Wellesley Tudor Pole, Abdu’l-Bahá and the Bahá’í goal of a universal faith
PATRICK S. WOLFE
Abdu’l-Bahá (seated) at Wellesley Tudor Pole’s The Clifton Guest House, Bristol, England, in 1911 or 1913. Tudor Pole, in the overcoat with eight buttons, is to the right of Abdu’l-Bahá.
A quote I identify with comes from Mahatma Gandhi: “I’m a Hindu, a Christian, a Muslim, a Jew, a Buddhist and a Confucian.” I’m sure Gandhi could’ve kept going, mentioning the Bahá’ís, the Quakers, and others, but only stopped where he did for reasons of economy.
Gandhi’s universality reminds me of news footage of the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu on stage together with much joyous high jinks occurring between them. Were it possible to have news footage of the Buddha and Jesus meeting, I’m pretty sure they’d also relish each other’s company.
A personally meaningful 1980 event occurred when my father’s older cousin, Getta, who was visiting from England, gave me a used copy of Wellesley Tudor Pole’s The Silent Road: In the Light of Personal Experience that she’d just purchased at a church bazaar. I was 28, Getta was 74. “I think you’ll find this of interest,” she said off-handedly. And I did once I got my nose into it. A British mystic (1884-1968), WTP would become an important life companion.
But this essay isn’t only about WTP. In the spirit of Gandhi’s universality, it’s also about Abdu’l-Bahá (1844-1921), the son of Bahá’u’lláh (1817-1892), who, in 1863, announced that he was the Universal Messenger of God foretold by the Bab, the forerunner, in 1844. (Bahá’u’lláh, meaning “the Glory of God” in Arabic, was born Mírzá Husayn ‘Alí. Abdu’l-Bahá, meaning, “Servant of Bahá,” was born Abbás Effendi.)[1] WTP first heard of the Bahá’í when he was in Constantinople in 1908.[2] He and Abdu’l-Bahá became friends when they met at Ramleh, near Alexandria, in 1910.[3]
Viewed as heretical, Bahá’u’lláh and his family were exiled from Persia, first to Baghdad, later to Turkey and finally, in 1868, to Akka in Palestine (now Acre, Israel). They were essentially imprisoned from 1868 until the Young Turks Revolution in 1908, when Abdu’l-Bahá and the others were freed and moved to Haifa.[4]
According to WTP, Abdu’l-Bahá “insisted that his father had come to proclaim anew the unity underlying all religions. He also spoke of the danger of exclusiveness.” WPT added that Abdu’l-Bahá impressed “all who met him by his dignity, friendliness, and his aura of spiritual authority[5] [as well as with] his immense breadth of outlook, permeated with the spirit of deep and loving kindness…. Abdu’l-Bahá always struck the universal note, the note of Oneness as between the Creator and all His creation, great or small.”[6]
When WTP arrived at Alexandria in the spring of 1910, he did so via the streamer Sphinx which had crossed the Mediterranean Sea from Marseilles. He was bringing gifts from Abdu’l-Bahá’s English friends. This was one of several purposes of WTP’s extended trip, which was to continue to Damascus, Smyrna, Constantinople, and Vienna. But when WTP met Abdu’l-Bahá a series of remarkable events quickly occurred and caused WTP’s carefully made travel plans to fall apart to his “considerable annoyance.”[7]
The first remarkable event was when Abdu’l-Bahá’s grandson, who was serving as the interpreter for Abdu’l-Bahá and WTP, was called away and, as WTP subsequently stated, “Abdu’l-Bahá continued the conversation and I found myself replying! When the interpreter returned, my ability to do so ceased. To make sure that I had understood correctly, I asked for a translation of what Abdu’l-Bahá had been saying in his absence, and this confirmed the fact that I had been able to understand and to reply accurately in a language of which I was completely ignorant. (This curious experience was repeated some years later when visiting Abdu’l-Bahá in Paris.)”[8]
The next day, WTP asked for Abdu’l-Bahá’s blessing for the rest of his journey. WTP was taken aback when Abdu’l-Bahá “casually” said that WTP “should be returning to Marseilles on the following day on the same steamer” he had arrived on. WTP explained to the translator that this wasn’t possible—“all my overland bookings have been made”—but the translator “replied to the effect that if the Master said I had to return to Marseilles now, then that was what would happen.”[9]
