George Grenfell

George Grenfell (21 August 1849, in Sancreed, Cornwall – 1 July 1906, in Basoko, Congo Free State (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) was an English missionary and explorer.

Early years Grenfell was born at Sancreed, near Penzance, Cornwall. After the family moved to Birmingham he was educated at a branch of King Edward's school. Though his parents were Anglicans he soon joined Heneage Street Baptist Chapel, where he was admitted to membership by baptism on 7 Nov. 1864. He founded the Birmingham Young Men’s Baptist Missionary Society.

After leaving school, he was apprenticed to a firm of hardware and machinery merchants. Influenced by the likes of David Livingstone, Grenfell's ambition was to become a missionary so in September 1873 he entered the Baptist College, Stokes Croft, Bristol. On 10 Nov. 1874 the Baptist Missionary Society accepted him for work in Africa.

In December 1874, he went as a Baptist missionary to Cameroon, West Africa, with Alfred Saker (1814–80).

He married Mary Hawkes from Heneage Street Baptist Chapel but she died in January 1877; In total, the Peace travelled 15,000 miles (over 24,000km).

By 1888, he had buried four children, as well as Comber’s wife. In 1903 he protested to King Leopold against consistent refusal of the Congo Free State authorities to countenance further Baptist advance beyond Yakusu on the Upper Congo, fifteen miles east of the confluence of the Aruwimi with the Congo. Meanwhile, he found difficulty in obtaining building sites from the Congo Free State, which accorded them freely to Roman Catholics. He grew convinced of Catholic favouritism in the Belgian administration, which he had previously trusted. The Cameroon District, West Africa, Royal Geographical Society, London, 1882