A Memorial Mass for Sr. Gregory Kirkus, a former headmistress of the school, was said by Canon Michael Brockie at the Church of the Holy Redeemer & St. Thomas in Chelsea on Friday 25th January.

There is a list of those present at the Mass at the bottom of the page.

Below is a copy of the obituary for Sister Gregory which was written by Sister Gemma for the Western Gazette

OBITUARY FOR SISTER GREGORY (PHYLLIS) KIRKUS

Sister Gregory (Phyllis) Kirkus, educator, historian and archivist, born on November 9th 1910 and died on August 30th 2007.  Founder member of St. Mary’s School, Shaftesbury 1945-1953, Headmistress of St. Mary’s School 1953-1964, 1970-1972.

Sister Gregory Kirkus, who has died at the age of ninety six, was a pioneer member and early headmistress of St. Mary’s School, Shaftesbury.  In a life spanning almost a century, she left an indelible mark on the Dorset school, founded by the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary (known since 2004 as the Congregation of Jesus).
   
Born in York on November 9th 1910, Phyllis Kirkus was sent to a Dames School which she found ‘extremely backward’, with morning lessons only, consisting of hours writing sums on a slate.  Disliking church and declaring herself an agnostic, from the age of ten she was nevertheless greatly concerned with the purpose of life. It was at Sutton High School, which only admitted Oxbridge graduates onto its staff, that she discovered her passion and genius for history and her desire for a life of scholarship.  She gained a place at Newnham College, Cambridge in 1929, eight years after the university voted against conferring its degrees on women. Never a feminist in the ideological sense, she was nevertheless moulded by Newnham’s determination to gain women full and unrestricted access to higher education.

Her search for a worthwhile purpose in life led her to attend lectures by the fiercely anti-Catholic controversialist G. G. Coulton, who promptly invited her to tea.  She balanced this with lectures in Catholic apologetics given by the Dominicans of Blackfriars.  The Dominicans won and with the support of Professor Jocelyn Toynbee, who became her godmother and lifelong friend, Phyllis was received into the Catholic church.  This took place in a convent chapel since the University’s Catholic chaplaincy, under Monsignor Alfred Gilbey, was also closed to women.  Gilbey died in 1998, the same year that the university celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of women’s accession to degrees.  Too shy and too frail to attend the ceremonies for the anniversary, Sister Gregory nevertheless took great satisfaction in knowing that two former pupils of St. Mary’s Shaftesbury, Sisters Amadeus Bulger and Gemma Simmonds, had served as assistant Catholic chaplains in the university.

Training in librarianship, Phyllis’s application for a post at Southampton University was thwarted by a pilfering office boy who destroyed her letter. She later ascribed this disaster to divine providence, as it led to a job in the University of Hull, far enough away from her beloved but obsessively united family, to explore her growing sense of a vocation to religious life.  With characteristic thoroughness she investigated the orders round about.  The barrack-like look of one convent appalled her, while an encounter on a train with a sister who wore fur gloves, ate chocolate and read a glossy magazine filled her soul with priggish horror.  A random meeting led her to the Bar Convent and the discovery of Mary Ward (1585-1645), a fellow Yorkshirewoman related to three of the Gunpowder plotters.  Mary Ward founded an unenclosed order of women modelled on the Jesuits, only to be imprisoned as a heretic and to have her order suppressed in 1631.  Phyllis had found her spiritual home at last.  Her family was so devastated by her conversion and decision to become a nun that she could never bear to speak of it afterwards, only saying that to inflict suffering on those one loves is the worst suffering of all.  Only her brother Cyril, later killed in action in North Africa, felt able to tease her.  Catching sight of two particularly ugly in unattractive habits, he whispered, ‘That’s what you’re going to look like’.  When his sister bravely retorted that she didn’t mind, Cyril urged, ‘Have another look!’

Entering the novitiate in Ascot in 1936, Phyllis took the religious name Sister Gregory, after the holy Pope who instigated England’s conversion to Christianity under Augustine of Canterbury.  When World War II broke out she was teaching in the order’s school in London and with the other sisters and all their pupils had to evacuate to the stately East Sussex mansion of Lady Catherine Ashburnham.  Although Lady Catherine had also tried her vocation as a nun, she saw the evacuees as intruders and refused them any comfort, loading logs into her quarters and the servants’ hall, while her unwanted guests froze in the bitter winter of 1940.  Nuns and children watched footmen in full livery carry sumptuous dishes in to where Lady Catherine dined in solitary splendour while they went hungry.  Sister Gregory was later to say that this was when she fully realised the feelings behind the French revolution.  She would take the younger children out to collect firewood covered in ice, which barely thawed enough for burning.  She also encouraged a rapport with the servants’ hall in which girls and staff entertained one another with plays, hockey matches and concerts. One of the youngest evacuees at that time, Ailsa Le Marchand, would later enter the order as Sister Louise, and become in her own turn headmistress of Shaftesbury. 

