Mary Slessor—Everybody's Mother: The Era and Impact of a Victorian Missionary

Prologue

In 1841, Hope Masterton Waddell, an Irish clergyman serving in Jamaica with the Scottish Presbyterians, received a copy of T. Fowell Buxton’s book, The Slave Trade and Its Remedy . The author insisted that God would inspire some from the West Indies to return to their African homeland with the gospel of Jesus Christ. The Scottish Mission had a strong ministry among former slaves in Jamaica. Waddell, his colleagues and Jamaican congregations were already praying about the need for a work in Africa when Buxton’s book arrived. It confirmed their sense of urgency.

When the Jamaica Mission Presbytery sought permission from the Missionary Society in Edinburgh to establish a work in Africa, their request was denied. The committee declared the plan premature, displaying more zeal than judgment and highly presumptuous in view of earlier disastrous trailblazing efforts.¹ They knew the tales of expeditions where many or all of the parties died. They worried about hostile encounters. They feared missionaries could not survive the tropical climate, thought to be a major cause of disease and death. Even Charles Dickens echoed a belief that religion should spread slowly and temperately. He wrote about the Niger Expedition of 1841, The useful lives of scholars, students, mariners and officers—more precious than a wilderness of Africans—were thrown away!²

After lengthy delays and with invitations in hand from King Eyamba and the chiefs of Old Calabar,³ opposition in Scotland faded. Enthusiasm grew for the mission among church leaders and their congregations. Robert Jamieson of Liverpool loaned his 150-ton brigantine Warree for so long as it shall be required plus a hundred pounds per year toward sailing expenses.⁴ The Missionary Society sent its emissaries out with their blessing:

The Warree . . . is wholly a Mission Ship . . . rigged, painted, provisioned, and manned for the noblest ends. It conveys the servants of Christ, bent on deeds of mercy and love. . . . It is freighted with the blessings of a full salvation. . . . Go, little bark, on thy peaceful and noble errand . . . and may the children of Africa not merely welcome thy approach, but commemorate through succeeding generations the day of thy arrival, as the season when the jubilee trumpet was sounded on their shores, proclaiming the reign of Satan at an end, and the freedom of the Sons of God to all their sable tribes.⁵

Waddell and five others arrived in Calabar, on the Cross River delta of Africa’s west coast, in April 1846. The party included Waddell, Mr. & Mrs. Samuel Edgerley, Jamaicans Andrew Chisholm and Edward Miller, and George Waddell, a rescued slave boy. The determined group set up mission stations at the settlements of Duke Town and Creek Town almost immediately and began to preach and to teach reading. They were the vanguard of many who followed for the next century. Among those who soon joined the mission were Waddell’s wife, Jessie; Hugh and Jane Goldie; and William and Louisa Anderson. All came to Calabar from mission service in Jamaica.

Hope Waddell is recognized as the founder of the Calabar Mission. He was adept at garnering support for the mission and often acted as spokesman to Presbyterians in Scotland. After seventeen years in Jamaica, he remained another twelve in Calabar. Although he looked forward to expansion of the mission, as evidenced by more than a dozen visits with colleagues to other villages along the Cross River and elsewhere, he is described as being cautious and austere. He wanted to have a firm base before proceeding too far or fast. He tended to be domineering with colleagues and sometimes sent hostile letters to them.⁶ He was, however, an excellent observer, who faithfully recorded each day’s events and sights. He bartered with Efik traders, dealt with British merchants and government representatives, and deliberated with kings and chiefs.⁷ King Eyo VII wrote to Waddell after his retirement: We of Creek Town are still having much interest in you as the one that had been first sent to open the way for the rest to walk thereby. . . . May we all meet in Heaven to part no more from each other.⁸

Hugh Goldie is remembered not only for many years of ministry at Creek Town but also as a scholar. Besides his New Testament and catechism translations, he produced a two-volume dictionary, an Efik grammar, many hymns, and a history of the mission’s first forty years. William Anderson was the fighter of the mission, at least in his early service in Calabar. He often disagreed with fellow missionaries and with chiefs during his many years as pastor at Duke Town, though he mellowed with age.⁹

All three of these pioneers died in 1895. Waddell had retired to Ireland in 1858 for health reasons. Mary Slessor would have occasion to work with both Goldie and Anderson for nearly twenty years of her own missionary service.

