Xhosa language
In 1830 Dugmore became a committed member of the Wesleyan Methodist church, and began to study for ordination. In the late 1830s he was appointed as the successor to the missionary William Boyce, who ran a Wesleyan mission station in the rural Eastern Cape at Mount Coke, near King William's Town. Dugmore became fluent in the Xhosa language, and spent the next twenty years undertaking missionary work. He was jointly responsible for the first translation of the Bible into the Xhosa language, and composed a large number of Xhosa hymns, some of which are still sung today.