All foreigners were called in to Fuzhou, but after a couple months the provincial governor declared that all trouble was over, and a number of missionaries left the city for a brief holiday.
From an early age, he had contemplated on ministry with a possible view to later going out to the mission field, but the loss of his parents made him determined to carry on the work which had been interrupted by their untimely deaths.
Four years later he was accepted as a candidate by the Church Missionary Society and sailed for Hong Kong, accompanied by a younger sister, Kathleen, in November 1905.
It seems that the Church Missionary Society at the time considered that there were great possibilities in Hong Kong and South China, which up to then had been somewhat neglected, while Fukien was comparatively well-provided, principally by members of the Dublin University Mission, which had been founded and organised during his last furlough by Robert Stewart, who was himself a T.C.D.
The Chinese Church of Hong Kong was still in its initial stage, though Christian work of a sort had been carried on for nearly sixty years by that time.
The growth of the school coincided with the increase in numbers of the Christians in the Bishop's Chapel, and Stewart conceived the idea of satisfying two needs at the same time.
In its earlier years there was a service in English on Sunday evenings in St. Paul's Church for the benefit of those Chinese, returned students and the like, who now frequented St. John's Cathedral.
The handsome young Irishman with the graceful pulpit manner, musical voice, remarkable eyes and amazing fluency of speech was well-remembered and loved by hundreds of men and women who heard him in those days, Hong Kong had a relative family feel to it then compared with its immensity today, with less than half a million souls at the time.
Branch schools of St. Paul's College, Hong Kong were formed in Hollywood Road, at Shau Kei Wan and Aberdeen, and in far-off Rabaul, staffed in every case by Old Paulines.
In 1933 he retired from work in Hong Kong, returning to England, where he became vicar of Lyonsdown in New Barnet, London, in succession of his father-in-law, Bishop Gerald Heath Lander.
[1] In late 1950, he suffered several minor strokes, and was ordered by doctors to return to England, resulting in the final part of the memoirs he had been writing being incomplete.
He and his wife Kitty moved to Bournemouth, England, where he assisted in the parish church, but a year later was confined to bed by a major stroke.
[3] His years of successful work in England were recalled by Bishop Sherwood Jones at the moving funeral held in Lyonsdown Church, London.