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Article Two
Gossip with a Point

Introduction

The Laos Mission, as Article One suggests, was an entirely human institution and prey to the vicissitudes of its humanity no less than other organizations. Its members played politics. They argued with each other. On rare occasions, individual missionaries behaved in a way that was scandalous, or nearly so. This essay recounts one of those occasions, an occasion when the mission avoided a public scandal only because the early twentieth-century sense of propriety deemed it best to keep some things secret. In light of the twentieth-century's massively turbulent history, the event itself was incredibly petty and hardly worth notice but for one fact. It is documented in unusual detail in Callender's letter books, making it virtually the only "scandal" for which we have a detailed, if one-sided account. The event reveals another side to mission life and missionary relationships, which both helps us to understand the pressures of that life and serves to correct the hagiographic tendency of many histories of the missionary movement. Our purpose here, then, is to engage in ninety year-old gossip, in order to better understand the less happy side of the missionary enterprise in northern Siam. That "less happy side" created obstacles to the smooth working of the mission itself, which obstacles weakened the Laos Mission's ability to carry out its work effectively.

The Story

So far as the rest of the world knew in July 1910, the small mission force at the Lampang Station of the Laos Mission in northern Siam worked alongside each other generally smoothly and happily. No one knew, that is, that the Rev. Charles Callender had discovered his colleague, the Rev. William Yates, was engaged in a serious flirtation with his wife, Winella. The first hint in the Callender letter books that there might be something amiss is a letter dated 15 July 1910 that Callender wrote to the Rev. Howard Campbell in Chiang Mai. He writes that he is worried about Yates who was going through a bout of depression, had been ill, and was not doing at all well in his language studies. Callender hopes that Yates can recover from all of this and become a capable missionary, and he writes, "Mr. Yates has the making of a splendid missionary, if he can keep extraneous things out of his mind and become consciously identified with the Laos people." One of the "extraneous things" Yates had on his mind, apparently, was Winella, a woman ten years' his senior. The hint, however, is too subtle to win attention in and of itself, as there is nothing in

Callender's correspondence to that date suggesting any problem between his family and Yates.

A missive written by Callender to Yates on that same day, 15 July 1910, however, makes the matter suddenly much more clear. Yates has gone to Chiang Mai, and Callender writes a personal letter to him, a letter virtually unique in the extant records of the Laos Mission and worth quoting in full. Callender writes,

"Dear Mr. Yates: Up to the present time I have treated you as a brother in trouble or as a father would a wayward son. I have talked with you and written to you, admonishing, advising, encouraging.

"You plead for another trial in my home. I said you would be given another chance to reinstate yourself, but not in my home. Circumstances, however, favored you to the extent of granting your desire and request, viz. another chance in my home.

"Your persistence in your unbecoming attitude toward Mrs. Callender (I shall not say failure to make good) forces me to treat you as a formidable foe. Your insult to Mrs. Callender at the dominoes table, as showing in your posture, is not indicative of love or of respectful regard, but of lust. No gentleman would do such a thing even to a lady whose love he might legitimately have a right to win. Your conduct takes the matter out of the category of consul. I am not in a position to advise you further. I cannot regard you as a Christian brother or co-worker. I forbid you to enter my home or to have anything further to do with my family.

"I write this after deliberation and prayer. It was Tuesday evening [12 July 1910] when the insult occurred, it is now Friday morning. I have prayed and thought much as to the wise course to pursue, and feel that I am led by the Spirit.

"Please read 1 Pet 2:19-21, and Ephesians 4:1.

"God gives you another chance; so do I, in that I tell no one of your disgraceful conduct. I have no desire to injure your career, but to assist you. You refuse to be assisted. I am in duty bound to protect my home, my family, as well as to strive to promote God's Kingdom of righteousness upon earth. I shall continue to pray for you. God will reveal to you what course to take—if you pray sincerely and listen for his voices and have a heart bent upon doing his will.
"Very Sincerely yours,

"P.S. "I have written the above after reading Mrs. Callender's letter to you, which she wrote of her own free will, as I have written mine."

Clearly something had been going on for some time, but matters only came to a breaking point on that Tuesday evening when the Callenders and Yates were playing dominoes. Precisely what Yates did is not clear, perhaps there was some physical contact involved or maybe just gestures and eye contact; whatever it was, Callender took those actions as an indication that Yates was (still) making advances towards his wife. He is now warning Yates off in the clearest terms possible.