Eyo Honesty II, king of Creek Town, was one of the most important men during the foundation era of the mission. Mission historian Geoffrey Johnston describes Eyo as a typical Victorian businessman—honest, shrewd, and industrious.¹⁰ Historian Kannan K. Nair states that the motive for Calabar’s kings to invite missionaries was the hope that they would in some way strengthen their respective economies, primarily because of the social changes caused by the change from slave trade to a palm oil economy.¹¹ Eyo did not become a Christian, but he did aid the mission’s endeavors. He invited missionaries to hold meetings in his yard and translated at their preaching services. He provided canoes and often escorted missionaries on trips to other communities. Nair declares, though, that Eyo sanctioned reforms only in instances where tradition was already changing.¹².

The missionaries continued the work—preaching, education, translation and basic medical assistance—among the Efik people. They added outstations from time to time and made occasional exploratory visits and contacts in more distant places. By the 1860s some of the work was undertaken by Efik converts. The number of mission stations remained small for years, not only because of staff shortages, illnesses, furloughs and deaths but also because missionaries were sometimes not welcomed in other villages. By 1856, ten years after the founding of the mission, there were two dozen staff members at Calabar. They included ordained missionaries; teachers and evangelists; industrial missionaries (printers and carpenters); women missionaries; wives of missionaries; and assistants and domestics, both Jamaicans and Scots.¹³ Their number had shrunk to a dozen by the time of Mary Slessor’s arrival in 1876, but nearly doubled by 1900 and stood at more than fifty by the time of Slessor’s death in 1915.

Society in Calabar

When the missionaries arrived in Calabar, they came with the great commission of Jesus on their minds—go into all the world and preach the gospel. But they also came with preconceived ideas about the status of society in Calabar. They held prevalent Victorian views: They considered Africa a dark continent, partly because it was a great unknown to Western Europeans, but also because Christianity had not reached it. They believed Africans were not only unchristian but were uncivilized heathen who were unable to govern themselves. They decried unacceptable cultural practices, the most notable of which were human sacrifice, twin murder, and trial by ordeal.

There were many more Ibibio in the Calabar area than Efik,¹⁴ as well as a number of other tribes who did not speak Efik,¹⁵ but the first missionary (and British trader) contacts were with the Efik community. They were the middlemen between the coast and inland markets. They spoke some Pidgin English, the trade language of the time, and had done so for years.¹⁶ With their domination of the area’s commerce and politics, Efik became "the lingua franca of the lower Cross River area."¹⁷ Thus, Efik was the first language selected for translation by the missionaries.

In Efik-speaking and neighboring communities, two powerful systems exercised authority: the house (ufok), and a secret society, Ekpe.¹⁸ The ufok represented a patriarchal system that adapted to meet changing economic and social conditions.¹⁹ Composed of a group of related families, it dealt mainly with lineage and property, while the powerful Ekpe made and enforced laws governing the social, political, and religious life of the people. Waddell wrote, The towns of Calabar, are, in fact, a number of small republics, each with its own chief and council, united only by the Egbo confraternity.²⁰

When writers refer to kings and chiefs, they have in mind the leaders of various houses,²¹ though such leaders were also in positions of authority within Ekpe. An ufok included everything a chief owned—not only land and personal property but also family, servants and slaves, and some who simply chose to align themselves with a particular house leader. Lineage determined leadership to a large extent, but the chiefs and village councils of a house selected an individual as their king by vote. Chosen rulers tended to be among the wealthiest members of the community.

