Pip’s Patch

Joy Bausum’s great, great, great grandmother, Jemima, met, Maria -  the first Mrs George Bausum – in Penang.

In Penang Jemima had the opportunity to learn from a woman who has proved to be one of the most successful at setting up schools for Chinese girls. Maria had been married to the LMS missionary Samuel Dyer when she founded a boarding school in Singapore in 1842. Today St Margaret’s Primary School is proud of being the oldest girls’ school in Singapore and the Far East and  offers a modern education for girls in a Christian environment.

Maria handed over the school to the SPFEE agent, Miss Grant, in mid 1843 and then suffered  the double tragedy of losing both a baby son and her husband, Samuel. He was an exceptional linguist and printer who had developed a quicker way of publishing texts in Chinese. Samuel died immediately after attending  a conference in Hong Kong where the western missionaries decided which of the five  newly-opened treaty ports in China they would work in following the British victory in the 1st Opium War.

This was the move that the Dyers had so longed for – but as a widow with three children Maria decided instead to return to Penang  especially as so many missionaries were moving to China.  Her youngest daughter (who became the first wife of J Hudson Taylor, the founder of the China Inland Mission) commented later that her mother felt she should be in Penang as there were no missionaries there by then and she could reach men and women equally. That was a revolutionary stance as the mission societies believed that women should only work with women and girls.

The Dyers had obviously done a lot of preparation for their career on the mission field. Samuel was one of the men who attended the Chinese language classes run by Robert Morrison between 1824 to 1826.  When Robert Morrison  reached China in 1807 he experienced  tremendous difficulty in learning the language because the Chinese government forbade anyone -  with the penalty of death -  to teach it to foreign barbarians. So when he was back in England in he was determined to share what he had learnt. He was very keen to recruit single women for the work among the Chinese and had a language class for three to four ladies. One of those was Mary Ann Aldersey – and maybe Maria was there as well. Maria’s father, Joseph Tarn, was a director of the LMS, so she had probably grown up in a household full of mission stories.

She certainly had heard that “fancy goods” as the SPFEE came to call them, were a very useful way of raising funds to cover the cost of setting up non-fee paying girls’ schools for she carried a lot of them with her when, with her husband, she sailed to Penang in 1827. There she would learn from a very experienced missionary wife, Abigail Beighton, about the problems of running schools for Malay and Chinese girls.

Thomas and Abigail Beighton had been assigned, with John and Joanna Ince*, to the newly created mission at Penang in late 1819.  The two wives started a girls’ boarding school in 1820 and by 1821 it was flourishing – much to the chagrin of the LMS directors back in London. The directors felt it diverted attention from missionary work. But as the LMS didn’t recognise the wives as being missionaries there was little they could do! The boarding school was for fee paying students from wealthier homes and helped considerably to boost the meagre allowances of the missionaries. It was schools like these which encouraged the SPFEE to believe that their agents could be self-supporting.

Maria set up schools for Chinese and Malay girls in Penang and then in Melaka before the couple were re-assigned to Singapore. Many of these failed partly because the girls left after a few months. So the missionary wives devised a system for the Chinese schools which meant they were assured that girls would stay for a set period of time. Parents were asked to sign an agreement that their daughters would remain at a school for three, four or five years according to their age. After their 12th birthday they were secluded in their homes by their families until they were married.

When Maria moved back to Penang she sent her 10-year-old son, Samuel, to England but kept Burella (8) and Maria (6) with her. She received an allowance  from the LMS and by late 1844  had 21 Chinese girls in a boarding school which was entirely supported by the sale of goods sent from England. It was in Penang that she met Johann  Georg(e) Bausum who was born in Rodheim vor de Hohe near Frankfurt am Main in June 1812 and had worked on the Malaysian peninsular for about seven years. She was nine years older than him but had little doubt that they should marry. She wrote to the LMS:

“The Lord put it into the heart of a truly devoted missionary, Mr J G Bausum, to offer me his hand – and I think my usefulness will be greatly increased, my own spiritual benefit and that of my dear children, be greatly promoted. He has lived by faith, on the promises of God. And we believe that the Lord will do so still.” They were married in 1845 and settled in Penang where  they took over the LMS work even though she gave up the mission allowance. She also continued with the girls’ school.

The Bausum’s, however, were married for just over a year when, on October 4, 1846, Maria died. Deeply bereaved George decided to send “my two darlings” (Maria’s daughters) home to England. He was allowed to continue using the LMS property and three years later he married Jemima.

*Joanna Ince died in 1822 and in 1824 her husband was buried beside her and three of their infant children. The Beightons, however, carried on until Thomas died in 1844.

Sources:
Incoming letters to the London Missionary Society, in the Archives of the Council for World Mission, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

Christine Doran, A Fine Sphere for Female Usefulness, Missionary Women in the Straits Settlements, 1815-1845, Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic society Vol LXIX pt 1 1996.

E Aldersey White A Woman Pioneer in China, The Life of Mary Ann Aldersey, The Livingstone Press, London, 1932.