Mother Cecile
by Mike Oettle
A DYING mother
in hospital clung to the hand of a nun visiting her. The wretched mother had
sold her baby to a Muslim family, but now realising what she had done, begged
the sister to rescue the child. The sister went immediately to obtain a magistrate’s order and, accompanied by a policeman, set off for the Muslim house. A large group of Muslims huddled about the door – an ominous sign. Suddenly the nun, spotting the child, seized it, tucked it under the capacious sleeves of her habit, and fled. The mob followed her to the railway station, but she escaped, with the baby unharmed.
This story is adapted from Saints of the Twentieth Century by Brother Kenneth,
CGA. Who was the nun, and what town was she in? It may surprise you to learn
how close to home it all was, for the nun was Anglican, not Catholic, and the
town Port Elizabeth.
She was Cecile Isherwood, remembered fondly as Mother Cecile,[1] foundress of the Community of the Resurrection of Our Lord and a pioneer in education.
Baptised
Annie Cecilia Ramsbottom Isherwood, she was born in Uxbridge, in what was then
Middlesex,[2] in 1862, the youngest daughter of a couple who died when she was still a child (she was eight when her mother died; 13 when Captain Ramsbottom-Isherwood left her an orphan in 1875). She stayed at first with her brother in Brighton, then with family friends, General and Mrs Browne, in London. She first received a call to work for Christ at St Peter’s Church, Eaton Square. It was in that same church that she heard Allan Becher Webb, third Anglican Bishop of Grahamstown, preach in 1883. Bishop Webb, who had already founded a community for women in the Bloemfontein diocese, took as his text “I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision.” [3] Annie, aged 21, responded by offering herself for work in South Africa. He ordained her a deaconess and she travelled to Grahamstown with him.
Annie had never considered being a nun but when, after her arrival in Grahamstown, Bishop Webb asked her to found a community of nuns, she thought about it and, on 25 April 1884, took her vows as a novice. Other women joined her and within two years the Community of the Resurrection had a home for destitute girls, a school (St Peter’s) for paying pupils, a boarding house for railway children and the Good Shepherd Mission School for poor children in Grahamstown. In 1887 Sister Cecile – subsequently Mother Cecile – took her final vows.
From 1887 to ’90 the sisterhood staffed a children’s ward at the Port Elizabeth hospital in Richmond Hill at their own expense, but afterwards concentrated on
education. Of the Good Shepherd Mission, Cecile wrote: “For three weeks our
first and only pupil, a child of seven, taught me missionary patience.”
“At the start Cecile and her sisters were very poor. Food was so short that if a visitor stayed for dinner one of the sisters would have to go without. They only had one pair of strong boots and one lamp.
“One day an African priest called. He wanted to see the ladies ‘with their heads tied up’. As he left he pressed some money into Cecile’s hand. Whe she asked what it was for he replied ‘For your Sisters’. ‘But we are doing nothing for your people,’ Cecile protested. ‘No, but you will.’ Cecile treasured that gift. It was a direct answer to their prayers for there was no money in the convent that day.”[4] Not long afterward they began an African school at Herschel[5] which later moved to Keiskammahoek,[6] and one for coloured children in Port Elizabeth.
Cecile also travelled to Cape Town, to press for improvements in prisons. She would wait in the Senate lobby to catch members and talk about the herding of children in jail.
She was concerned about educational standards, and the sisters’ efforts to improve
their teaching qualifications led, in 1894, to the community’s founding of the
Grahamstown Training College (now taken over by Rhodes University). The same year saw the start of a school in King William’s Town, which ran until 1906.
A
Government official wrote of her: “It filled me with admiration when I saw
how she faced difficult problems – problems that many a man would have shrunk
from – with a smile on her face and a twinkle in her eye.”[7] It is also recorded: “Her favourite expression in any difficulty was ‘We shall
have to go on our knees.’ ”[2]
Cecile was, despite all this energetic work and good humour – “always bright and full of fun”[3] – a sickly woman who was often in pain, although she put her pain aside to spend long hours in the community’s little chapel.
In 1902 she returned to England to raise £5 000 for the college – she had refused Government grants – and again in 1905. In February 1906, while she was still in England, her condition necessitated an operation, but she did not long survive it, dying on the 20th.
K S Hunt, writing in the Dictionary of South African Biography, refers to her undoubted administrative ability and continues: “Her persuasive ways, engaging personality and good example inspired her subordinates and made her an ideal leader and organizer. Her approach to her religion was essentially practical and as a result the work of the Community was shaped to meet the needs of those whom its members served.”
