Crawford, Emily May

Author

(née Grimes), b Lambeth, Surrey (S London) 1864, d Folkestone, Kent 1927. From 1893 until her marriage in 1904 she was a missionary in Pondoland with the S Africa General Mission. She was a writer in the Keswick tradition; her best-known hymn features, with some variation in the number of stzs, in several evangelical collections including Golden Bells (1925 edn), The Christian Hymnary (from the Churches of Christ, 1938) and Christian Praise (1957)—credited to E May Grimes in all three but with her married surname used in the list of copyright permissions. Another hymn, The Master comes! He calls for thee, is her sole entry in the 1899 Church Missionary Hymn Book, but was in great demand at missionary gatherings of that time and appears in 3 major mid-20th-c books. Her husband Dr TWW Crawford had served with CMS in Kenya, then British East Africa. She was one of those contributing briefly to the 1905 biography of Albert Head; see also under E A P Head. No.563.