Home
People
Organizations
Events
Themes
Oral Histories
Learning Resources
E. B. Bhose
‐
Bengali missionary who worked with lascar seamen in nineteenth-century Britain
Other names
Reverend E. B. Bhose
Ebenezer Bholanath Bhose
Place of birth
Date of arrival to Britain
Location(s)
E16 1SL
United Kingdom
Place of death
West Ham, London
Date of time spent in Britain
1857–62, 1878–1905
About
E. B. Bhose was a missionary who worked with lascars in Britain. He was originally from Bengal, born in Calcutta to non-Christian parents in either 1829 or 1835. He was educated at the Bishop’s College, Calcutta, an institution funded by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG). He seems to have been an outstanding student there, since the Principal of Bishop’s College gave him a glowing reference. He first arrived in Britain in 1857, and was posted by the SPG to British Guiana (Guyana) in 1862 to work as a missionary with the population of 80,000 Indian indentured labourers.
He returned on leave to Britain on occasion and in December 1874 he was married to Emma Green in Marylebone, London. They had five children: Agnes (born 1877), Emma Florence (born 1878/9), Mary (born 1879), Cyril (born 1881) and Mabel (born 1884).
Bhose settled permanently in Britain in 1878, living in London. In 1881 he was licensed to the curacy of St Andrews in Bethnal Green. In the ensuing years he travelled widely in Britain, lecturing on mission work and raising funds for the SPG. His lectures highlighted the challenges of his mission work, including the isolation, the wariness of local people and the cynical attitude of white colonists. He was also critical of the British in India who monopolized the best posts and accrued wealth but lacked zeal in mission work with the Indian population.
In 1887 Bhose was appointed chaplain at the Lascar Mission newly opened by St Luke’s Church in Victoria Dock Roads, Canning Town. His mission room was also used as a Sunday school and a club room for leisure activities, attracting large numbers of lascar seafarers. It provided a safe space, as Asian seafarers often encountered racism locally. Bhose also visited lascars on the ships. He wrote regular mission reports which noted the observance of Muslim festivals by lascars in the ports. He emphasized that the mission had a social as well as a religious purpose, and did not make conversion to Christianity a focus of his work. He died in 1905 and is buried in West Ham Cemetery.
Society for the Propagation of the Gospel
Barrett, Daniel William, Sketches of Church Life in the Counties of Essex and Hertfordshire (London: Skeffington & Son, 1902)
Lahiri, Shompa, ‘Patterns of Resistance: Indian Seamen in Imperial Britain’, in Anne Kershen (ed.) Language, Labour, Migration (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 155–78
Miller, Robert, From Shore to Shore: A History of the Church and the Merchant Seafarer from the Earliest Times (Nailsworth: R. Miller, 1989)
Visram, Rozina, Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History (London: Pluto Press, 2002)
British Newspaper Archive
Census of England and Wales
Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, Tait 258 f. 210, Description: Correspondence on individual missionaries; letter of introduction for BHOSE (Ebenezer Bholonath), former S.P.G. missionary in British Guiana, 1881, Lambeth Palace Library, London
St Andrew's Waterside Church Mission Reports
Image credit
© Remaking Britain: South Asian Connections and Networks, 1930s – present
Entry credit
Mark Gorman