Ekpe was originally for religious purposes,²² but like the house system, it changed to meet other needs, especially as Europeans became an increasing force to be reckoned with. Hope Waddell wrote, The want of a bond of union among the different families, and of supreme authority to enforce peace and order between equals and rivals, became apparent, and the Egbo institution was adopted.²³ Every free male²⁴ became a member of the fraternity, paying an initiation fee. Each grade within the organization²⁵ had its duties. Entrance fees escalated with each succeeding grade and were distributed to those in higher grades.

Each village had a clearing for community gatherings. Here Ekpe staged colorful ceremonial masquerades, with dancing, plays and beating of drums. But Egbo runners, enforcers of Ekpe laws, were feared when they ran through villages with whips, assaulting those who had the audacity to remain outside of their homes. Hugh Goldie wrote, concluding that Ekpe was given all scope . . . for the oppression of the weak.

Ekpe, the native [Efik] name for a leopard . . . is represented to be a supernatural being that inhabits the forest, and is brought into the town only on great occasions, concealed in a small tent borne along to suit his progress. . . . His voice is heard . . . resembling the growl of an angry animal; on hearing which the town is hushed, the street door of every house is shut, and all business is suspended while he remains. Though himself never seen, he has his idems or representatives, who mask themselves in fantastic dresses, a bell being hung at the back of those of the higher grades, who run about the town armed with formidable whips, which they lay mercilessly on the back of any one out of doors. . . . A grand display is, however sometimes made as part of the funeral rites of a great man, or on some other special occasion, to which all are free to witness. . . . It is a capital crime for any one not initiated to look upon any secret observance, or take part in any ceremony. Mr. Waddell mentions the case of a young man who intruded on the mysteries at Creek Town. . . . He was denounced by his own father . . . [and] was captured and publicly executed.²⁶

Ekpe could arrest, fine or execute those judged guilty of wrongdoing. Boycott of an offending person or group (called blowing Egbo) was another punishment imposed by the group. This action prevented trade or other contacts with the offender. In fact, it was used at times against the Calabar Mission during its early years, when chiefs were incensed at the harboring of slaves or rescue of twins.

Missionaries put pressure on both Africans and British officials to change or eliminate some cultural practices and excesses of Ekpe, especially the seeming disregard for the sanctity of human life. However, they often failed to recognize that there was some value in the systems that were already in place and that had governed the indigenous society for many years. Nair states, Because they were horrified by some cruel customs, [they] tended to condemn everything.²⁷

A modern Nigerian writer states, Despite the fact that women and male non-members know quite well that the masquerades are not ancestral spirits, Ekpo [Ekpe] members, even to this day [1984] still want people to believe that they are. He says that despite attempts of the colonial administration to eliminate Ekpe/Ekpo, it continues to exert its influence in modern Nigeria.²⁸

Charles Partridge, a District Commissioner during Mary Slessor’s era, believed that secret societies were an outgrowth of change. They play an important part in the progress of civilisation, he wrote, but, in course of time, their power tends to become tyrannical and antagonistic to progress. He expressed the hope that someone would one day explain the organization completely.²⁹ Explanations continue to be varied and at times confusing. Missionary letters and reports detailed encounters with Calabar’s kings, chiefs and Ekpe for years.

An Infamous Trade

Thousands of slaves were exported from Calabar. Britain encouraged and participated in that infamous period of history, as did France, Portugal, Holland, and independent traders from America, the West Indies, and elsewhere. James I issued the first royal charter to establish slave trading in Africa in 1618. Charles I did the same in 1631. In 1662 a new company was formed, headed by the Duke of York. That charter stipulated that the company would supply 3,000 slaves annually to Jamaica.³⁰ With the development of the Americas, more and more workers were required to meet the needs of expanding markets. Sugar, gold, coffee, rice, and cotton were important products shipped from the new to the old world. Estimates are that a half-million slaves were shipped to the United States, as many as ten million to all the Americas. Brazil imported more than four million, and the West Indies, two million.³¹ At least thirty percent of the total were shipped from the Gulf of Guinea—the Bights of Benin and Biafra.³²

Slavery was nothing new in the land that is now Nigeria. European slave-traders simply created (or expanded) a market, and Africans met the market demand. When the slave trade was abolished, it did not mark the end of slavery in Africa. Palm oil became the top export, and slaves became a surplus commodity. Waddell wrote in 1847 that slavery seemed to be normal in West Africa. He contrasted it with the slavery that resulted from the slave trade, when campaigns tracked down people to sell and send across the sea. For domestic slaves in Calabar, Absolute authority on the one part, entire subjection on the other, is the theory; but in practice both the authority and subjection are checked and limited in many ways. He did not approve of slavery but disclosed the frequent family-like relationships that existed in Calabar between slaves and their masters. The Efik had no word for master or mistress, so the sweet and precious names, father and mother, alone are used to express the relation, he wrote.³³ That does not mean that to be a slave was desirable. The powerful secret Ekpe organization managed to keep slaves in subjection. Sometimes masters inflicted punishments such as flogging, chaining, drowning, or death (especially when a man of importance died).³⁴ One punishment was to free an unwanted slave, which left him incapable of protecting or providing for himself. Waddell listed the ways in which a person could become enslaved:

First, [free men may become slaves] by selling themselves, either in time of famine, or for protection, or to better their circumstances; as a rich, head slave may be better off than a poor despised freeman. . . .

Second, Men may be sold for debt. . . . Egbo [Ekpe] is powerful in enforcing such claims. . . .

Third, Men may be sold as prisoners of war, or as criminals. . . . It is a matter of choice whether to kill them or sell them. . . .³⁵

Domestic slavery existed well beyond Mary Slessor’s years of service.

Victorian Dundee

The beautiful city of Dundee, fourth largest in Scotland, bears little resemblance today to the Dundee of the Victorian era. It was then a part of the Scottish wellspring for much missionary effort that arose from the evangelical movement.

A typical city of the Industrial Revolution, it grew at such a pace during the nineteenth century that proper housing and sanitation could not be provided. Wealth increased, but so did poverty. Although the city was a leading whaling port, it was the proliferation of textile mills—especially after the introduction of jute—and the need for workers that drew immigrants in droves.

As in other industrial cities in the mid-nineteenth century, Dundee’s factories spewed smoke, and slum living was the norm for many people. Workers spent long hours in mills, and women and children formed a large part of the work force. Unemployment for men was extremely high because working women and children received lower pay.³⁶ Alcoholism became a severe social problem, even among women.

Some historians compare Victorian Dundee to Charles Dickens’ depressing, mythical Coketown.³⁷ The population of the city doubled to over 90,00 between 1841 and 1861 (the Slessor family was among the newcomers), but fewer than six hundred new houses were built.³⁸ By 1871, another 30,000 people had moved into the overcrowded city. Some mill owners built a few tenements for their employees. Baxter’s,³⁹ where Mary Slessor worked, was among them. They built a tenement block of two- or three-room dwellings in the 1860s for eighty families, an improvement over some houses being built in the city that were said to be just ten feet square.⁴⁰

Tenements clustered around the mills. The majority of people survived in one- and two-room dwellings with no running water or toilets. Disease and crime flourished. Because of the high incidence of alcoholism, concerned Dundee citizens reacted by forming temperance societies and temperance hotels, but even long after Mary Slessor’s working days in Dundee Winston Churchill, who represented Dundee from 1908–1922, dubbed it the most drunken city in the British Empire.⁴¹ Dundee’s citizens eventually organized the Prohibition Party, and one of their own became the only Prohibitionist ever elected to Parliament.⁴²

Life in Dundee, as in other growing industrialized cities, was hard enough for adults working twelve to fourteen hours a day. For children, conditions would be unthinkable today. By 1844, all the mills worked children on a half-time system, after laws were enacted to limit child labor. Children (including Mary Slessor fifteen years later) worked six hours and attended school six hours while they were half-timers. At age thirteen or fourteen they went to full-time work and could attend school at night. Few of those who worked twelve-hour days, however, had the incentive to spend the evening at school. Since families often depended on the earnings of their children to keep them above the starvation level, there was a thriving business in falsified birth certificates, especially after 1872, with enactment of stricter laws regarding the employment of children.⁴³ Factories were required to provide basic education by Mary Slessor’s time. In 1858, a year before her employment, Baxter’s opened a new school with washing up facilities that boasted hot and cold water, and even combs and mirrors.⁴⁴ Some people insisted that children were better off working in the mills than they were at home, where conditions could be worse.

Hunger was common among the poor of Dundee. A poem by Robert Mullen of Dundee published in 1849 bears witness to the problem of hunger, as well as to the resistance of some in society to sending missionaries to foreign lands. A portion of it follows:

Starved to Death

The Jury returned a verdict of—‘Death from Starvation.’

Starved to death! Starved to death!

Think on it, Christian women and men;

This is no idle sentence I pen;

‘Twas the verdict of twelve good men and true

On the corpse of one whom gaunt hunger slew;

Who sank beneath want’s pitiless wave,

With none to help her—no hand to save;

This is the epitaph over her grave—

Starved to death!

. . . . . . . .

Starved to death! Starved to death!

Think on it, Christians! think, is it right,

While want and darkness around we slight,

To spend so much money, and toil, and thought,

That the savage afar may be fed and taught?

Let’s look at home, and do all we can

To help our struggling, weak fellow man,

That no more those fearful words we may scan—

Starved to death!⁴⁵

The Slessor family was one of many that struggled with hunger, as Mary herself would do years later in Africa.

1. Christie, Annals, September 14, 1841; McFarlan, Calabar, 9.

2. Powers, Converting a Savage Mind (Dickens, 56).

3. Christie, Annals, January 19, 1843. The name Old Calabar was officially changed to Calabar, August 12, 1904.

4. Ibid., May 7, 1845.

5. Record, 1846, 9. Secession and Relief churches joined as United Presbyterian Church in 1847; United Presbyterian and Free Church of Scotland became United Free Church in 1900. Each published magazines that included the wording Missionary Record.

6. Ajayi, Christian Missions, 279; E. U. Aye, Foundations, 7; Johnston, Maxim Guns, 15; Nair, Politics and Society, 59; Waddell, Journal, Letters to William Anderson, 10–15.

7. See Nair, Politics and Society, Chapter 1, for a thorough discussion of Calabar society, including kings and lineage, the house system and Ekpe.

8. Goldie, Memoir, 36.

9. Buchan, Expendable Mary Slessor, 52; Johnston, Maxim Guns, 16.

10. Johnston, ibid., 14–15; See also Aye, Efik People, 165.

11. Nair, Politics and Society, 36, 85.

12. Ibid., 59.

13. Christie, Roll of Missionaries in Annals.

14. Essien, Grammar, x–xi.

15. Goldie, in Conference of West African, 5–7.

16. Aye, Old Calabar, 108; Forde, Efik Traders, ix–x, 79.

17. Ibid., 3.

18. The society was called Ekpo in the Ibibio language, Ekpe in Efik, and written Egbo by Europeans.

19. Aye, Efik People, 86.

20. Dike, Trade and Politics, 33; Nair, Politics and Society, calls them a conglomeration of loosely-knit towns, 6.

21. See Oku, Kings & Chiefs for biographies and genealogical charts.

22 Aye, Efik People, 70.

23. Waddell, Twenty-nine Years, 313.

24. European traders and slaves could sometimes purchase membership. Some historians say membership was open to women, but eligibility seems to have varied with different years and localities.

25. The number of grades named varies from five to twenty-three. See Aye, Efik People, 81; Ema, The Ekpe Society, 314; Forde, Efik Traders, 137–38; Nair, Politics and Society, 16; Offiong, Functions, 80.

26. Goldie, Calabar, 30–34.

27. Nair, Politics and Society, 69.

28. Offiong, Functions, 87.

29. Partridge, Cross River, 35.

30. Hutchinson, Impressions, 33.

31. Klein, Atlantic Slave, 208–11.

32. The Bight of Biafra is also known as Bight of Bonny since 1970.

33. Waddell, Twenty-nine Years, 315.

34. Aye, Old Calabar, 96; Ayandele, Missionary Impact, 83; Waddell, Twenty-Nine Years, 320.

35. Waddell, ibid., 316.

36. Dundee was known as a woman’s city. See N. Watson, Emerging from Obscurity, 199–213.

37. Whatley, Remaking of Juteopolis, 12.

38. Whatley, Life and Times, 103, 106.

39. Baxter’s produced linen, canvas, tarpaulins, and gun covers to meet the needs of the Crimean War and the American Civil War. They were the largest firm in town in 1864, with 4,000 workers. See Cooke, ed. Baxter’s of Dundee, 55.

40. Wilkinson, Housing and Health, 55.

41. Ogilvy, Most Drunken City, in Scotsman, 2000.

42. Peterkin, Spirits Above and Spirits Below, 181.

43. Lenman. Dundee, 59.

44. Blackburn, Baxter’s Half-Time, 65.

45. Mullen, in Poems by the People, 5–6.

part one

Preparing and Going

1848–1879

1

Early Influences

I have a note from Miss Crawford asking me to send you the exact date of my birth: that’s rather a large order isn’t it! To a gentleman I do not have the honour of knowing personally either. But as I am settled in a large family, having 13 of my own rearing in hand, I need not blush, need I? Well, I don’t know whether I was born in 1848 or 49, & the old Family Bible is given away, & the Act & Testimony in which also our births were registered was eaten by the ants here [in Africa] years ago, so I don’t know when I can get it. But it was the 2nd day of December of one of those years, that had the doubtful honour of my entrance into this world.

—Mary Slessor, 1901¹

Shoemaker Robert Slessor and teenaged weaver Mary Mitchell, both born in Aberdeen, Scotland, were married there on May 16, 1840. Their daughter Mary is listed as second of seven children by other biographers, though two of the children’s names are not known, and birth and death records are scanty. Mary Mitchell Slessor was born December 2, 1848 at her maternal grandmother’s house in Gilcomston, a suburb of Aberdeen.

Mary’s brother, Robert, was born in Aberdeen two years later, then sister Susan in 1855. John and Jane were born in Dundee, John in 1857 and Jane in 1862.² No available records mention the other two Slessor children, who probably died in infancy.

Mrs. Slessor took her children to services at Belmont Street United Presbyterian Church in Aberdeen. She, like hundreds of other Scottish Presbyterians, eagerly read each issue of The Missionary Record. Churches circulated the monthly magazine to inform members of mission comings and goings, progress, problems and needs. The chronicled exploits of David Livingstone, as well as stories of those serving in Calabar and elsewhere, enthralled Mrs. Slessor. She communicated her enthusiasm to her young children, telling them missionary stories.

The mission work at Calabar became a part of Mary’s earliest memories. She often played church and missionaries with her siblings. With a fiery temper to match her red hair—Mary wrote years later about her brothers and sisters calling her Carrots and Fire—she was upset when Robert insisted that women couldn’t be preachers or missionaries. She didn’t intend to let him have all the glory she imagined went with being a missionary. When he relented and told her he would take her with him into the pulpit, Mary was satisfied.

Mary’s childhood had a dark side. The skeleton in the closet was her father. Mrs. Slessor tried to keep her husband’s drinking and its dismal results hidden from those around them. He lost his job in Aberdeen in 1857 because of his increasing dependence on alcohol, and the family moved to Dundee. They hoped Mr. Slessor could get a fresh start and that the family’s financial situation would improve. He worked briefly at his old occupation as a shoemaker, then in one of the city’s textile mills. Soon, though, he joined the ranks of the many unemployed men in Dundee and reverted to his old lifestyle. His alcoholism, which one biographer attempts to blame on Mrs. Slessor,³ played its part in molding Mary’s character.

