Dundee Years

MARY M. SLESSOR The “Uncrowned Queen” of Old Calabar by James Johnston:

“Scotia has no greater living heroine than Miss Mary Mitchell Slessor, whose record of achievement forms an almost unbelieveable story in the annals of the Old Calabar missions. She has shown to the world what a “woman of action” can do in the warfare against suffering, cruelty, degradation, and heathenism in one of the darkest lands on the face of the earth.”

Mary Slessor, a Dundee mill girl, was inspired to travel to Calabar in Western Africa to become a missionary in 1876. Her determination and spirit and the strong connection she made with the local tribes while living with them, meant that she became much more than a missionary and is remembered and celebrated there still, 100 years since her death.

Dundee Tough Times 7

Mary Mitchell Slessor

Mary Mitchell Slessor was born on 2 December 1848 into a working class family in Aberdeen. The family moved to Dundee in 1857 in search of work. Her father was a trained shoemaker but due to his struggle with alcoholism, the family suffered very severe hardship. Mary, her mother and older brother Robert had to find work in the mills to support the family, she had five younger siblings and they all lived in a one room house in a slum area of Dundee.

The experience of living in poverty and struggling to survive helped Mary to develop the resilience, drive and determination that would prove invaluable in her later life as a missionary in Africa.

Mary became a mill girl in the Baxter Brothers and Co. Ltd. Lower Dens Mill and attended the mill’s half-time school. The Scotland Education Act of 1872 encouraged employers to provide some education for the children that they employed. This meant very long working days for the children who would often attend school for six hours after they had finished their shift in the mill. By the time she was fourteen, Mary was a linen power loom weaver, a skilled job. She became an avid reader and like David Livingstone, would read when she could during her working day, with a book propped on her loom.

Life in Dundee in 1800s

The industrialization of towns and cities across Scotland in the early 1800s, resulted in huge increases in population as  people moved from rural areas to towns for work. The population in Dundee rose from 26,000 in 1801 to a staggering 166,000  in 1840 with the development of textile, shipbuilding and whaling industries. Housing and sanitation couldn’t keep pace with such expansion and many working class families, including the Slessors, ended up living in overcrowded slum areas with little or no sanitation.

With no welfare state at this time, families without a regular income could fall quickly into desperate circumstances, suffering from hunger and disease, with infant mortality extremely high.

Many people tried however to retain an image of respectability despite their desperate living conditions, especially in front of those of authority, such as church elders, even if this meant going to the pawn shop on a Saturday night to retrieve Sunday best clothes to attend church the next morning.

 

The Call to Africa

In her twenties, Mary volunteered to teach at a new Dundee mission in Queen Street, in one of the poor areas of the city. Bible study was taught and what would be considered a youth group nowadays was organized with trips to the country for the local children to give them some respite from their daily lives. Her sense of humour and down to earth approach made her a popular teacher. Her own experience of growing up in poverty and deprivation meant she could relate well to the local children and understood what their lives were like.

Missionary work in 1800s

Many churches in Scotland had strong links with their foreign missions across the world. It was considered an important role for congregations to raise funds and support missionary work. There was a constant demand for people with different skills including teaching and the trades (carpenters, printers, builders etc.) to volunteer to undertake work in the foreign missions.

The Slessor family attended the United Free Presbyterian, Wishart Church in the Cowgate area of Dundee. Mary’s mother was a devout Christian woman who felt it was important to send missionaries to remote parts of the world. So despite the family’s difficult circumstances, she was keen for her children to consider this work, even though in general, recruits to the missions tended to be from better off families.

The Wishart Church was linked to the Calabar Mission in West Africa, an area we now know as Southern Nigeria. Churches published monthly magazines to keep congregations informed about work in the missions. Hearing about life in what were then very remote and unimaginable parts of the world such as Africa, Jamaica and China was a revelation to people back in Scotland in the 1850s and these were read avidly. Large sums of money were raised by local congregations to support missionary work and these sums were listed for each parish in magazines such as The Missionary Record and The Women’s Missionary Magazine.

Becoming a Missionary

Mary’s application to the Foreign Mission Board to go to Calabar was accepted. She travelled to Edinburgh for a three month training course in the skills that were thought to be important to become a missionary. Many of the practical skills that Mary already had as a skilled weaver and a resourceful woman having grown up in very difficult circumstances, were probably more useful for the life she was about to embark on.

Before she left Dundee, the congregation of the Wishart Church presented her with a gold watch.

On 5th August 1876 at the age of 28 she boarded the SS Ethiopia at Liverpool sailing to Duke Town in Calabar. The journey from Britain to West Africa in 1876 took roughly five weeks. Like most new missionaries at the time, she travelled, with set ideas about the work to be done and some misconceptions about the native people and their country. Many of these ideas were about to change.