Adrift on an Ice-Pan | Page 2

the defence of Lucknow, and another commanded the crack cavalry regiment, the "Guides," at Peshawar, and fell fighting in one of the turbulent North of India wars.
Of teachers, there was Dr. Grenfell's paternal grandfather, the Rev. Algernon Grenfell, the second of three brothers, house master at Rugby under Arnold, and a fine classical scholar, whose elder and younger brothers each felt the ancestral call of the sea and became admirals, with brave records of daring and success.
Dr. Grenfell's father, after a brilliant career at Rugby School and at Balliol College, Oxford, became assistant master at Repton, and later, when he married, head master of Mostyn House School, a position which he resigned in 1882 to become Chaplain of the London Hospital. "He was a man of much learning, with a keen interest in science, a remarkable eloquence, and a fervent evangelistic faith."
Mostyn House School still stands, enlarged and modernized, in the charge of Dr. Grenfell's elder brother, and in it his mother is still the real head and controlling genius.
Parkgate, at one time a seaport of renown, when Liverpool was still unimportant, and later a seaside health resort to which came the fashion and beauty of England, had fallen, through the silting of the estuary and the broadening of the "Sands of Dee," to the level of a hamlet in the time of Dr. Grenfell's boyhood. The broad stretch of seaward trending sand, with its interlacing rivulets of fresh and brackish water, made a tempting though treacherous playground, alluring alike in the varied forms of life it harbored and in the adventure which whetted exploration. Thither came Charles Kingsley, Canon of Chester, who married a Grenfell, and who coupled his verse with scientific study and made geological excursions to the river's mouth with the then Master of Mostyn House School. In these excursions the youthful Wilfred was a participant, and therein he learned some of his first lessons in that accuracy of observation essential to his later life work.
Here in this trained, but untrammeled, boyhood, with an inherited incentive to labor and an educated thirst for knowledge, away from the thrall of crowded communities, close to the wild places of nature, with the sea always beckoning and a rocking boat as familiar as the land, it is small wonder that there grew the fashioning of the purpose of a man, dimly at first, conceived in a home in which all, both of tradition and of teaching, bred faith, reverence, and the sense of thanksgiving in usefulness.
From the school-days at Parkgate came the step to Marlborough College, where three years were marked by earnest study, both in books and in play, for the one gained a scholarship and the other an enduring interest in Rugby football. Matriculating later at the University of London, Grenfell entered the London Hospital, and there laid not only the foundation of his medical education, but that of his friendship with Sir Frederick Treves, renowned surgeon and daring sailor and master mariner as well. With plenty of work to the fore, as a hospital interne, the ruling spirit still asserted itself, and the young doctor became an inspiration among the waifs of the teeming city; he was one of the founders of the great Lads' Brigades which have done much good, and fostered more, in the example that they have set for allied activities. Nor were the needs of his own bodily machine neglected; football, rowing, and the tennis court kept him in condition, and his athletics served to strengthen his appeals to the London boys whom he enrolled in the brigades. He founded the inter-hospital rowing club at Putney and rowed in the first inter-hospital race; he played on the Varsity football team, and won the "throwing the hammer" at the sports.
A couple of terms at Queen's College, Oxford, followed the London experience, but here the conditions were too easy and luxurious for one who, by both inheritance and training, had within him the incentive to the strenuous life. Need called, misery appealed, the message of life, of hope, and of salvation awaited, and the young doctor turned from Oxford to the medical mission work in which his record stands among the foremost for its effectiveness and for the spirituality of its purpose.
Seeking some way in which he could satisfy his medical aspirations, as well as his desire for adventure and for definite Christian work, he appealed to Sir Frederick Treves, a member of the Council of the Royal National Mission to Deep Sea Fishermen, who suggested his joining the staff of the mission and establishing a medical mission to the fishermen of the North Sea. The conditions of the life were onerous, the existing traffic in spirituous liquors and in all other demoralizing influences had to be fought step by step, prejudice and evil habit