WTP relented. When he came to say goodbye the next morning, Abdu’l-Bahá asked him “to carry out a commission for him on reaching Paris.” The assignment was to find Tammadun ul Molk, a Persian student who was nearly blind, and give him “£10 in gold to pay his fare to Alexandria.” In relating all this, WTP added: “When I asked for the student’s address in Paris I was told that this was unknown but that a way would be found for bringing me into contact with him.”[10]
WTP was about 26 at the time, while Abdu’l-Bahá was forty years his senior. In his book The Two Worlds of Wellesley Tudor Pole, Gerry Fenge remarks: “It is possible that Abdu’l-Bahá was deliberately giving TP the minimum of information and in a fashion designed to raise the hackles of a less mature person. In a way, it was a typical piece of spiritual training, the sort an older figure might give a younger one in order to pass on some hard lessons of experience.”[11]
WTP concludes the story of his unusual assignment and his changed travel plans this way:
On reaching Paris I went to the Persian consulate only to find that Tammadun ul Molk was unknown to the officials there. I then visited the student’s quarter on the left bank of the Seine and spent the whole day there and elsewhere in a task that yielded no results whatever. When one’s mind is fearful or depressed, no interior guidance can be experienced. This I have found to be true on many occasions throughout my life. In the present instance I gave up the search and set out for the Gare du Nord, where my luggage was already deposited in readiness for the return to England. En route I crossed the Seine by the Pont Royal. Happening to look across the bridge to the opposite pavement, I saw, among a crowd of pedestrians, a young man, evidently of Eastern origin, who was using a stick to tap his way along. I dodged through the traffic and accosted him. In reply to my question, he told me he was of Persian origin. I then enquired whether by chance he knew a certain Tammadun ul Molk. In surprise he replied “C’est moi”, adding that he had only arrived in Paris from Vienna that very morning. In a Vienna clinic three serious operations on his eyes had been undertaken, but the results were negative and he had been told by the surgeon that his sight could not be saved.
I then gave Abdu’l-Bahá’s message and the £10 for his ticket to Alexandria. To watch the profound joy on his face was more than sufficient reward for all my previous disappointments, including the abandonment of my European tour. Tammadun duly reached Alexandria and visited his Master at once. Those present told me later that Abdu’l-Bahá poured a few drops of attar of roses into a glass of water. He then gave the youth his blessing whilst anointing his eyes with the water in question. Immediately full sight was restored, and when I met Tammadun some years later he was still enjoying perfect vision.
The further sequel was both significant and instructive. I crossed to England late that night and, on reaching my office the next day, discovered that I was only just in time to avert a very serious crisis in my affairs. The change in my plans had indeed turned out to be a blessing in disguise.[12]
In The Silent Road, a five-page section on Abdu’l-Bahá is titled “Healing ‘Miracles’”. Describing the “devoted followers” who made the long journey from Persia to Akka to receive Abdu’l-Bahá’s blessing, WTP states that he “secured reliable evidence [of] many remarkable healings, even of so-called incurable diseases.”[13]
In September 1911, Abdu’l-Bahá came to London and “gave his first ever public address at the City Temple, Holborn.” He spoke for eight minutes in Persian, followed by WTP reading the English translation to the assembly of “over five thousand.” During that visit, and another in 1913, Abdu’l-Bahá stayed at WTP’s home in Bristol.[14]
After being wounded during the fighting between the British and the Turks in the mountains around Jerusalem in early December 1917, WTP, then a lieutenant, was transferred to British Intelligence as he was “temporarily incapacitated for active service.” By February, he was Director of Occupied Enemy Territory Administration, based in Cairo. In March, British troops were preparing to move against Haifa, which was occupied by the Turkish army. WTP learned the Turkish commander-in-chief intended to kill “Abdu’l-Bahá and those around him should the Turkish Army be compelled to evacuate … and retreat north.”[15]
