In Memory Sister Laurence - Founder: Sister Laurence RAF Massingham Museum
To speak of LAURIE, to share the memories of someone who was “a legend in her own lifetime” … even to say a few words about Sister Laurence – Laurie – will be a difficult task! She was a person of many talents, involving many friends and contacts. She managed to combine her Religious Life commitment with her many outside interests and projects.
Born in Brierfield, Lancashire, she was a child of the cotton mills. A tomboy as a small child, in the early days of the war, she preferred to play football in the street with the boys rather than playing with dolls. At the age of 11 her parents sent her to our Convent school in Colne, where her mother hoped the nuns would make a lady of her – without success! She was popular in school mainly because she used to organise cricket in the convent field at lunch time recreation!
Laurie joined the Rangers/Guides and was a life-time member till she died! She used her guiding skills in many ways: when she entered the Novitiate to train for life in the Convent she was ever the Girl Guide, organising concerts, singing-games, exploring the countryside etc. She was very good with children: she taught for a while at the little parish school here of St Monica’s and loved organising football for the boys on the Green outside, where now stands the local school of Rickmansworth Park. She taught Catechetic
to children at weekends and later at an RAF Base in Buckinghamshire.
As her skills were more practical than academic she later was engaged in pastoral activities, cooking, archives, gardening, domestic work, driving, and general mechanical work. She was great at ‘fixing’ things: if you needed a shelf put up or a door fixed or a bolt put in she would do it – even if sometimes it might not be quite straight! On one occasion she was told she could not knock down a partition wall to access the attic from her bedroom, so she got a saw and cut a door-shaped hole in the wall instead!
She was a fund of knowledge and information, an avid reader of newspapers, journals, local affairs, Church affairs, World News; a fervent Royalist and football enthusiast; concerned about social and political matters....She had visited places up and down the countries of the British Isles, and what’s more could recall details of events and sights that others had long forgotten. She was a keen photographer and recorded everything, including stunning sunsets.
But, as I was reminded, there was one place she could not say she had visited – until now! Even there, she has beaten us to it!
In her later years Laurie developed a passionate interest in researching the lives and history of the Veterans of RAF Bomber Command, stationed during WW2 at Massingham airfield in Norfolk. Pilots from there were billeted at Little Massingham Manor, which much later was bought by the Daughters of Jesus as their Provincial HQ and later became a Retreat Centre. It was from here, in the onetime stable block, that Laurie started her work which has since developed into the Massingham RAF Museum.
Apart from these major passions in her life, she was given the task as Archivist for our Province and this led her to research the beginnings of our Congregation in England, by the first Sisters from France who founded here. She researched the first foundations and went on to document the history of our house in Massingham and our present house in Rickmansworth – once the Residence of an Ambassador - and the lives of our first Sisters. Coupled with this she searched the records of all the Sisters who are buried in
cemeteries around the places where the DJ’s have lived & worked. Alongside these researches she has gone in depth into her own family history, about which she was equally passionate.
She was passionate about gardening for which she was trained and the results can be seen today in our lovely garden at Blakenhall. She insisted on having a section for wild life with flowers for the butterflies and bees. She kept a well-supplied bird table and spent time keeping away the squirrels and magpies – the food was for the little birds. She spoilt the neighbour’s cats with cuddles and titbits. They can’t understand why she isn’t around anymore, and still come around occasionally to see if she might have come back!
As you see, our Laurie was quite a remarkable person, unique in her brand of Christianity. She was deeply spiritual with a simple Celtic faith, sensitive, generous, brave and industrious, a prayerful and loyal Daughter of Jesus. She was active right to the end, in spite of lifelong poor health: up to the day before she died she was working on a translation, from French, of a document she was researching for a contact, concerning information about an RAF Veteran and finished it! I was able to see the relative and to hand over to her this last piece of documentation a few days after her death. Laurie would have been so pleased to see the delight and emotion of the recipient: her life’s work thus completed!
Tribute to Laurie by Anthony Robinson on a visit to Blakenhall:
Today I sat on a bench
At the bottom of Laurie’s garden
A seed off a Lime tree floated down in a spiral
It landed at my feet and I cried
I sobbed for that contact from her
Bless you Laurie for all your Lads
There are few left to grieve
You will never be forgotten
God Bless
By Ant (Anthony) Robinson
Curator
This article is from the Winter 2013 issue of Confound and Destroy
