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.

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.

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 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.