As “Abdu’l-Bahá’s imminent danger became more and more alarming,” WTP raised the matter with different British generals and the new British Governor of Jerusalem, but “None of them knew anything about Abdu’l-Bahá” and couldn’t be persuaded to act.[16] Tempting court martial, WTP bypassed his superiors and strict censorship requirements and used his own connections to send an urgent, uncensored message to the British Cabinet.[17] Not only was “a Cabinet despatch … sent to General Allenby instructing him to ensure the safety of Abdu’l-Bahá and his family and entourage so soon as the British Army captured Haifa,” but a related requirement for information about “the Bahá’í Movement” was passed to WTP “for action.” In June 1968, WTP recalled that he was part of a “chain which saved A.B. and his family from death” and, in 1969, the Secretary of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the British Isles stated: “The place of Major Tudor Pole in the annals of the Bahá’í faith will rest chiefly on the part he played during 1918 … whereby Abdu’l-Bahá’s life was spared.”[18]
Yet WTP also tells of “Another incident of those times … worthy of record” that seems to suggest he was not the only actor working to protect Abdu’l-Bahá and that some redundancy to ensure that end may have prevailed. “More than once in the presence of Abdu’l-Bahá I was able to glimpse the extent to which he could see the future.” So begins the chapter in WTP’s Writing on the Ground, in which this other incident is related.
I was told by a reliable witness that before the fall of Haifa, Abdu’l-Bahá was discussing the British campaign with those around him. He then predicted that, contrary to the general expectation, the taking of Haifa and the walled town of Akka would be achieved almost without bloodshed. This prediction was borne out by events. He also stated that the Turks would surrender the fortress town of Akka (supposed to be impregnable) to two unarmed British soldiers. The facts so far as I was able to gather turned out to be as follows:
After our entry into Haifa, the front line was pushed forward halfway across the Bay of Akka, and outposts were placed in position on the sands of the Bay some five miles from Akka itself. Akka was believed to be filled with Turkish troops at this time.
Very early next morning two British Army Service men, who had lost their bearings in the night, found themselves at the gates of Akka, believing erroneously that the town was already in British hands. However, the Turkish rearguard troops had been secretly evacuated some hours earlier, and the Mayor of the town, seeing British soldiers outside the gates, came down and presented them with the keys of the town in token of surrender![19]
“The basic principle enunciated by Bahá’u’lláh,” WTP stated in Writing on the Ground, “is that religious truth is not absolute but relative, that divine revelation is a continuous and progressive process.”[20] WTP heeded Abdu’l-Bahá, who once told him: “Do not desert the Christian fold but strive to bring it into the light of the Bahá’í principles as set forth by the Effulgence who was my father.”[21]
In The Silent Road, WTP notes: “One of the great purposes inspiring the Bahá’í Faith is to bring about unity and brotherhood between all religions, with the desire to establish a universal faith…” Following Abdu’l-Bahá ‘s death, WTP wrote a private memorandum of December 1921 in which he recalled sitting beside Abdu’l-Bahá at Ramleh “while he spoke of the essential unity of all mankind. There were Christians, Jews, Moslems, Parsis, Hindoos and Freethinkers sitting around him on that occasion, one and all united with the same faith and aspiration.”[22]
Wellesley Tudor Pole, Writing on the Ground, with commentaries by Walter Lang, Neville Spearman, London, 1968, 140. ↑
W. Tudor Pole, The Silent Road: In the Light of Personal Experience, Neville Spearman, London, 1960, 77. Gerry Fenge, The Two Worlds of Wellesley Tudor Pole, Starseed Publications, Everett, WA, USA, 2010, 53. ↑
Wellesley Tudor Pole, Writing on the Ground, 139. ↑
Ibid., 153 (urgent, uncensored). My Dear Alexias: Letters from Wellesley Tudor Pole to Rosamond Lehmann, edited by Elizabeth Gaythorpe, with a Foreword by Rosamond Lehmann, Neville Spearman, Jersey, 1979, 206 (British Cabinet). ↑
Wellesley Tudor Pole, Writing on the Ground, 153 (Cabinet despatch, Bahá’í Movement, for action). My Dear Alexias, 206 (chain). Fenge, 97-98. ↑
Wellesley Tudor Pole, Abdu’l-Bahá and the Bahá’í goal of a universal faith
Wellesley Tudor Pole, Abdu’l-Bahá and the Bahá’í goal of a universal faith
PATRICK S. WOLFE
Abdu’l-Bahá (seated) at Wellesley Tudor Pole’s The Clifton Guest House, Bristol, England, in 1911 or 1913. Tudor Pole, in the overcoat with eight buttons, is to the right of Abdu’l-Bahá.
