His mission to England was a life-changing experience

President Gordon B. Hinckley's mission to England as a young man had a profound influence on his life.

Serving a mission itself was a challenge. Even though the Depression was under way and relatively few young men were serving missions, 1st Ward Bishop John C. Duncan urged him to consider a mission.

President Hinckley discussed it with his Liberty Stake president father, his mother having died three years earlier from cancer. The family was facing challenges, financially and in every other way.

"Nevertheless I remember my father saying, 'We will do all we can to see that your needs are met,'" President Hinckley recalled in an Ensign interview after he was sustained as prophet, "and he and my brother committed to see me through my mission. It was at that time we discovered a little savings account my mother had left — change saved from her grocery purchases and other shopping.

"With that little bit of help added, it appeared I could go on my mission," said President Hinckley, who had graduated from the University of Utah the year before and was earning money to attend Columbia University to continue his journalism studies. "To me, that money was sacred."

His farewell was June 11, 1933, and he was on his way to England by the end of the month.

He was sent first to Preston in Lancashire, where then-Elder Hinckley found some of the discouragement common to missionaries facing new circumstances in a new land.

As he went to his first street meeting in that impoverished mill town in the north of England, he recalled: "I was terrified. I stepped up on that little stand and looked at that crowd of people that had gathered. They were dreadfully poor at that time in the bottom of the Depression. They looked rather menacing and mean, but I somehow stumbled through whatever I had to say.

"We didn't get anywhere," he recalled in August 1995 at a Liverpool fireside during his first international trip as prophet. "To get people to listen to us was like knocking on a brick wall; they were bitter.

"I wrote home to my father and said, 'I'm not doing any good here. I am just wasting my time and your money. I don't see any point in staying here."'

The answer came: "Dear Gordon. I have your letter. ... I have only one suggestion. Forget yourself and go to work. With love, Your Father."