By historian Arthur Nicholls:

ONE of the most famous people to visit Kendal was the missionary David Livingstone, but few people today are aware of this.

He began life in 1813 in Blantyre, Lanarkshire, as an ordinary Scottish boy from an impoverished, hardworking family. His parents were marked by their piety, a zeal for education and a strong religious faith. There were seven children in the family who all lived in a single room at the top of a typical tenement.

His father worked in a cotton mill on the nearby River Clyde and David joined him working in the mill, his day starting at six in the morning and continuing for a full 10 hours or more, leaving little time for any other activity.

However, he inherited his parents’ zeal for education and, knowing that there was more to life than mere work, he attended a night school and continued his studies in the cramped conditions at home. At the mill, he propped open a book on the spinning frame and read from it a sentence at a time as the machinery moved towards and from him. He became able to read the Latin works of Virgil and Horace.

When he was 20, he read an account of a missionary’s toil in Asia and developed an urge to devote his life to the alleviation of human misery. Responding to an appeal in 1834 by the British and American churches to go to China, he determined to become a medical missionary there.

To equip himself for that task, he worked only part-time and attended college classes in Glasgow for two years, studying Greek, theology and medicine. He was accepted in 1838 by the London Missionary Society but was prevented from going to China by the outbreak of the Opium War.

He did not give up and completed his studies which included botany, zoology, chemistry and astronomy to equip him for his life’s work. He met Robert Moffat, a missionary in southern Africa, and became convinced that his future life’s work was also to be in Africa.

For the next 30 years he travelled extensively in Africa, discovering the Victoria Falls. He married Robert Moffat’s eldest daughter, Mary, and she accompanied him on many of his missionary journeys. By 1842 they had four children and the family’s needs caused her to return to England, where she was welcomed by Charles Braithwaite and his wife Susanna, who were supporters of the London Missionary Society. She lived with them in their house on Highgate, Kendal.

David came to England in 1858 as a national hero and stayed with the Braithwaites. Returning later to Africa he continued his work, where he was found by Henry Stanley with the famous words, ‘Mr Livingstone, I presume’. He had become worn out, dying on his knees in prayer at Ujiji in 1873. His body was buried with full honours in Westminster Abbey. His life was epitomised in his motto of ‘fear God and work hard’.