A quote I identify with comes from Mahatma Gandhi: “I’m a Hindu, a Christian, a Muslim, a Jew, a Buddhist and a Confucian.” I’m sure Gandhi could’ve kept going, mentioning the Bahá’ís, the Quakers, and others, but only stopped where he did for reasons of economy.
Gandhi’s universality reminds me of news footage of the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu on stage together with much joyous high jinks occurring between them. Were it possible to have news footage of the Buddha and Jesus meeting, I’m pretty sure they’d also relish each other’s company.
A personally meaningful 1980 event occurred when my father’s older cousin, Getta, who was visiting from England, gave me a used copy of Wellesley Tudor Pole’s The Silent Road: In the Light of Personal Experience that she’d just purchased at a church bazaar. I was 28, Getta was 74. “I think you’ll find this of interest,” she said off-handedly. And I did once I got my nose into it. A British mystic (1884-1968), WTP would become an important life companion.
But this essay isn’t only about WTP. In the spirit of Gandhi’s universality, it’s also about Abdu’l-Bahá (1844-1921), the son of Bahá’u’lláh (1817-1892), who, in 1863, announced that he was the Universal Messenger of God foretold by the Bab, the forerunner, in 1844. (Bahá’u’lláh, meaning “the Glory of God” in Arabic, was born Mírzá Husayn ‘Alí. Abdu’l-Bahá, meaning, “Servant of Bahá,” was born Abbás Effendi.)[1] WTP first heard of the Bahá’í when he was in Constantinople in 1908.[2] He and Abdu’l-Bahá became friends when they met at Ramleh, near Alexandria, in 1910.[3]
Viewed as heretical, Bahá’u’lláh and his family were exiled from Persia, first to Baghdad, later to Turkey and finally, in 1868, to Akka in Palestine (now Acre, Israel). They were essentially imprisoned from 1868 until the Young Turks Revolution in 1908, when Abdu’l-Bahá and the others were freed and moved to Haifa.[4]
According to WTP, Abdu’l-Bahá “insisted that his father had come to proclaim anew the unity underlying all religions. He also spoke of the danger of exclusiveness.” WPT added that Abdu’l-Bahá impressed “all who met him by his dignity, friendliness, and his aura of spiritual authority[5] [as well as with] his immense breadth of outlook, permeated with the spirit of deep and loving kindness…. Abdu’l-Bahá always struck the universal note, the note of Oneness as between the Creator and all His creation, great or small.”[6]
When WTP arrived at Alexandria in the spring of 1910, he did so via the streamer Sphinx which had crossed the Mediterranean Sea from Marseilles. He was bringing gifts from Abdu’l-Bahá’s English friends. This was one of several purposes of WTP’s extended trip, which was to continue to Damascus, Smyrna, Constantinople, and Vienna. But when WTP met Abdu’l-Bahá a series of remarkable events quickly occurred and caused WTP’s carefully made travel plans to fall apart to his “considerable annoyance.”[7]
The first remarkable event was when Abdu’l-Bahá’s grandson, who was serving as the interpreter for Abdu’l-Bahá and WTP, was called away and, as WTP subsequently stated, “Abdu’l-Bahá continued the conversation and I found myself replying! When the interpreter returned, my ability to do so ceased. To make sure that I had understood correctly, I asked for a translation of what Abdu’l-Bahá had been saying in his absence, and this confirmed the fact that I had been able to understand and to reply accurately in a language of which I was completely ignorant. (This curious experience was repeated some years later when visiting Abdu’l-Bahá in Paris.)”[8]
