CATHERINE GURNEY O.B.E. (1848-1930) AND HER 1379 CHILDREN

At Christmas in 1848 my 3x great grandfather William Brodie Gurney celebrated the birth of half a dozen new grandchildren that year. This was quite a tally, even for a man who eventually had 62 of them, and 1848 became known mock-memorially in the family as The Year Of The Six Babies.

Catherine Gurney (1848-1930)

One of them was my great grandfather William Henry Gurney Salter’s cousin Katie Gurney. A deeply Christian woman, she first made her mark by starting a Bible Class in Wandsworth Prison in the early 1870s. A chance remark from one of the policemen who made safe her journey from Wandsworth back to her home in Notting Hill – “What? D’you think a police officer has a soul?” – led her to found the Christian Police Association in 1883. To accommodate the Association she opened London’s first Police Institute, a drop-in centre for comfort and conversation.

In 1889 she helped an ailing officer find a place in a convalescent home, only to see him check out again when he found his neighbour in the next bed was a violent criminal whom he had put behind bars. Katie realised the need for a dedicated sanctuary for policemen recovering from injury or illness, and founded the Southern Provincial Police Home in Brighton the following year.

St George’s House, Harrogate c1898

soon after being opened as the Northern Police Orphanage

The institution began to serve a second purpose as a home for the orphaned children of policemen, for which it soon became clear there was a very great need. Children were being sent to the south coast orphanage from as far away as Manchester in the north. In 1897 Miss Gurney arranged the purchase of St George’s House in Harrogate and a year later opened the Northern Police Orphanage there. Within the grounds she then built the Northern Police Convalescent Home.

All these institutions were paid for through the personal fund-raising efforts of Catherine Gurney amongst her friends, family and other wealthy patrons in the north and south of England. Where funding fell short, she arranged loans on which she paid the interest herself. She remained closely associated with them throughout her life. She was on hand to show him around when the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VIII, opened a new chapel at the southern Home in 1923, and shortly before her death in 1930 she was awarded an O.B.E.

Catherine Gurney (right) with the Prince of Wales (centre left)

at the opening of the new Southern Police Orphanage chapel

27^th November 1923

735 children passed through the doors of the Southern Police Orphanage from its founding in 1890 until 1939. (No doubt even more followed before its closure in 1947.) The first was James Henry Archer, five years old, from a family of seven in Leicestershire. The first admission to the Northern Orphanage in 1898 was a little girl from Sunderland called Minnie Smith; she was followed by 643 others before the institution closed in 1956.

Thousands of police officers have benefited from the convalescent homes, and continue to do so through the St George’s Trust. Attitudes to orphanages have changed, but the fatherless children of policemen are still cared for in Britain by the Gurney Fund.

Memorial to Catherine Gurney

in the chapel of the Southern Police Orphanage

Katie, who never married or had children, was born in an age when women were seen and not heard. She ignored that dictum. With the support of her relatives, and the example of her ancestors (for example her great grandmother Rebecca Brodie and her great great aunt Martha Gurney of whom I have written here), she made a difference. She still changes lives.

REBECCA BRODIE (1744-1814) AND THE WALWORTH MATERNITY SOCIETY

My 4x great grandmother Rebecca Brodie “had not the gift of large resources,” her son William Brodie Gurney observed, “but my mother knew how to set others to work, and made the most of what she had.” She was born in Nottinghamshire to Paisley parents, and I imagine a persuasive, talkative, cheerful woman: William wrote that she spent the last ten months of her life, when she had been diagnosed with cancer, visiting friends and relatives to tell them that she would “soon be shut up!” 

Rebecca (Brodie) Gurney (1744-1814)

Around 1787 Rebecca prevailed on her neighbours in Walworth, South London, with greater resources than hers to set up a Girl’s Charity School. She played a very active part in the running of it, and also in the organisation of a Maternity Society which she set up there. Thirty years after her death in 1814, William was still meeting people whose lives had been touched and changed by her activity.

The girls’ schoolteacher was encouraged to extend the school’s activities to include religious instruction every Sunday, and he was offered a penny for each child attending on a Sunday, up to a maximum of thirty pupils. Unsurprisingly attendance at the Sunday school ran at a steady thirty week after week after week, netting the teacher a regular extra income of half a crown. When, as was expected of a pious young man, William Gurney went along to volunteer one Sunday in 1795, he found a less than spiritual reason for the full classroom. If ever there was a shortfall, the teacher sent his son out on the streets to round up extra children with the promise that they wouldn’t be kept long – just long enough to have their heads counted by the chapel treasurer.

William took over the running of the Sunday school and his success there led to the founding of the Sunday School Union eight years later. William’s son in law William Augustus Salter met his future wife, Gurney’s daughter Emma, while volunteering at a Sunday school run on Gurney's lines. Salter would go on to found two schools himself, and in 1860 Emma, without doubt inspired by her grandmother’s Maternity Society, set up the first ever Mother's Meeting in Leamington Spa.