Yet, another fact stands out as well. Callender wants to keep the matter under wraps, to cover it up. His ostensible reason is to protect Yates' reputation so that he can remain a member of the Laos Mission. In previous correspondence, Callender

has expressed a great deal of concern concerning the limited size of the mission force and a particular desire to have the mission recall several experienced former missionaries no longer associated with the mission. Callender is, thus, presenting himself in a selfless light, as one who is concerned to prevent the loss of Yates, a promising young missionary, to the mission—in spite of his attentions towards Winella.

In a letter written the next day,16 July 1910, to his friend and mission colleague, Dr. Briggs, Callender maintains this pose by noting that Yates had been "down in the dumps" for some time, and the Lampang Station (i.e. the Callenders) had voted him a trip to Chiang Mai, ostensibly to snap him out of the doldrums. Callender expresses his fear that Yates might be lost to the mission and hopes that the presence of several younger missionaries in Chiang Mai might help Yates "pick up." The last hope is yet another subtle hint that something was wrong in Lampang, that is that Yates needed to be around younger, single missionary women where he would not have to flirt with an older, married colleague.

Yates, in Chiang Mai, subsequently wrote to Callender, evidently asking to be allowed to return to Lampang and resume his work there. In two letters to Yates, dated 9 August and 13 August 1910, Callender refused to consider a reconciliation; he warned Yates that if he returned from Chiang Mai Callender would not allow him in their home and the whole matter would soon be exposed to the other missionaries. He also urged Yates to consult about the whole matter with Campbell, a respected senior colleague who could keep a secret.

The matter could not rest there, however. The mission had assigned Yates to Lampang, where he had evidently been doing an acceptable job. Callender did not have the authority on his own to keep Yates from returning to Lampang, and even if Yates did not return explanations would have to be invented to keep the rest of the mission from finding out the real reason. Within this problem in mind, Callender wrote to Campbell on 20 August 1910 under the stated assumption that Yates had confided in Campbell (which was not the case) that Yates and the Callenders could not possibly work in the same Station. Callender asked that Yates stay on in Chiang Mai until the annual mission meeting in December when he could be assigned to a new station, anywhere but Lampang.

Callender and Campbell then exchanged a number of letters regarding Yates, Callender's letter to Campbell of 24 September 1910 being especially helpful in explaining a number of points. In this letter, Callender describes what had been going on prior to that fateful Tuesday evening at the dominoes table, writing that over a period of time Yates had persistently acted in "familiar" manner with Mrs. Callender. Yates knew how to do hypnosis, which Winella Callender was very susceptible to, and Callender told Campbell that this fact probably explained, "the partial success he obtained in his efforts with Mrs. C." Callender goes on to explain that after he noted Yates behavior towards his wife he warned Yates, but Yates persisted. Eventually, Callender had to go out on a trip into the country and put Yates "on his honor." When, after a few days, Callender asked Yates to join him at the rural church he was visiting, Yates tried to refuse and finally went only after a show of great reluctance. While he was with Callender, he wrote a note to Winella "treating her like a lover," which Callender intercepted and read. Further warnings and trial periods saw no change in Yates' persistent interest in "Mrs. C.," and matters finally came to their dramatic end as already described.

With this communication, Callender's substantive correspondence regarding Yates comes to an end. Subsequent letters indicate that Yates tried to repair his relationship with the Callenders, with little success. We do not know whether or not the actual reason for his subsequent reassignment to the Prince Royal's College, Chiang Mai Station, became public knowledge or not. Yates, in any event, remained on the field only until 1913, when he returned on sick leave to the United States and soon resigned from the Laos Mission. He later became pastor of the Westminster Presbyterian Church, Allentown, Pennsylvania.

Some Thoughts

Callender's last letter to Campbell indicates that the relatively minor affair of Yates' flirtatious attentions to Minella Callender are more complicated than it first seemed. Clearly, Minella in one way or another did not discourage those attentions and, evidently, may have even encouraged them. Callender does not express his feelings that his wife was also flirting with a man ten years her junior, but one can imagine that the whole episode put a serious strain on their marriage as well as adding unwanted, unneeded pressures on their duties as missionaries. It is hard to believe that Callender himself took the hypnosis hypothesis seriously. Callender's desire to

hush up the whole affair, thus, was not as selfless as he himself presented it to Yates and Campbell. He had his wife's complicity, however passive and temporary, to keep secret as well.

