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Name: GARDNER, Frank (Rev.)

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Birth Date: 1880 Coventry

Death Date: 11 Feb 1955 Lingwood, Norfolk

Nationality: UK

First Date: 1921

Profession: Missionary, Africa Inland Mission

Area: Chania Bridge, Kinyona

Married: In Nyasaland 1911 Edith Seaton b. 1888

Children: Edith (1913); Grace (1916 d. at birth); Beryl Vita (1918); Reginald Frank 'Rex' (24 June 1920 Fort Hall, Kenya-1998 Sunderland)

Book Reference: KAD, Hut, Red 22, Grasshoppers

General Information:

Red 22 - F. Gardner, Kijabe
Grasshoppers - Worked first in Nyasaland for the Zambezi Industrial Mission. During and after World War I they moved to the Congo to work with C.T. Studd, then joined AIM and worked in the Congo and Uganda. Persistent malaria sapped their strength and they were urged to return to England. At Kijabe they felt better and started work in Kenya at Kinyona.  Retired to England and finally settled in Scotland.
Web The West Nile district of Uganda had no Christian witness until 1918. Africa Inland Mission (A.I.M.) was developing its work nearby in north-east Congo, whilst the Church Missionary Society, who were at work in the rest of Uganda, did not have the human resources to extend this beyond the Nile. When a group of A.I.M. missionaries en route to the Congo passed eastwards through West Nile in 1917, the District Commissioner asked for A.I.M.’s help.
Meanwhile, the Gardners, Baptists from Chipping Norton, were approaching West Nile from the other direction. Frank, Edith and Alfred Gardner, who had previously served in Nyasaland (now Malawi), were missionaries in the Belgian Congo with CT Studd’s Heart of Africa Mission.
They had faced difficulties getting to the Congo. Firstly, Frank and Edith had to make the heart-breaking decision to leave their three-year-old daughter, Edith, behind in England. Then, their plans to sail were frustrated when Frank and Alfred were told that they needed to face a military tribunal before leaving the country (as it was in the middle of WWI).
After a month's delay, they reached the Belgian Congo in late 1916 and worked there for a year. However, some of Studd’s policies and his style of leadership caused great concern to the Gardners, along with a number of other missionaries. They were able to transfer to A.I.M, who allocated them to open a new mission station in Arua, in Uganda, and thus to bring the gospel to this area for the first time.
The land where they were building their home and setting up the mission station had been given by a local chief called Awudele. He had been the first of the Lugbara tribe to make contact with the District Commissioner, Mr Weatherhead when he arrived in Arua a few years earlier. He attended the services started by the Gardners, and continued to attend church until the age of 120, although it was not until he was close to his death that he became a Christian – and also confessed polygamy with ten wives as well as adultery with other people’s wives! 
The Gardners’ desire was to learn Lugbara, the local language, and to begin work preaching the gospel to the villages around them. However, much of their time was absorbed by house-building, and battling illness. Frank and Alfred built mud huts as temporary accommodation, alongside a tent which they lived in whilst they built a permanent house.
In the end, they were unable to complete this building work due to Spanish flu and numerous bouts of malaria. Eventually, one attack of malaria developed into blackwater fever for Frank, a devastating illness that had affected him twice before, and had caused the deaths of a number of other missionaries. This illness nearly killed Frank, and it was clear that, after less than a year in Arua, they would not be able to stay. Edith writes that Frank ‘wept as he thought of all he had hoped to do at Arua’. Frank, Edith and baby Beryl travelled to Kenya where the climate was better suited to Frank, and they continued to serve A.I.M. there for another four years until they returned to England.
Ancestry Passenger list 1916 - went to Belgian Congo with wife and Afred Gardner aged 29

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