The next day, WTP asked for Abdu’l-Bahá’s blessing for the rest of his journey. WTP was taken aback when Abdu’l-Bahá “casually” said that WTP “should be returning to Marseilles on the following day on the same steamer” he had arrived on. WTP explained to the translator that this wasn’t possible—“all my overland bookings have been made”—but the translator “replied to the effect that if the Master said I had to return to Marseilles now, then that was what would happen.”[9]
WTP relented. When he came to say goodbye the next morning, Abdu’l-Bahá asked him “to carry out a commission for him on reaching Paris.” The assignment was to find Tammadun ul Molk, a Persian student who was nearly blind, and give him “£10 in gold to pay his fare to Alexandria.” In relating all this, WTP added: “When I asked for the student’s address in Paris I was told that this was unknown but that a way would be found for bringing me into contact with him.”[10]
WTP was about 26 at the time, while Abdu’l-Bahá was forty years his senior. In his book The Two Worlds of Wellesley Tudor Pole, Gerry Fenge remarks: “It is possible that Abdu’l-Bahá was deliberately giving TP the minimum of information and in a fashion designed to raise the hackles of a less mature person. In a way, it was a typical piece of spiritual training, the sort an older figure might give a younger one in order to pass on some hard lessons of experience.”[11]
WTP concludes the story of his unusual assignment and his changed travel plans this way:
On reaching Paris I went to the Persian consulate only to find that Tammadun ul Molk was unknown to the officials there. I then visited the student’s quarter on the left bank of the Seine and spent the whole day there and elsewhere in a task that yielded no results whatever. When one’s mind is fearful or depressed, no interior guidance can be experienced. This I have found to be true on many occasions throughout my life. In the present instance I gave up the search and set out for the Gare du Nord, where my luggage was already deposited in readiness for the return to England. En route I crossed the Seine by the Pont Royal. Happening to look across the bridge to the opposite pavement, I saw, among a crowd of pedestrians, a young man, evidently of Eastern origin, who was using a stick to tap his way along. I dodged through the traffic and accosted him. In reply to my question, he told me he was of Persian origin. I then enquired whether by chance he knew a certain Tammadun ul Molk. In surprise he replied “C’est moi”, adding that he had only arrived in Paris from Vienna that very morning. In a Vienna clinic three serious operations on his eyes had been undertaken, but the results were negative and he had been told by the surgeon that his sight could not be saved.
I then gave Abdu’l-Bahá’s message and the £10 for his ticket to Alexandria. To watch the profound joy on his face was more than sufficient reward for all my previous disappointments, including the abandonment of my European tour. Tammadun duly reached Alexandria and visited his Master at once. Those present told me later that Abdu’l-Bahá poured a few drops of attar of roses into a glass of water. He then gave the youth his blessing whilst anointing his eyes with the water in question. Immediately full sight was restored, and when I met Tammadun some years later he was still enjoying perfect vision.