The Yates-Winella flirtation reminds us of the strangely isolated situations in which the members of the Laos Mission lived, especially those who served in the smaller stations such as Lampang. Missionary correspondence repeatedly alludes to this feeling of isolation. One of Callender's first letters in the Callender letter books, written on 22 December 1909 when his family had just located themselves temporarily in Phrae, describes the their feelings of loneliness and isolation at the end of the mission's annual meeting, which had been held in Phrae that year. The rest of the missionaries went back to their respective stations, leaving the Callenders "alone" in Phrae. Leaving them alone, that is, in the middle of a thriving city of thousands of inhabitants. In Lampang, Yates faced a strange dilemma. He was a young, single man with a full set of sexual drives and needs, who should have been on the look out for a prospective bride. The year was 1910, and we have to assume that both he and Winella Callender felt some ambivalence concerning their potentially promiscuous behavior, but Yates "obviously" could not turn his attention to the fair young ladies of Lampang, some of whom would have surely welcomed such attention. The mere thought of one of those young ladies as a prospective wife was unthinkable—as, more generally, was the thought that a missionary could live among the northern Thai but apart from other Westerners without feeling isolated or lonely.

The point is not whether or not such feelings were justified. The point is the reality of those feelings. It was almost as if the missionaries lived on a chain of small tropical (American, Christian) islands in the midst of a huge (northern Thai, Buddhist) ocean. They had to paddle between their islands to keep each other company, finding no social refreshment in that large ocean. This is not a minor point, but rather a central fact of mission life built on missionary attitudes about themselves as Western Christians and about the people around them who were neither Western or, for the most part, Christian. Even the small Christian communities related to each mission station did not provide social intercourse of a type that prevented even veteran missionaries, such as the Callenders, from feeling lonely.

This sense of social alienation posed an immense burden for the missionaries, the Yates-Winella dalliance being but a minor if telling example. The missionaries

lived in what were effectively, if unconsciously, small communes, with all of the attendant problems posed by communal life but not the conscious commitment to communal life necessary to transcend the problems.

It is hard in retrospect to calculate the effects of social isolation on the missionaries, most especially because their sense of propriety and, perhaps, embarrassment did not allow them to admit openly to the Board the extent of the tensions they felt with each other. Tactically, they had budgets and work to protect as well, which might be jeopardized by the Board knowing too much. The cost of social isolation, in any event, must have been very high in terms of health, well-being, and effectiveness. We do know that it was more than some of the missionaries, particularly the wives, could bear; there is some indication that some missionaries were sent home with mental health problems, although the matter was not generally put that way, in justifying to the Board why they had to return home.

This admittedly minor case also reminds us of the importance of propriety to the "old-time" missionaries. Yates' (and, possibly, Winella's) improper behavior aside, we see Callender doing his best to handle the matter in a proper manner. He took pains to treat Yates fairly and gave him repeated chances to change his behavior, which Yates used, according to Callender, only as further opportunities to flirt with Winella. Callender, furthermore, tried self-consciously to act as a proper, responsible missionary by preserving for the Laos Mission a promising young missionary. At the same time, his sense of propriety drove Callender to engage in a cover up of the whole affair, one that would preserve Yates' reputation, the Lampang Station's reputation, and—not least of all—Winella's good name. The point is that throughout this event Callender labored mightily to act in a proper manner, and in the course of things to save his and his wife's face.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, little stories like this one serve to remind us, again, that the missionaries of one hundred years' ago were not any different from us—in spite of latter-day efforts to idealize and even idolize them. They did dumb things, and dumb things happened to them. The good they did in northern Thailand was substantial, but it was always tinged with the limitations and realities of human frailty embodied in unhappy ideologies, personal tensions, unwarranted assumptions, and just plain mistaken actions. We must insist on preserving as clear an understanding of

missionary humanity as possible because just as their strengths helped strengthened the northern Thai churches of their day so their weaknesses served to weaken the church. The northern Thai churches of today stand heir to both the strengths and weaknesses. We tend, however, to want to exaggerate the strengths and wish away the weaknesses, which is tantamount to perpetuating that which weakens. We tend, that is, to want to cover up and forget implications of the fact that one of the old-time missionaries once engaged in an extended flirtation with a colleague's wife, who in her turn did less than she should have to discourage those flirtations.