Biography
Cecil Henry Polhill-Turner was born on December 12, 1860, into a family of English gentry, at Howbury Hall in Bedfordshire. He was educated at Eton and at Trinity College, Cambridge, and was a good athlete. Like his friend C. T. Studd, he was drawn into the revival that touched Cambridge in the early 1880s. He gave his life to Christ and felt a call to missions. In 1885 he was one of the Cambridge Seven who sailed to China with the China Inland Mission.
He and his brother Arthur were assigned to the western province of Sichuan, in the region near the border of Tibet. He learned Chinese and worked among the Tibetan people. He was strongly drawn to the mountains and to the remote tribes. In 1888 he made a journey into the border lands in an effort to enter Tibet. He suffered much hardship, and he was turned back. He worked for years in the region and married a missionary, Eleanor Marston. He also came under suspicion as a foreigner at the time of the Boxer troubles, when many missionaries were killed. He survived and went back to England in 1900.
He took the surname Polhill when he inherited the family estate in 1908, after the death of a relative. He was a gentleman of means and used his income to support missions. In 1908 he made a visit to the United States and went to Azusa Street in Los Angeles, where the Pentecostal revival had begun two years earlier. He was baptized in the Holy Spirit there. He returned to England convinced that the Pentecostal experience was a mark of the last days and that it was meant to equip believers for the work of the gospel.
He soon helped to found the Pentecostal Missionary Union in 1909 and served as its chairman. The union was formed to send out missionaries who had been baptized in the Spirit, to carry the gospel to the unreached. He gave large sums for the passage and training of the missionaries and worked closely with Alexander Boddy of Sunderland. Under his leadership, the Pentecostal Missionary Union sent workers to India, Africa, China and other lands. He also gave his own house, Howbury Hall, as a place for retreats and training.
His leadership was not without dispute. As the movement grew in Britain, some of its leaders disagreed about how missionaries should be funded and about the relationship between the union and the new Pentecostal denominations. He did not always side with the majority. Later in life he supported the Assemblies of God in Great Britain and Ireland and served on its council. His wealth gave him influence, and he used it sparingly.
He lived long. He saw the beginnings of the Pentecostal movement in Britain and its growth into a worldwide force. He died on September 20, 1938, at about the age of seventy-seven. His life shows how a man who had received every advantage chose to give it up for the Lord. In two movements, the missionary revival of the 1880s and the Pentecostal awakening of the 1900s, he stood among the early leaders.