The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Revival Streams
Oswald Chambers
1874–1917 · Scottish
A trained artist who died at forty-three in Egypt, and whose wife's shorthand notes became the most-read devotional book in English.
The life
Oswald Chambers trained as an artist in Edinburgh and gave it up for a training college in a Scottish seaside town, then spent years traveling and teaching before he settled as principal of a small Bible college in London. He married Gertrude Hobbs - he called her Biddy - a stenographer who could take dictation at 250 words a minute, and she wrote down what he said.
In 1915 he closed the college and went to Egypt as a chaplain to Australian and New Zealand troops waiting to be sent to the front, running a hut where soldiers came for talks and tea. He died there in November 1917, at forty-three, of complications after a burst appendix, having put off surgery so as not to take a bed from a wounded man. Almost every book with his name on it was assembled by Biddy from her notes after he was gone; the daily readings she published in 1927 have never been out of print.