Pip’s Patch

“I was impressed by her enthusiasm to take on any challenge and travel to any location in order to serve the Lord she loved,” wrote Russell Board, one of the directors of World Mission Ministries, about Joy Bausum following her death in Malaysia on August 18 2010, aged 26. That could certainly have been written about Joy’s great, great, great grandmother Jemima. Her career in the nineteenth century  began in south Kalimantan (Borne) after the long voyage around Africa  and took her via Penang to Ningbo in China. It started when the Society for  Promoting Female Education in the East (SPFEE) received an application from “Miss Poppy school mistress from Maidenhead”.

This was a remarkable female run organisation based in London which from 1834 until 1899 sent single women to start schools for girls in Africa, India, South East Asia and China. For them the Bible was the Magna Carta of their womanhood. “In Christ Jesus there is neither male nor female. He committed the Gospel of Resurrection first to the lips of women!” a committee member wrote in 1874.

But even with a woman on the throne (Queen Victoria began her reign in 1837) the lives of most women in Britain were heavily circumscribed. For most of that century women couldn’t go to university or become doctors, and a  married woman had no legal rights to her own money or her children. As Florence Nightingale learnt in 1845 a single woman was not even free to respond to God’s Call unless her parents, and especially her father, approved.

It must have been very hard for Jemima when her father, Jonathan Poppy, died in January 1838, 29 days before her 20th birthday. He and his wife, Mary, were married in Norfolk in 1811 but then moved to Northumberland where four of their children were born. Jemima was baptised at Earsdon in North Shields. Jonathan’s will was not probated in Norfolk until 1843 so it was likely that Jemima did not receive any of her inheritance until then.

His death meant she had the freedom to make choices for herself and within a year she had found a teaching post at Maidenhead. She may have arrived in that busy brewery town  in time to see the first train cross Isambard Brunel’s magnificent bridge. Many had prophesised that the bridge, which crossed the River Thames in two great strides, each span being 128 ft (39m) wide,  would collapse when the wooden props were taken away! It still stands today like a memorial to how visionary ideas can be successfully accomplished. But could a young, single woman in the nineteenth century fulfil a visionary calling?

Jemima would have been aware that the SPFEE had made it possible for some to do so. By the end of 1838 the London committee had sent 13 women overseas. One of the first was the Englishwoman,  Eliza Thornton, who successfully set up girls’ schools in Jakarta (then Batavia) after arriving there in 1835.

In the society’s records no reason was given for the delay between receiving Jemima’s application and her beginning the mandatory probation period in May 1842.  It is likely, however, that between 1839 and 1842 she not only continued working as school teacher but had also built a strong relationship with a church for she needed good testimonials from both to be accepted by the SPFEE. Her referees had to assure the society that she had given evidence of real piety, and had maintained a temper and deportment consistent with her Christian character and profession. They were asked if she also “embraced opportunities for usefulness” by benefitting others such as by teaching at a Sunday School or visiting the sick. The society  wanted to be sure she was a good communicator; had good sense, judgement and prudence; was mild, courteous and humble; and evinced patience and perseverance.

Jemima had to convince those who interviewed her that she had sound protestant doctrines and that she had the right reasons for wanting to be a missionary, besides showing that she was well equipped as a teacher. The interviewers were women, of course, because the SPFEE was sure that a “Committee of gentlemen would be manifestly incompetent to select and superintend the preparatory training” of the single women called to run girls’ schools overseas. The society explained in 1847 why women did this job: “Their discernment and discrimination are thus most usefully brought to bear upon a matter of serious responsibility, the investigation of the real character of the applicants; for it is not excitement of romantic feeling, which often takes a specious form and assumes the language of zeal for the glory of God…. but a deep, steady principle of love of Christ, and of holy grateful obedience to His command. Who but a woman can understand the heart of a woman, and enter into all her difficulties and discouragements?”

Following a successful interview Jemima began a period of probation at a British and Foreign School Society institution in London. These schools followed the Lancastrian monitoring system with its very systematic, carefully graded lessons and textbooks so that senior students (monitors) could teach younger pupils. This enabled one teacher to supervise the education of up to 300 children. During the probation  period Jemima was under constant assessment by three to four members of the SPFEE to make sure she could become part of the effective corps of single women that the society aimed at developing.

The society was well aware that although some missionary wives had started girls’ schools in India and South East Asia they were often too busy taking care of their husbands and children to work full time as teachers and administrators. Male-run missions were simply not able to successfully include this specialist niche within their objectives. The SPFEE was, therefore, willing to pay out considerable sums of money to provide outfits for their “agents”, to cover the cost of the long voyages,  and even to partly or fully meet their needs once overseas. In return they expected these women not to marry but to be single-minded in their task of running girls’ schools. Jemima, therefore, had to sign a legal agreement before she left England in which she agreed that, if she left the society or married within five years of arriving at the post assigned to her, she would repay the SPFEE a proportion of the grant according to the number of years served.

The SPFEE was careful to find a ship which was suitable for single women to travel on, and to bring any of them home in the case of sickness or any unlooked-for emergency. But, like many mission agencies at that time, the SPFEE did not even think it necessary to prepare their candidates for living in a very different culture. Nor did the society research the location to which it decided to send Jemima.

All it had was a letter of invitation from a Swiss woman who had gone to work with Miss Thornton in 1838. Emma Cecilia Combe from Berne had initially been accepted by the Geneva Auxiliary Committee.  But more about Emma and how her life and death so affected Jemima in the next “chapter”.

Sources : The records of the SPFEE in the special collection at Birmingham University; the History of the Society for Promoting Female Education in the East published in London  in1847 by Edward Suter; and The Female Intelligencer published by the SPFEE.   I am very grateful to Dan Bausum and Dorothy Evans (Jemima’s great grand daughter) and to Margaret Troy for sharing information about Jemima.