One bitterly cold winter night in 1867 Thomas Barnardo, then a young, medical missionary student, found a pitiful-looking boy curled up by the dying fire in the tiny London building1 in which he had been teaching other poor boys that evening. Barnardo told the boy to go home to his mother, but the boy, Jim Jarvis, replied that he did not have a mother, or a father, that he “Ain’t got no friends…and Oi—don’t—live—nowhere.”2 When Barnardo enquired further as to where he slept, Jim led him to some of the roofs and gutters in the East End of London where he found other destitute children, dressed only in rags and huddled together to keep warm. It was a revelation which was to change the direction of Barnardo’s life.

At this time Thomas Barnardo had only been in London a few months. He had been born in Dublin in 1845, the ninth child of reasonably well-to-do parents, and, although a voracious reader, he was too high-spirited to have done particularly well in school, and he left at 16 to attempt a career in business. Influenced by rationalist writers like Voltaire, Paine, and Rousseau, he had declared at 14 that he was an agnostic,3 but three years later in 1862 he was converted to evangelical Christianity during the revival then sweeping Ireland. From the very beginning of his Christian life he showed a special concern for the poor, almost immediately starting to teach at “Ragged Schools” (classes held on Sundays and a few evenings a week to give poor children a basic education) and later preaching the gospel in poor neighborhoods. A few years later, inspired by a meeting with Hudson Taylor, he had offered to become a missionary to China and arrived in the East End of London in 1866 for his training.4

But having become aware of the dreadful plight of so many children in London, Barnardo was encouraged by the great Christian reformer Lord Shaftesbury to think that God might be calling him, not to China, but to be a “missionary among the homeless children of this Metropolis.”5 He started to appeal for funds, and after an initial false start,6 in March 1868 he acquired two small four-roomed houses from which to base his work. Unlike the limited scope of the Ragged Schools, the “East End Juvenile Mission,” as it became known, had an ever-open door and a program for every day of the year—as well as Bible study and prayer meetings, there was a free lending library, a reading room, reading circles, sewing classes, and an employment bureau. Barnardo had been paying for destitute children to be boarded out with local Christian families, and he was to continue this policy all his life, but in addition, in 1870 he set up the first of what were to be many residential homes for destitute children.7 These eventually spread throughout Britain, Ireland, and even overseas. They took a variety of forms, but he tried to make the experience of the children living in them as much like loving family life as possible,8 and unlike the State-run Poor-Law institutions, he laid great stress upon providing the children with training so that they would be able to earn their own living when they left. He also helped many of the more physically robust children to emigrate overseas where, particularly in Canada, many were to lead astonishingly successful lives.

Barnardo died at the early age of 60 in 1905, worn out by his work. He rarely went to bed before 3 a.m., and in his early years he often spent the small hours searching in the sheds, stables, barrels, and crates of the East End for children sleeping rough, so becoming known as the “Young Man with the Lantern.”9 But the effort was worth it: during his lifetime he saved at least 60,000 children,10 and by the time of his death the charity he founded ran 96 homes caring for more than 8,500.11 He was a man in which Christian compassion and practical action were wonderfully joined. And his legacy is a lasting one—Barnardo’s is still Britain’s leading children’s charity.
Footnotes:
1

It was, in fact, an old donkey shed, which Barnardo and a couple of friends had done up sufficiently that it could serve as an experimental Ragged School.
2

Quoted in J. Wesley Bready, Doctor Barnardo: Physician, Pioneer, Prophet (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1930), 71.
3

All his life Barnardo was to retain a great love of reading, and a deep respect for the use of reason. His one indulgence was his library, and he would often read between midnight and 3 a.m.
4

It was Hudson Taylor who recognized after a few months that Barnardo also had the qualities needed to study medicine. He eventually qualified as a doctor in 1876.
5

Quoted in Bready, Doctor Barnardo, 85. Seventeen of the children Barnardo rescued were later to go to China as missionaries.
6

He started, in November 1887, to hold huge meetings providing free Sunday teas, followed by evangelistic talks, for more than 2,000 poor children in a large hall over a pub. After a couple of weeks, however, a new proprietor took over the pub and refused Barnardo the use of the hall. Almost immediately Barnardo became seriously ill and, brought low, realized he had not fully asked God for guidance about the work. Thoroughly humbled, he started work again the following year in a much smaller way.
7

Not long after the first boys’ home was set up, Barnard had to turn away an 11-year-old boy, “Carrots” Somers, because it was full. To Barnardo’s distress, Carrots was found dead two days later as a result of malnutrition and exposure. From then on the policy of the homes was “No Destitute Child Ever Refused Admission” (this included children even with quite severe physical handicaps). This necessitated a huge expansion in the homes program, and put tremendous and constant pressure on fundraising.
8

His first home for girls, started in 1873, was initially run on very institutional lines, and Barnardo was very upset to learn how unpopular it was with them. One night, however, he had a dream which he recounted to his wife as follows: “I saw…an ivy-mantled cottage surrounded by flowers, and a light gleaming from its bay-window. I peeped through. The room upon which I gazed presented every appearance of a cosy, happy home. The furniture was simple, but tasteful; beautiful pictures were on the walls; and in the centre of the room was a large table beside which was seated a happy, matronly looking woman, around whom clustered fifteen or sixteen girls, their faces radiant with joy. I now looked more intently, and perceived that the woman was reading aloud from a Family Bible open at Psalm lxviii. Listening, I heard her read verse six: ‘God setteth the solitary in families.’” Ibid., 131.

After this he set up a girls’ home in Barkingside based around small cottages. By the time of his death there were 70 cottages, housing more than 1000 girls.
9

Quoted in Bready, Doctor Barnardo, 128.
10

Ibid., 134.
11

“History: 1900-1939,” Barnardo’s Website, http://www.barnardos.org.uk/who_we_are/history/history2.htm (accessed August 23, 2007).

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article adapted from Kairos Jouranl

First Baptist Church of Perryville is located across from the Principio Health Center on Rt. 40, one and a half miles east of Rt. 222.