Grenfell of Labrador: A Biography

G.A. Rawlyk is a history professor at Queen’s University and the
author of Champions of the Truth: Fundamentalism, Modernism, and the
Maritime Baptists.

Romkey’s superbly produced book is a major reassessment of the
remarkable missionary-doctor Wilfred Grenfell. Romkey, who teaches in
the English Department at Memorial University, St. John’s,
Newfoundland, is not primarily concerned with Grenfell as a
doctor-missionary but with Grenfell as “a cultural politician who
intervened in a colonial culture.” This critical yet empathetic
biography should be required reading for those interested in outpost
life in Newfoundland or Labrador in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. Moreover, Grenfell reveals more than the author may
realize about the evolving evangelical ethos of the Anglo-American world
at the turn of the century and about the transformation of muscular
Christianity into bureaucratic social service.

Grenfell was born in 1865 in Cheshire; he died in 1940 in the United
States, his adopted home. His ashes were deposited in July 1941 in the
soil of Newfoundland, his real home. Grenfell first arrived in
Newfoundland in 1892 as an evangelical missionary of the Royal National
Mission to Deep Sea Fishermen. In a short time he transformed this
mission into the Grenfell Mission, making brilliant use of his
considerable powers of persuasion and propaganda.

As Newfoundland developed in the twentieth century, Grenfell found his
mission under increasing pressure from the state. Nevertheless, He
remained a genuine Anglo-American hero, and the institutions he helped
create continue to exert a profound influence on a myriad of
Newfoundlanders. This book is well researched and is a marvelous
introduction to the missionary/hero of Labrador-Newfoundland.