Adam Madill and his Bible

The Seven Sharp television programme recently featured a story about the chance discovery of a Bible belonging to Rev Adam Madill at the Nelson Recycling Centre. The segment showed the Bible’s return to Knox College where Adam had used it when he was a student studying for the ministry. Who was Adam Madill and what was his story?

Adam Madill was born in Pukekohe about 1880 and in 1911 joined his brother, Dawson, at the Theological Hall at Knox College to train for the Presbyterian ministry. His Bible dates from this period. It is worn and well-thumbed and the margins of whole sections are filled with notes and thoughts on the text, scrawled in dark ink. Adam obviously liked to scribble down his thoughts as other books that he owned are similarly annotated.

In April 1914 Adam was ordained into his first parish at Whakatane where he took an active part in community life, including being a member of the local hockey team. Two years later he went to the First World War, embarking for France with the Auckland Battalion of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force. As an active Presbyterian minister, it would have been expected that Adam would take up a chaplaincy role. However, he turned this down, believing that he would be of more use to the men fighting at the Front by being among them, rather than behind the lines in a camp or hospital setting.

Adam’s letters home to his brother Dawson describe the shock and horror of his first experiences of combat. “The Front is an awful place,” he writes. “I feel that it is only through the mercy of God that I have come through safe and sound.” And yet within weeks he had become used to his new environment, remarking that “a shell does not scare me at all unless it lights a few yards away.”

His letters are full of fond wishes for Dawson and his family and thanks for gifts of Christmas cake and hand-knitted woolly vests. He describes the cold wintry weather in the trenches, warmed by brief meetings with old friends and acquaintances from New Zealand and a brief Knox College reunion held “somewhere in France”. He also recounts holding Bible Classes for his fellow soldiers and his sense of being in a place where he was able to do good work among the men.

His last letter warns that there “will be something doing soon” and not to worry if they didn’t hear from him for a few days. But there would be no more letters. Corporal Adam Madill was killed in action on 21 February 1917 and is buried at the Military Cemetery of Pont-du-Hem in Northern France. A family friend visiting in autumn 1928 sent a description of the site back to the Madill family: “On every grave flowers are growing. The trees were a blaze of autumn colouring – copper and gold. In the fading light of the afternoon the place looked eerily, wistfully beautiful, for the autumn mists were curling over the Flanders plain in the background.”

Adam’s family kept and treasured his letters for 80 years before entrusting them to the care of the Presbyterian Research Centre Archives. We are glad that his Bible has now been added to this personal collection, helping to bring to life the story of Rev Adam Madill.