Frances Elizabeth Ellis
(1846-1930)
She was a most generous benefactress of the Catholic
Church in England. Her considerable fortune was almost entirely spent in
helping to establish schools, hospitals, orphanages and other good works in
many counties of England; and in financing the erection of small churches in
Southwark and Westminster.
She was a convert. She was born into a wealthy
family at Brighton in 1846 and raised as an Anglican. She was left a
considerable fortune by her father, and devoted much of her adult life to
caring for her blind mother and infirm sister, who joined the Catholic Church
with her.
Oral tradition has it that she made her first
acquaintance with the Church through a gentleman who passed her house in
Ramsgate every morning in all weathers on his way to the Abbey for early Mass.
He was Mr Leahy, the father of a little girl who later was to become Sister
Francis Elizabeth F.C. Thus began Miss Ellis's interest in the Church in whose
service she spent her life and her wealth. Mr Leahy was able to introduce Miss
Ellis to prominent clergymen in the diocese and became her trusted agent in all
her transactions.
Her method was to identify areas that
needed churches, work with the clergy and the local people to build up a
community, and buy sites with her own money. She also contributed towards the
construction costs and made her own choice of architect. She favoured a
Romanesque style, but was not insistent; the result, because of a lack of money
for ornamentation, was often a bare and austere buillding. She made sure there
was money enough for a presbytery to be built if
necessary.
She built twenty-two churches in South London
alone, and quite a number in the rest of the diocese, of which Saint
Ethelbert's is a delightful and interesting example. The archdiocese of
Southwark has good reason to be eternally grateful to Miss Ellis. She died in
1930 at a home run by the Daughters of the Cross at Hayle in Cornwall, another
building she had paid for. |
