Like the pilgrims, Frederic looked for ways to share Bible truths. Thus, on his job, he witnessed to carpenter Willem Telgt. The carpenter liked what he heard and, together with a friend of his, began attending the meetings of the “Earnest Bible Students,” increasing the number of students from three to five.

Brother Braighwaight appreciated those meetings. “Although he was poor,” Willem Telgt related some years ago, “Brother Braighwaight always wore a freshly pressed white suit for the meetings. Some days, when he could not afford to have a meal, you could hear his empty stomach rumbling, but nonetheless he conducted every meeting with the same enthusiasm.”

Spurred on by Brother Braighwaight’s example, Willem Telgt was baptized on February 19, 1919, and later played a prominent role in expanding Kingdom interests.

On Sunday nights Cornelus Voigt, a store owner sympathetic toward the Witnesses, positioned his record player and powerful loudspeaker on the second floor of his house. “Then,” related Brother Telgt, “he played a recording of a Roman Catholic Mass, followed by religious music. After that, when enough people had gathered, he changed the record and turned the volume all the way up. Suddenly the voice of Joseph F. Rutherford, the Society’s second president, boomed into the audience and far beyond.”

[Picture on page 199]

Willem Telgt, baptized in 1919, later became the country’s Kingdom Hall builder