Adelaide Ellen Grace

Ellen Grace grew up in Shoreditch and within a few months of completing nursing and midwifery training at MiIdmay, sailed for Africa in 1924 as a Protestant missionary in the Belgian Congo (now the Democratic Republic of Congo). Here, she would work for the next twenty years  with the Congo Balolo Mission, part of the international Regions Beyond Missionary Union.

On arrival at Boma at the mouth of the Congo River, after a four week sea voyage, she travelled by train and river boat for two weeks up the river to join a small group of missionaries at Bongandanga, a mission station close to the Equator in the central Africa rainforest on the banks of the Lopori River, a tributary of the upper Congo. In addition to teaching Christianity her task was to start a small “hospital” to establish medical care for the local population, there being no missionary doctor nor medical services provided by the Belgian colonial administration.

In 1926 she married fellow missionary Harold Hall and moved to Ikau on the Lulonga River where she started a similar hospital and a girls’ boarding school, both buildings constructed by her husband. Missionaries served terms of four years, returning to the UK for furloughs of one year. During the first of these, six months were spent in Antwerp learning French to facilitate working in the Belgian colony.

The medical care she provided included infectious diseases (malaria, sleeping sickness, intestinal parasites, filariasis, tuberculosis, leprosy), obstetrics, infant welfare, trauma and minor surgery. Prior to the arrival of the first mission doctor in 1929 women in obstructed labour died as caesarean section was not possible. However, on one occasion, she was able to save a man gored by an elephant by closing the abdomen, without anaesthesia, with more than fifty sutures.

Following several miscarriages she had a son at the age of thirty-eight. In 1944 the family returned permanently to England where, for several years, she fostered, unofficially, seven children whose parents were previous colleagues still working in the Congo. For many years thereafter she was busy with church work and promoting overseas mission. Ellen died aged 86 of cholangiocarcinoma.

Reginald Hall

Retired. Previously: Consultant Urological Surgeon, Newcastle upon Tyne;

Director, Northern Cancer Network;

Visiting Professor, University of Newcastle upon Tyne

Author: 'Mission Impossible? Taking Christianity to the Congo’  by RR Hall with postscript by Norbert Mbu-Mputu.  pub.The Choir Press.