Cannibals and the little known story of a Barnard Castle man’s epic life

This Saturday, April 8, marks the centenary of the death of a Teesdale man held in such high regard in the islands of the Pacific Ocean that thousands of people gather each year to pay tribute. Trevor Brookes reports

MOST people in Barnard Castle won’t have heard of Revd George Brown. He may be forgotten in his home town, but people in New Britain, Papua New Guinea, hold a huge commemoration event in his honour every year.

George Brown Day marks the Methodist missionary’s arrival on the island on August 15, 1875, after which he brought faith to the inhabitants, despite the fact they ate his colleagues.
Last year, 5,000 people gathered on New Britain for the event which included choirs, presentations and banners.
The late 1800s saw the “tragic” killings of missionaries who came from Fiji, accompanying George Brown, reports the Pacific media site Loop news.
“On their mission to spread Christianity, Dr Brown’s Fijian missionaries were murdered and eaten by the ancestors of locals living in the villages surrounding Tungnaparau. Despite suffering their loss, he pushed to spread the Gospel,” it adds.
A ceremony was held a decade ago to reconcile locals with the relatives of the deceased missionaries. Food for thought indeed.
The son of a barrister, Brown was born in Barnard Castle in 1835, and was educated at a private school.
He became an assistant in a doctors’ surgery and later a chemist. It is said that Brown recoiled at his stepmother’s discipline and attempted to run away to sea.
His urge to escape these islands didn’t leave him. He migrated to New Zealand in 1855 and took an interest in the bible. The rest is South Pacific history.

A report published in the Teesdale Mercury on May 1917, chronicles the life of Brown. The reporter at his memorial service wrote of a “man who rose from office boy, step by step, until his name was famous through all the countryside, and regarded with the greatest respect throughout Durham and the North Riding.
“He was a man of great application and ability in public life, and of singular modesty of character, and was deeply interested in the moral, intellectual and spiritual well-being of the town
“He was one of the founders of the Mechanics' Institute, and for some years its secretary. He was also the secretary of the South Durham and Lancashire Union Railway, Clerk to the Boards of Health and Poor Law Guardians, and was in later years called to the Bar in the Middle Temple.”
In 1891, the Australian Conference bestowed its highest honour by placing him in the presidential chair in recognition of his work in the South Pacific. It was his extraordinary work on these islands that is by far the most noteworthy.
It began with him travelling to New Zealand, “a wild sailor boy”, and then making his home with the Revd Buddle, his uncle, also a Barnard Castle man but then living in Auckland. His missionary work began in Samoa, where he witnessed the rise of German imperialism and its consequences when traders began selling arms and ammunition to the locals
Brown once spent the day sat in the sun trying to make a truce between the warring parties to avoid a bloodbath. In later life he had the unique distinction of founding three separate missions – in New Britain, New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. In New Britain, he was constantly in danger of being eaten because he was a foreigner.
In her recent book, Pacific Missionary George Brown, 1835-1917, biographer Margaret Reeson records the type of scenes that greeted him there.
She writes: “Human bones tipped the spears he purchased by barter, human skulls were revered in chiefly houses and the odour of decay hung around a nearby tree where the corpse of a respected leader was suspended.
“Evidence of violent death and cannibalism were always part of their new world.”
Brown once wrote how he reacted: “We were a little uneasy at seeing so many natives assembled all heavily armed and with spare bundles of spears. I certainly did not like their appearance but we kept walking quietly on right into the midst of the crowd and I began to barter with them.”
The Teesdale Mercury a century ago is a little more explicit of his achievements: “When he landed with a single sailor for companion, entirely ignorant of the language, he found the islands inhabited by a race of ravages, notorious as cannibals of the worst type.
“He reduced the language to writing, translated parts of the New Testament into it, and lived to see the people educated and sending native teachers to less fortunate communities.
“Dr Brown was a great man, and Barnard Castle had never produced in real manhood a greater man.”
He returned to Sydney, in Australia, in 1881 after five years on the island.
Reeson’s work notes Brown to be an “explorer, linguist, political activist, apologist for the missionary enterprise, amateur anthropologist, writer, constant traveller, collector of artefacts, photographer and stirrer.”
She writes: “Brown gained unwanted notoriety for involvement in a violent confrontation at one point in his career, and lived through conflict in many contexts but he also frequently worked as a peace maker.
“Policies he helped shape on issues such as church union, indigenous leadership, representation by lay people and a wider role for women continue to influence Uniting Church in Australia and churches in the Pacific region.”
The aforementioned “conflict” came when Brown took part in reprisal raids in 1878 against a chief who killed Christian native teachers. The Reverend Sailasa Nacukidi, from Fiji, two mission workers and a youth had been eaten in a vast feast – and their women and children were next on the menu. As Reeson’s excellent book records, it made Brown’s “blood boil”.
No sooner as he had preached “for ye should go out with joy and be led forth with peace”, the reprisal raid had been decided on, even though Brown knew that he would be accused of trying to force Christianity by war on the locals. Blood and death followed.
It is said that legendary novelist Robert Louis Stephenson was “so taken by hearing Brown tell of his experiences that he begged to be allowed to write his autobiography”.
Brown declined the offer. Had he said yes, the life and times of this Barney boy may have become just as famous as Treasure Island and the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
A century on, there is little to commemorate Brown in Barnard Castle other than a memorial plaque in the Methodist Church.