The further sequel was both significant and instructive. I crossed to England late that night and, on reaching my office the next day, discovered that I was only just in time to avert a very serious crisis in my affairs. The change in my plans had indeed turned out to be a blessing in disguise.[12]
In The Silent Road, a five-page section on Abdu’l-Bahá is titled “Healing ‘Miracles’”. Describing the “devoted followers” who made the long journey from Persia to Akka to receive Abdu’l-Bahá’s blessing, WTP states that he “secured reliable evidence [of] many remarkable healings, even of so-called incurable diseases.”[13]
In September 1911, Abdu’l-Bahá came to London and “gave his first ever public address at the City Temple, Holborn.” He spoke for eight minutes in Persian, followed by WTP reading the English translation to the assembly of “over five thousand.” During that visit, and another in 1913, Abdu’l-Bahá stayed at WTP’s home in Bristol.[14]
After being wounded during the fighting between the British and the Turks in the mountains around Jerusalem in early December 1917, WTP, then a lieutenant, was transferred to British Intelligence as he was “temporarily incapacitated for active service.” By February, he was Director of Occupied Enemy Territory Administration, based in Cairo. In March, British troops were preparing to move against Haifa, which was occupied by the Turkish army. WTP learned the Turkish commander-in-chief intended to kill “Abdu’l-Bahá and those around him should the Turkish Army be compelled to evacuate … and retreat north.”[15]
As “Abdu’l-Bahá’s imminent danger became more and more alarming,” WTP raised the matter with different British generals and the new British Governor of Jerusalem, but “None of them knew anything about Abdu’l-Bahá” and couldn’t be persuaded to act.[16] Tempting court martial, WTP bypassed his superiors and strict censorship requirements and used his own connections to send an urgent, uncensored message to the British Cabinet.[17] Not only was “a Cabinet despatch … sent to General Allenby instructing him to ensure the safety of Abdu’l-Bahá and his family and entourage so soon as the British Army captured Haifa,” but a related requirement for information about “the Bahá’í Movement” was passed to WTP “for action.” In June 1968, WTP recalled that he was part of a “chain which saved A.B. and his family from death” and, in 1969, the Secretary of the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the British Isles stated: “The place of Major Tudor Pole in the annals of the Bahá’í faith will rest chiefly on the part he played during 1918 … whereby Abdu’l-Bahá’s life was spared.”[18]
Yet WTP also tells of “Another incident of those times … worthy of record” that seems to suggest he was not the only actor working to protect Abdu’l-Bahá and that some redundancy to ensure that end may have prevailed. “More than once in the presence of Abdu’l-Bahá I was able to glimpse the extent to which he could see the future.” So begins the chapter in WTP’s Writing on the Ground, in which this other incident is related.
I was told by a reliable witness that before the fall of Haifa, Abdu’l-Bahá was discussing the British campaign with those around him. He then predicted that, contrary to the general expectation, the taking of Haifa and the walled town of Akka would be achieved almost without bloodshed. This prediction was borne out by events. He also stated that the Turks would surrender the fortress town of Akka (supposed to be impregnable) to two unarmed British soldiers. The facts so far as I was able to gather turned out to be as follows:
After our entry into Haifa, the front line was pushed forward halfway across the Bay of Akka, and outposts were placed in position on the sands of the Bay some five miles from Akka itself. Akka was believed to be filled with Turkish troops at this time.
Very early next morning two British Army Service men, who had lost their bearings in the night, found themselves at the gates of Akka, believing erroneously that the town was already in British hands. However, the Turkish rearguard troops had been secretly evacuated some hours earlier, and the Mayor of the town, seeing British soldiers outside the gates, came down and presented them with the keys of the town in token of surrender![19]
“The basic principle enunciated by Bahá’u’lláh,” WTP stated in Writing on the Ground, “is that religious truth is not absolute but relative, that divine revelation is a continuous and progressive process.”[20] WTP heeded Abdu’l-Bahá, who once told him: “Do not desert the Christian fold but strive to bring it into the light of the Bahá’í principles as set forth by the Effulgence who was my father.”[21]
In The Silent Road, WTP notes: “One of the great purposes inspiring the Bahá’í Faith is to bring about unity and brotherhood between all religions, with the desire to establish a universal faith…” Following Abdu’l-Bahá ‘s death, WTP wrote a private memorandum of December 1921 in which he recalled sitting beside Abdu’l-Bahá at Ramleh “while he spoke of the essential unity of all mankind. There were Christians, Jews, Moslems, Parsis, Hindoos and Freethinkers sitting around him on that occasion, one and all united with the same faith and aspiration.”[22]
Text copyright © 2024 Patrick S. Wolfe
All rights reserved. Short segments may be quoted with due attribution.
Readers of this essay may also be interested in Wellesley Tudor Pole and the Big Ben Silent Minute
Like this: