Isabella Gilmore and the deaconess movement

Bishop’s Chaplain Lindsay Llewellyn-MacDuff discusses the life and work of Isabella Gilmore in an extract from Bertha's Daughters: A History of the Church in Kent

Isabella Gilmore branches off from the same beaten track in almost entirely the opposite direction. Born within a year of Sarah Forbes Benetta, in 1842, Gilmore is still a little girl when Hilda (still Harriet Stewart) joins the Devonport sisters. By the time Hilda is just meeting Charlotte Boyd, Gilmore is newly widowed and looking for something to plug the gap of a much loved husband. The general Victorian expectation is for her to divert her energies to her extended family, and indeed, on the sudden death of her brother Rendell in 1884 Gilmore does take on responsibility for his eight children (aged, at the time, two and above). By then, however, Gilmore has decided that needlepoint and Companionship are not her bag. Scandalously, despite not needing the money, she gets a job. She trains as a nurse at Guy's Hospital on the back of Florence Nightingale's reforms. It is hard to express how radical this was. Respectable married women did not go about unescorted by a maid/parent/husband and most emphatically did not take lodgings away from her family. Her mother is so scandalised that the two are alienated from each other until Gilmore's mother is close to death, decades later. "Women today will hardly realise what it was then for a lady to work & I had many troublious [sic] times to go through with my relations, many hard unkind things were said," writes Gilmore, later, in an extravagance of understatement. This separation is painful to Gilmore for the rest of her adult life. At her ordination, only her brother-in-law John Gilmore, and her sister and brother, Emma and William Morris (yes, that William Morris) are present from her family.

Taking on eight children puts a slight dent on her ambition, but is not enough to keep Gilmore tethered to home and hearth. Instead she starts to look for some voluntary occupation just at the point where Bishop Thorold of Rochester is looking for a solution to problem of ministry to the slums in his newly reorganised diocese. In 1877 the dioceses of London, Winchester and Rochester had been reorganised to create the Diocese of St Albans. Before then, most of Rochester Diocese had been in rural Essex.

Thorold 22 describes the new diocese into which he is consecrated as a Cinderella diocese of the poorer bits of London rejected by London and Winchester. "All were displeased with the new diocese, which people said had only by accident or afterthought been allowed to include even those few prosperous suburbs now allocated to it." (The life and work of Bishop Thorold, CH Simkinson) Thorold, who up till now had ministered in North London, was deeply shocked by the living conditions of the people in his diocese and vividly aware of his clergy's inability to cope.

Plan the first had been to deploy the new Salvation Army, but he had found them a tad excitable. His next solution had been to try and set up a Lay Helpers' Association, but there had been little enthusiasm for the role to be found. (Plan 2b, seems to have been the setting up of a sisterhood – perhaps even Mtr Hilda's community which moved into Malling Abbey two years after Thorold's translation to Winchester.) Plan the third involved the new network of Deaconess Houses that were spreading out from London, but Thorold wanted somebody to rework the idea first.

The version that had been brought across from Germany by Elizabeth Ferard was in many ways the Protestant-ising of the religious houses springing up in the AngloCatholic wing of the church. It was a solution to the unease felt by the general population at the autonomy and "Papism" of the sisterhoods, that aimed to retain women's passion and labour in the service of the poor. So while Ferard's deaconess movement still organised themselves in houses, they were not convents, and the deaconesses were expected to offer lifelong service, but there were no life vows. They were under the supervision of a head deacon, but made no vows of obedience to a mother superior; they were expected to remain single, but they were not "celibate". Duck, walk, quack, etc. Most importantly, Ferard constantly emphasised the authority of the Bishop over the deaconess houses so, fear not, gentlemen, a man was still in charge.

It take a while for Thorold to get Gilmore on board (eight children is hell of a responsibility to juggle with, while creating a whole new order of ministry). At length he passes to her his determined vision of bringing love to the darkest corners of his diocese, where poverty, as he says, is not just in terms of money but of air, light, space and water. Once she takes on the project, not being a woman of half-measures, Gilmore is very clear that her deaconess order is not a variation of the religious vocation but of the vocation to ordained ministry. Gilmore looks at the service to which society was calling women, the "women's work" of tending the sick, caring for the vulnerable, for children, for orphans, working in hospitals, prisons, asylums, teaching children, and concludes that these were the marks of the ministry of a deacon. In her booklet, "The Deaconess and her Ministry," Gilmore emphasises the New Testament and the Early Church precedent for her assertion that the deaconess is essentially the same order as the deacon. It is, she argues, a personal vocation to service, confirmed by the Church in the person of the Bishop. Under her influence Thorold ordains deaconesses with the laying on of hands and issues them letters of orders – features which, since the Carolingian reforms, had until then been reserved entirely for the ordination of male priests and deacons.

