The Long Walk That Sent Bibles to Singapore

I was recently listening to a podcast about Mary Jones, a poor Welsh girl who could not read. She loved the Bible so much that she learnt how to read. Then she wanted to own her own Bible. She worked for six years to accumulate enough to purchase a Bible. The nearest place that sold a Bible was 42 kilometres away.

In 1800, she walked the full 42 km from her village in Llanfihangel-y-Pennant, Abergynolwyn, to Bala, only to be told there were no more Bibles available for purchase. She was then only 16 years old.

The man at the other end of the walk

The following account of Mary's walk and its aftermath draws on Simonetta Carr's "Thomas Charles, Mary Jones, and the Birth of the Bible Society", Place for Truth, 13 September 2022.

Mary wasn't walking to a stranger. Her destination was tied to someone who had already shaped her life: Thomas Charles, the preacher who had founded the very "circulating school" in Abergynolwyn where, at age ten, Mary had first learned to read.

Charles himself had an unlikely path to Bala — Oxford-educated, ordained in the Church of England, he'd fallen in love with a Bala businesswoman named Sally Jones and agreed to settle in her hometown to marry her. There he built a network of schools carrying Welsh-language literacy into rural North Wales, work that put him, and his stock of Bibles, at the centre of Mary's story.

The Bible she wanted was expensive: a 1799 edition from the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge. But she'd saved enough. Her own pastor, William Hugh, told her the nearest copies were with Charles at Bala, and she set out there.

A door that almost closed

She arrived in the evening, only to find Charles had already retired for the night, as was his habit. William Hugh had prepared a fallback: Mary sought shelter with a local preacher, David Edwards, who took her in and walked her to Charles's door the next morning.

There, her hopes were nearly dashed. All ten thousand copies of that 1799 print run had already been sold or claimed by other buyers. But moved by her tears, and by the story of how she'd earned every coin over six years, Charles gave her a copy that had been promised to someone else.

Mary went home with her Bible. Charles couldn't shake the encounter.

Charles kept telling Mary's story as an appeal for champions who were willing to make Bibles free available.

That led to the formation of the British and Foreign Bible Society on 7 March 1804.

When I heard in the podcast of the British and Foreign Society, I remembered that Stamford Raffles had carried Bibles to our region for the Society.

Raffles' Role in the Bible Society 9 Years Later

The British and Foreign Bible Society was barely a decade old when its work reached a British colonial administrator eight thousand miles from London: Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, Lieutenant-Governor of Java.

In 1813, letters from British soldiers stationed in Java were asking for Bibles. The letters reached London and drew the Society's attention to the Java region for the first time. The Society decided to send 500 complete Dutch Bibles and a thousand new Testaments. It also sent 300 English Bibles, and 500 new Testaments out to Java. and addressed the shipment directly to Raffles's authority.

That's how Raffles's name first entered the Society's records; not as a volunteer, but as the man the society trusted to see thousands of Bibles safely into the right hands on the other side of the world.

A letter dated 22 November 1813 asked that "His Excellency will have the goodness to give directions that they be placed in the hands of proper persons to distribute the same…." The consignment came through men of the London Missionary Society (LMS).

Less than three months later, on 4 June 1814, the Java Auxiliary Bible Society was formally established "in the house and under the Presidency of His Excellency Lieutenant Governor Raffles." He wasn't a distant patron — he chaired it.

Raffles's involvement deepened rather than faded once he left the region. Returning to England between 1816 and 1818, he had more time to correspond directly with the Society, and archived letters show he pushed specifically for the Malay Scripture translation to use everyday, commonly spoken Malay rather than the more formal literary register.

When he returned to the region as Lieutenant-Governor of Bencoolen, he set up a second auxiliary, the Sumatran Auxiliary Bible Society in 1818. All these happened before he founded Singapore

And after founding Singapore in 1819, he continued advocating for the cause from there too, pressing the Society to station a dedicated agent in the new settlement.

Taken from Sophia Raffles's 1830 Memoir of the Life and Public Services of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles

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