The Kilburn Sisters: Children in Iron Cages

Emily Ayckbowm was a remarkable woman who was ahead of her time. Her father Frederic served as the rector of Holy Trinity Church in Chester for 30 years, and at one time, he was tutor to the young Duke of Westminster. Born in Dublin from a German family originally named Eichbaum, Frederic changed this to Ayckbowm. Emily, his eldest child was born in Heidelberg in November 1836. Soon after Frederic took up his post at Holy Trinity, his wife died leaving three children under the age of five.

In 1856 Emily and her sister Gertrude returned to Chester after a two-year tour of Germany and Italy where they had witnessed the rich and poor worshipping side by side. In the Holy Trinity Church almost all the pews belonged to wealthy families and the poorer members of the congregation were pushed into the corners of the gallery. Emily said the slums of Chester were just as bad as those of London. She and her sister visited the poor, held classes for adults and children and attempted to overcome the pew ownership by installing some of the poor on cushioned seats. Emily suffered from two family tragedies in rapid succession: the death of her sister in December 1861 and that of her father the following August.

 

Mother Emily

Emily formed the Church Extension Association (CEA) in 1864 with the aim of building free and open places of worship and helping the poor. After three years, it had over 200 members each paying a subscription of up to 5s a year. To raise funds, items for sale made by members were sent round the country from the CEA depot at 11a Duke Street, off Manchester Square, London.

In 1866 Chester, like other parts of the country, was hit by a cholera outbreak. Emily and her friends worked as nurses in the emergency hospital. In October 1868 Emily came to London with her stepmother, who was treated unsuccessfully for cancer.

After her death Emily decided to stay in London, living above the CEA depot in Duke Street. In 1869 she set up a Sunday school in a loft over stables in Linton Place, off the Edgware Road near Bell Street, where poor children received a breakfast of hot tea and a large current bun. This was the first of the so called ‘Bun Schools’ which proved very popular and were attended by large numbers of children.

On 1 April 1870 Emily moved with her elderly maid and her black cat to 20 Belgrave Road. (Today this is called Belgrave Gardens, an L-shaped road off Abbey Road leading to Bolton Road). Emily moved there because she heard that Rev. Richard Carr Kirkpatrick was going to be the first vicar of St Augustine’s Church in Kilburn Park Road. She had previously met him at her uncle’s house in Staffordshire and he was a member of the CEA. He had taken over at St Mary’s in Abbey Road in 1866 when the first vicar fell ill. Kirkpatrick ran very popular Anglo-Catholic services until the Bishop of London stopped him in February 1867 for ‘extreme ritualistic practices’. This was a time of opposition to the Tractarian or Oxford Movement, believed to be introducing Catholic practises into the Anglican church. The congregation of St Mary’s split; Kirkpatrick and his supporters left to set up the new district of St Augustine’s. They faced considerable opposition but eventually purchased a site on Kilburn Park Road where they erected an iron church in 1871. With further funding they built the huge permanent church on the site. Designed by John Loughborough Pearson, the first service was held in the June 1872. The church was finished, apart from the spire, in 1877.

Emily wrote to Kirkpatrick about setting up a Sisterhood at St Augustine’s. He agreed and on 5 April 1870 she was made the first novice of the Sisters of the Church. Four other novices had been appointed by July 1871 and as more followed each year, Emily became the driving force behind what was generally referred to as the Kilburn Sisterhood and the Mother Superior for life.

 

Rev. RC Kirkpatrick and 31 Kilburn Park Road

Just a few days after she entered the Sisterhood, Emily set up a school in a mews in Kilburn. To begin with there were just seven girl pupils. By the following September the number had risen to 150 and larger premises had been found. Emily began to raise funds to build St Augustine’s School, completed in 1873 for 1,500 girls and infants. The CEA went on to open other schools in London, Liverpool, York, Canada and Australia. The local schools included The Gordon Memorial School in Cambridge Road (1885) and the Wilberforce School in Beethoven Street, Queens Park, (1888). In 1882 the Sisters also set up St Mary’s, a large convalescent home for poor children in Broadstairs, with a few beds for orphans.

In 1872 The Kilburn Sisters moved from Belgrave Road to Nos.27, 29 and 31 Kilburn Park Road. Mother Emily began to look after orphan children in 1875 when two little girls from Chester arrived at Kilburn Park Road. By July there were 16 children and two years later, six sisters and 12 novices were looking after 68 children. Funds were raised to build an orphanage on a site next to St Augustine’s Church, between Rudolph Road and Randolph Gardens where the main entrance was located. The Orphanage of Mercy opened there in June 1880 and became the home of the Community of the Sisters of the Church. The architects of the large building were Messrs Kendall & Mew and the builder was Mr Yerbury of Kilburn High Road, who was employed by Emily on other projects. By 1886, it could house up to 300 girls, and 500 by 1892. The Order accepted children who had no one to help them and tried not to split up families. It also took in a few young boys. However, on the four census nights 1881-1911, numbers were far lower than this, with a maximum figure of just over 100 orphans in 1891, attending school or being trained for domestic service. It’s likely funding fell short of supporting the substantial numbers the Orphanage could accommodate.