When the German army reached the channel ports a further evacuation took place, to Bratton, Wiltshire, under the kindly welcome of Sir Horace and Lady Seymour.  Most of the children stayed at school throughout the war, becoming the sisters’ war work.  Educationally, the establishment ran more like a holiday camp than a school with nuns sleeping on sofas by night in improvised classrooms where they taught by day.  In an era when pupils in convent schools rarely saw the domestic life of the nuns or thought of them as normal human beings, the closeness of evacuation engendered a relaxed and humane spirit that outlasted the war.  The exiles finally found a permanent new home at Coombe House, Shaftesbury, in 1945.  A former hotel used as a convalescent home by the American military, it had been left overrun by rats and filth, and needed drastic cleaning.  As the exhausted sisters were finishing the massive task a girl rode up the mile-long drive on a horse, tethered it to the bushes and asked to be accepted as the school’s first pupil.  More pupils came, despite the school’s desperate struggle with meagre resources, and classes were housed in ex-Army huts.  As headmistress, Sister Gregory determined to run an exemplary school for women of the future and to achieve public status despite its poverty.  Every penny went into resourcing new facilities and buildings for the pupils, a number of whom went on to join the novitiate and become educators in their turn.  The sisters slept in the kitchen, piano rooms and even cloakrooms until the 1970s.  A successful inspection of the school by Lady Helen Asquith gained the coveted public status and laid the foundations of another lifelong friendship. Drawn by a shared passion for education and the faith to which both had converted, the prime minister’s granddaughter made many visits to the school from her home in Mells, later coming to teach classics to the senior girls.

Sister Gregory’s happy years in teaching came to an end when in 1972 she was appointed provincial superior of the order’s English province. This was a period of sometimes bitter tension within a Catholic church trying to come to terms with the reforms of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965).  Despite its pioneering history, Mary Ward’s Institute had not responded with enthusiasm to the proposed reforms of religious life. Sister Gregory was wary of the changes emerging in America and elsewhere, with numbers falling and religious in record numbers abandoning their traditional habits, ministries and styles of life, and even their vows.  Her instincts were conservative, and this engendered frustration in some quarters, but she reacted with typical energy and far-sightedness in seeing the need for sisters to be properly educated in their own history.  She ran education programmes and two international summer schools where sisters from around the world, responsible for running schools from Canada to Korea, Australia to Africa, learned what it meant to be part of a worldwide network dedicated to faith and education. Three members of the St. Mary’s Shaftesbury community, past pupil Sister Teresa (Josie) Bulger, school nurse Sister Camillus (Pat) Robb and headmistress Sister Clare Goodman would leave the school to work as missionaries and educators in Zimbabwe.  Sister Gregory’s influence as an educator encouraged improvements which enabled the Bar Convent Grammar School, and Saint Mary’s Schools in Hampstead, Ascot, Shaftesbury and Cambridge to evolve into the successful lay-run establishments they are today.       

When relieved of this office after nine years Sister Gregory began her final career in York, setting up the Bar Convent Museum, archives and library.  A brilliant story teller with a sharp sense for quirky and intriguing detail, she wrote numerous sketches of school and convent life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for the Catholic Record Society.  Her biographical work has provided invaluable research tools for historians of the English recusant period.  Recent moves to integrate the ‘Catholic’ and ‘Protestant’ histories of England and bring them out of their separate spheres rely on access to reliable and well-ordered archives.  Sister Gregory presided over those of the Bar Convent, the oldest convent in England, and a girls’ school from 1686-1985. Its magnificent collection of antique books, artefacts and manuscripts is a model of how archives should be kept.  Well into her nineties Sister Gregory was giving erudite and entertaining talks on its hidden Georgian chapel, complete with priest’s hiding hole, and its parlour full of early nuns’ portraits. Whether professors of history, schoolchildren or television personalities like Robbie Coltrane, all comers were welcomed and none failed to be captivated.  Painfully shy yet engaging, she did nothing to create a following, but at academic conferences dealing with women’s religious history, it was noticeable that bulletins on her health were always sought by her worldwide admirers.  

As her public profile grew, so did that of Sister Wendy Beckett, the art historian, whom she resembled in both dress and feature. The first to agree that God had not blessed her with good looks, it appealed to Sister Gregory’s impish sense of humour when strangers approached to ask if she were ‘that sister on the telly’, only to withdraw in embarrassment when they realised their mistake.  Despite her shyness, she herself proved a TV natural.  An austere lifelong teetotaller, it was only when she appeared on a Channel Four documentary on the Bar Convent that her astonished sisters discovered her to be an avid buyer of lottery tickets, in the hope of winning the fortune that would secure the convent’s future.

Meticulous to the last, she only began to prepare for death when she had finished a biography of Mary Ward’s first companions in anticipation of the four hundredth anniversary of the order’s foundation in 2009.  Having earlier sent a letter of resignation as province archivist to the current provincial superior, Sister Jane Livesey, who was the last nun headmistress of St. Mary’s Shaftesbury, she finished planning her funeral and retired to the convent infirmary, dying aged ninety six on August 30th 2007.

© Gemma Simmonds CJ

People present at the Chelsea Memorial Mass for Sr Gregory:

Sr Clare Goodman CJ
Sr Pat Robb CJ
Sr Maria Rochford CJ
Sr Elizabeth Aldworth CJ
Sr Gemma Simmonds CJ
Sr Francis North CJ

Kathleen Black ( CFH SOL)
Margaret Butler (ditto)
Michael Gandy ( Chairman ditto)

Gillian Cannon (Williams)
Sarah Godfrey (Hamilton)
Beverley Vine (Wardale)
Margaret Mould (Greenwood)
Anne Peacock
Priscilla Coutt-Donald (Aldington)
Melanie Gibson
Caroline Laing (Pender-Cudlip)
Rosamund Connor (Gilbert)
Blanche Massy (McSweeney)
Felicity McSweeney
Jackie Samuels
Judy Langton-Lockton
Anne Nixon
Jane Shenton (White)
Regan Otte (Wylie)
Margaret Hamilton
Eithne O’Sullivan
Corinne Gibbons (Simmonds)
Barbara Murray
Anne Hardy (Thicknesse)
Christine Burgess (Enfield)
Priscilla Sharpe (Richardson)
Audrey Ardern-Jones (Pawle)
Ann Billinghurst (Barnett
Gudrun Knapp
Deirdre Doyle