W. P. Livingstone, Mary Slessor’s first biographer wrote: She was usually reticent regarding her father, but once she wrote and published under her own name what is known to be the story of this painful period of her girlhood. There is no need to reproduce it.⁴

Later biographers would wish he had reproduced this manuscript. It is nowhere to be found today, as Livingstone’s papers were destroyed during World War II. His biography first appeared the year Mary Slessor died and went through many reprints. It presents many details of her life that are not available elsewhere. Mary’s report apparently expressed the dread that came with a father who arrived home drunk late on Saturday nights and threw food saved for him into the fire. She told of being locked out at night in tears and waiting until her mother could let her sneak back inside. She told of the embarrassment of often carrying a parcel to the pawnbroker for enough funds for the week’s needs, then rushing off to pay the most urgent bills. All the while, she and her mother tried to keep the facts hidden from the family’s younger children, the neighbors and, more especially, church members.

Mrs. Slessor, already a skilled weaver, began work in one of the mills to help support the family. Mary went to work in the mill, too, probably before she was eleven. Dundee’s 1861 census shows Mary working as a power loom weaver at age twelve, her brother Robert employed as a power loom worker at age ten. Both children were listed as partly at school, and both contributed to family sustenance.⁵

The conversion of the young wild lassie, as she called herself later in life, came through the frightening counsel of an old widow who lived nearby. She invited several girls into her warm room from their play. Once they were inside, she began to tell them of their need for a savior. With her strong Calvinist beliefs, she compared the fire in her hearth to the horrors of hell. Their souls would burn in hellfire for ever and ever if they did not repent, she told them.⁶ Mary was appalled. She decided that repent and believe was her only option, and once she made that decision she never looked back. Hellfire-and-damnation was never a part of her own mode of operation. In her years of ministry she emphasized a loving God and freedom from fear to a people who already had too many fears.

When she was eighteen Mrs. Slessor took Mary and John (nine years younger) to hear Calabar missionary William Anderson speak in Dundee. She hoped that one of her sons would go as a missionary to Calabar, but Robert died of tuberculosis in 1870. (Mr. Slessor also died a few months later.) That left only thirteen-year-old John as a possible missionary candidate, but John, too, developed tuberculosis—one of the diseases that plagued slums everywhere. Advisors thought a warmer climate might help. He emigrated to New Zealand in 1873 but died a week after arriving there, leaving behind only Mary, her mother and two younger sisters.⁷

Education and Work

In 1550, Scotland’s Protestant reformers produced their Book of Discipline, which served as a guide for three centuries. Parishes were admonished to provide education. Elementary schooling for all, girls and boys alike, was the means to salvation: no longer to be gained through the intercession of priests or saints, but by a justification of faith achieved by an individual and personal reading of the Scriptures.⁸

Government became involved in education in the 1800s, partly at the behest of church leaders requesting financial aid. The Argyll Commission and others made enquiries and wrote reports, but the major changes came with Scotland’s Education Act of 1872. It outlined strict regulations and required annual inspections of schools, but this came after Mary Slessor’s school days.

It is possible that Mary obtained some schooling at Belmont Street United Presbyterian Church in Aberdeen in her early childhood. As a half-timer at Baxter’s Lower Dens Factory in Dundee, Mary attended Baxter’s new school after work: six hours a day for two or three years. When she went to work full-time at age fourteen, she attended evening school, where she continued to study the required subjects: reading, writing, arithmetic, Bible and Scottish history. Her teens and twenties show an intermingling of education with work and the church. More and more, she began to read independently, often under the direction and encouragement of an older church friend, but she also enjoyed the popular fiction of the day.⁹ Widespread stories tell of Mary following the lead of David Livingstone by propping a book on her loom at work and snatching moments to read surrounded by the clamor of the factory’s machines. She was also known to read while walking to and from work at the mill. It is obvious, from lessons she wrote, that she depended on the Bible as a textbook and for devotional study.