The key thing, for Gilmore, was that her deaconesses were based not in the deaconess house, but in the parish, licensed to the parish and to the incumbent. She flips the Ferard model. For Ferard, the principal loyalty of the deaconess is to the deaconess order and to her training house, and only secondarily to the incumbent and his parish. Gilmore's deacons, on the other hand, are released from the house to work in the parish alongside the parish clergy, so that she "is licensed to the parish, receives her own stipend, and is entirely independent of the Head Deaconess, but she is responsible to her Vicar and her Bishop." (Gilmore, annual report, 1896). Gilmore is convinced this is the primitive (ie Early Church) model. Experience has also shown her that allegiance to a structure separate from the parish undermines loyalty and responsiveness both on the part of the deaconess and on the part of the parish clergy. For Gilmore, the deaconess house is there for support, not oversight.

Like the other Victorians we'll look at, Gilmore, for all her innovation, is still a creature of her time, for all her innovation. She believes in the "natural authority" that the middle classes have over the poor. She sees the deaconess not only theologically but culturally as the counterpart to the English clergyman. This does not mean that she keeps herself apart, though. She is genuinely shocked by the living standards of the slum tenements she is adamant that her deaconesses should roll up their sleeves and muck in. Whereas Ferard's deaconesses avoid "everything vulgar and indelicate," Gilmore's are expected to be confident in London slums and enter the grimmest accommodation without flinching. They are to fill the gaps in a parish system overwhelmed by urbanisation, which 23 often meant working across any boundaries that obstructed the endeavour: unlike Booth, Gilmore works with any organisation in the field. "The more we know about each other's work," she says, "the more we help each other, and can send the right people to the right places." She is not precious.

Two stories, I think, exemplify Gilmore's commitment and ministry. The first is that on the eve of Gilmore's own ordination she puts all her rings, including her wedding ring, aside as a gesture of her wholehearted commitment to her new ministry. Giving them up is not a light gesture. "It was not vanity, but all that they had meant to me." She has them melted down and added to a chalice that she has made for the chapel at Gilmore House. Thereafter, like the clergyman perpetually in holy black, Gilmore is seen only in deaconess blue.

Deaconesses in characteristic blue cassocks, photographed alongside Bishop David Say in the Cloister Garth in 1987.

The other is of her response to the discovery that few in the patch she was serving are baptised. On investigation she discovers it is in part because the women in the slums rarely leave their own house and even more rarely leave the small selection of streets that is their community. Should they muster the audacity to do so, Gilmore found, they still will not go to church on a Sunday because they cannot dress for church, having only one set of ragged clothes. Gilmore browbeats her incumbent into offering a baptism on a weekday evening. The sceptical cleric gives her a service slot of half an hour, just before the parish meeting. The service overruns by a full hour and 93 children are baptised! These "public baptisms" become a regular feature in the parish and are run with near military organisation by Gilmore.

Gilmore's deaconesses changed the structure of ministry in the Church of England. Between 1860 and 1919 431 deaconesses are ordained, 76 of whom – over a fifth – for the Rochester Diocese. True, there remains during her lifetime significant resistance to Gilmore's vision of an order of deaconesses that is on a par with their male equivalent. This means that the lack of hierarchical structure and proper definition of the role hamstrings the order. At length the numbers fall, despite the need for their ministry. A significant chunk of the objection lies in admitting women to Holy Orders, with the authority and independence of vocation that gave them. The rest is mixed up in the Protestant opposition to celibacy, on account of the association with religious orders through Ferard, and in Gilmore's subversion of traditional domestic gender roles. Still, throughout her life, even after her retirement from her role as the head deaconess of the Rochester Diocese, Gilmore pushes hard for acknowledgement of her deaconesses' authority under Christ and for the significance of a woman's personal vocation. There is no doubting that she laid the foundations for the ordination of women to the diaconate in 1987, and to the priesthood in 1994.

All of her writings are full of her love of God and her love of the people that she served. She retires in 1906 and died in 1923. By 1936 she is largely forgotten.

Lindsay Llewellyn-MacDuff

Bishop’s Chaplain, Diocese of Rochester

Extract from Bertha's Daughters: A History of the Church in Kent