of the ministers who had
passed out from under him.”
The unveiling of James’
portrait was performed by Mrs. Ada Balfour, the wife of Calabar’s tutor James
Balfour who was on Calabar’s staff from 1883-1899. Mrs. Balfour was the daughter of Calabar President David Jonathan
East. After her father’s retirement, she, with her husband, departed Jamaica
for the United States where her husband died in 1900. Shortly thereafter, she
joined her three daughters living in Canada. She passed away in 1938.
Writing in The Northampton
Mercury of May 9, 1924, after James’ death, Sir Ryland Adkins, a Liberal
Party politician in England who had known James from his day at Thrapston said,
concerning James:
Arthur James was a man with a personality
worthy of recollection. His temperament at once sweet and shrinking and yet
with quiet force under the surface, was just the kind of temperament that
evades full recognition…. There
was a mellow maturity in his outlook on life, and in conversation or public speaking
he was always individual, and now and then almost original in his utterances….
He leaves behind him a legacy of quiet charm most often attained by women than
men, and in his case an experience of a divesting, unselfish man to whom spiritual
life was a constant and unforced reality.
James passed away peacefully in retirement at Northampton on May 11, 1924, at the age of seventy-three, leaving behind a record that is worthy of emulation. Twenty-four years later, on January 12, 1946, Mrs. Eliza James passed away at West Bridgford, Nottingham.
Consider this. Arthur James was not the BMS first choice for
the Jamaican mission. Yet, consider the outstanding work that James did in
Jamaica. God does have a strange way of working things out. In regard to administrative
decisions in the church, it seems we can speak confidently of the will of God
only in retrospect.
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