 

St Augustine's and Orphanage, 1910s (Marianne Colloms)

Other local homes set up by the Sisters included the Alexandra Home for Girls at 176 Alexandra Road with room for 20 girls. The house near the junction with Kilburn Priory has now been demolished. The Home was taken over in 1906 by the Waifs and Strays’ Society and two years later, moved to larger premises in Loughton, Essex.

In 1885 a gift of £3,000 allowed the CEA to build the Lady Adelaide Home for 50 destitute boys at 73 Christchurch Avenue, Brondesbury; today Malorees Primary School occupies the site.

Emily also supported unemployed men and the navvies who were building the new Metropolitan Railway in 1878-79. Many were starving, often sleeping rough on the streets. She gave them soup, tea, bread and butter at the Sisters’ home and set up a night shelter, holding ‘Mens’ Sunday Teas’ in St Augustine’s School. Emily also offered night classes there and was a pioneer of the education for working men long before the establishment of evening classes.

 

Orphange and St Augustine's, 1890s Map

The CEA and the Kilburn Sisters expanded considerably but faced difficulties. Some nuns were unhappy at the way things were being run: in April 1894 nine sisters and three novices left to start their own community while the following year, another nun and six novices left. This from a total of about 100 nuns and 40 novices.

A further and more serious problem concerned the issue of foundlings. The Society for the Protection of Children and other organizations had highlighted the common practice of ‘baby farming’ where poor mothers, facing great financial and social pressure, gave up their illegitimate children and paid to have them looked after. But there were no regulations; some ‘carers’ starved or killed their charges. At the time, the police reported that large numbers of murdered infants were found every day in London.

Mother Emily decided that the Sisters of the Church would take in illegitimate children. This caused concern for some of her middle-class lady supporters and the church authorities, who thought it would encourage vice and immorality.

The dispute over the foundlings was further complicated by the publication of alleged cruelty to the girls in the orphanage. Towards the end of 1893 the Sisters introduced individual wire mesh cubicles over the beds, in response to what they termed the ‘immoral habits’ of some of the girls. Opponents of the CEA called them ‘iron cages’, and they provoked widespread criticism.

The anti-Catholic Protestant Alliance pamphlet ‘The Ritualistic Kilburn Sisters’ (1895), was full of gothic images of cruelty which it claimed were to be found in the Sisters’ orphanages such as: hair shirts, steel whips, knotted scourges, and crosses with sharp points used to inflict pain. The Alliance bought and exhibited an iron cage as ‘an instrument of torture’ at the Annual Church Congress the following year.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Edward Benson, had been a patron of the CEA since 1892. In January 1895 concerned by the adverse publicity in the press, he wrote to Mother Emily. He wanted to conduct an enquiry into conditions at Kilburn and hoped she would be bound by the conclusions of his report. Mother Emily replied saying she looked forward to his inspection but could not agree conditions in advance. They met in March, when the Archbishop pointed out his four main concerns: the danger of receiving children of doubtful birth (the foundlings); the fact the annual accounts were incomplete; that a printed constitution was required and lastly, there should be proper oversight and control of the CEA by the church, through an official ‘episcopal visitor’. He later complained that Mother Emily took no notice of him and in his diary he called her, ‘The most comically audacious Mother in the universe’. On 21 June it was reported in the Times that Archbishops of Canterbury and York were no longer patrons of the CEA. They had not resigned, rather Mother Emily had removed them, using the excuse that she only wanted ladies as patrons. This effectively stopped the Archbishop’s inquiry.

In December 1895 a group called the Charity Organization Society who disliked the Kilburn Sisters, issued a report that not only summarised all the accusations against the CEA but made further criticisms. This time the Sisters were defended by the religious paper ‘Church Bells’, which published a pamphlet in 1896 called the ‘Kilburn Sisters and their Accusers’. It praised the conditions they saw at the Kilburn orphanage and the dedicated work of the Sisters. The iron cubicles were described as harmless and it refuted the claims of cruelty. The pamphlet also pointed out the CEA was one of the best supported charities in England: its income had risen from £503 in 1871 to £17,000 in 1887 and to £38,000 in 1895 (worth over £4M today).

Despite these positive comments, the accusations did not stop. On 18 June 1896 Henry Labouchere, who had previously been a supporter, published a highly critical supplement in his paper ‘Truth’ about the Kilburn Sisters. The attacks continued over the years until Mother Emily’s death in Broadstairs in June 1900. Her successor as Mother Superior at Kilburn was Mary Riddell. The Sisters finally agreed to oversight by a Bishop in 1903.

At the outbreak of WWII in September 1939 the nuns and orphans were first evacuated to Ormerod House, St Anne’s-on Sea, and later to South Wraxall Manor in Wiltshire. The Kilburn building was badly damaged by a high explosive bomb in 1940. In 1941 it was taken over by the Government and used as a school for 500 young men and women in the RAF. In spring 1944 the Sisters moved to 39 Pont Street in Chelsea.

The Sisters finally left Kilburn in 1955/56 for the mother house at Ham Common near Richmond. By then over 70,000 children had been given help at the Kilburn home. Today, the site of the Orphanage together with properties on Carlton Vale, has been redeveloped as residential flats: Strome House, Thurso House and Renfrew House.

The work of the CEA continued and spread, and today the Community of the Sisters of the Church has nuns working in the UK and overseas.