When Mary read Philip Doddridge’s The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul, she was dismayed.¹⁰ She complained to a friend that she couldn’t meditate, and Doddridge says it is necessary for the soul. Her friend advised her not to worry about her wandering mind but to Go and work, for that’s what God means us to do.¹¹

When someone gave her Sartor Resartus, though, she stayed up all night reading. She, like many Victorians, appreciated Thomas Carlyle’s best-selling portrayal of his moral and spiritual crisis and his admonition, Love not Pleasure; love God.¹²

Christian Commitment

Besides work and reading, Mary Slessor’s life was filled with church meetings—worship, Sunday school, youth work and prayer meetings. The family (except for Mr. Slessor) attended Wishart Church, in the Cowgate district of Dundee. The area was one of tenements and slums. The church met in the upstairs of a large brick building. John O’ Groats pub and other shops were downstairs.¹³ Mary wrote to a friend in later years of being washed with Brown Windsor soap before church, having a drop of Bergamot perfume on gloves and handkerchiefs, and each [child] a peppermint for the sermon time, when mother had babies and could not be there to give us the lozenge herself.¹⁴ Shortly before she died, she wrote, We would as soon have thought of going to the moon as of being absent from a service. And we throve very well on it too. How often, when lying awake at night, my time for thinking, do I go back to those wonderful days!¹⁵

As a teenager, Mary volunteered to teach children when the church began a mission work around the corner. I had the impudence of ignorance then in special degree surely, she admitted years later.¹⁶ She also began to distribute the ymca paper, Monthly Visitor.¹⁷ (It is difficult to imagine how she added this project, which required house-to-house visitation. Her hours were already filled with work, study and church.) At the mission she was first confronted by the bullying of young ruffians. Boys who had nothing to do and no supervision took delight in harassing those who worked at the mission, as well as those who attended the meetings. Rude taunts were easier to ignore than the mudslinging that often accompanied them. Sometimes unemployed men joined in the torment, too. Mission workers were admonished to travel in pairs for their own safety. Mary didn’t always abide by that advice. She learned to dodge trouble, just as she had learned to dodge her father when he was drunk, but she also wasn’t afraid to stand up to the gangs. Growing up in their midst and with an alcoholic father, she learned to be tough and resourceful.

A story Mary often told, after years as a missionary, was of her encounter with a gang of boys whose leader had a lead weight tied to a cord. As he began to threaten her, swinging the weight around his head, she carefully removed her new hat (decorated with cherries) and stood facing him. He swung the weight closer and closer to her head until it nearly grazed her forehead. Finally, the boy threw the weight down and declared, She’s game, boys! whereupon the group sheepishly followed her in to a prayer meeting.¹⁸ One frame of the memorial stained glass windows erected in her honor depicts this episode. The leader of the gang sent Mary a picture of himself and his family when she lived in Africa. He told her that day was a turning point in his life.

Another tough youth cracked a whip at those coming to meetings. Mary confronted him one day, saying, If we changed places what would happen? When he said he would get the whip across his back, she proposed a deal: I’ll bear it for you if you’ll go in. The astonished boy deserted his whip and followed her. He also decided to become a follower of Jesus.¹⁹

Mary’s mission work and her commitment to the gospel continued to bear fruit. She cajoled youths and kidded with them and preached to them. Her sense of humor, her honesty and her down-to-earth temperament attracted them.

Minister James Logie, under the auspices of Victoria Street United Presbyterian Church, opened another mission for the young people of Dundee. By this time, Mary was in her early twenties and no longer attending school. She offered to help with meetings. Logie soon came to appreciate her devotion and her influence. He saw that those from the slums confided in her in a way they would not do to those of a