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Edith Theodora Williams

EDITH THEODORA WILLIAMS (22 July 1878 to 1 January 1969), a former missionary who earned the Croix de Guerre and the rare Czarist Cross of St. George for her nursing services in France and Russia in the First World War. She was the daughter of Charles Williams, a curate of Northallerton, and Edith Williams (born Oates, an aunt of Titus Oates, the self-sacrificing member of Scott’s ill fated Polar expedition of 1912). A woman of outstanding intelligence, she was self-taught because her father could not afford to send his daughters to school. At the age of 7 she started writing poetry. Her keen spirituality and love of life is reflecting in her poems, some of which were published and even won a few prizes. She was also a talented artist, producing many landscapes depicting scenes from rural Russia in the early twentieth century.

At 20 she took a degree in theology in Britain. Her studies included learning to read the New Testament in Greek.

In 1902 she emigrated to South Africa and served as a missionary for the Society of the Propagation of the Gospel. She became fluent in Sesotho and other African languages, in which she conducted services and gave sermons throughout the Reef, cycling wherever she went. She was the first woman permitted to hold church services in the mine compounds of the Reef and at Rietfontein Hospital outside Johannesburg, established by Dr. John Max Mehliss, whom she was later to marry.

At the outbreak of the First World War she volunteered for service in France where she was in charge of a casualty-clearing station on the Western Front. Late in 1916 she went to Russia with a Red Cross unit to work among the victims of the great famine in the Volga Basin. While there she taught herself Russian and could speak and write the language fluently. Trapped in Russia by the revolution in 1917 she continued to work there – running a small hospital near the Siberian border. Her patients were mainly Tartars and people of the virtually extinct Tuvasch tribe. One experience there which she would never forget was being on duty alone one night in a remote infirmary at the height of the dreaded Arctic snowstorm called a “Booran”. As icy winds lashed the building, and snow piled up against it, hungry wolves prowled around the windows. Inside the infirmary a mad priest terrified her and the patients, until he died as he attempted to break down the door of the room in which she had managed to lock him.

For her services in Russia she was awarded the Czarist Cross of St. George – an unusual award for a woman – before she returned to England at the end of 1918.

After receiving a marriage proposal by telegram, she returned to South Africa and on 6 August 1919 she married Dr. Mehliss and helped with his medical work at Rietfontein. They had only one child, and in 1927 her husband died at the age of 59, after suffering a stroke. After his death she opened and ran a church bookshop in Johannesburg’s Anglican Cathedral for some years. She and her son lived in Irene for a few years. She also lived in Swaziland for a short time.

In 1949 she settled in Bulawayo, Rhodesia when her son, the well known geologist Dr. Max Mehliss, was sent there by a Rand Mining house. At 70 she started another job – giving scripture lessons in Bulawayo’s senior schools. She continued these for about 8 years.

After her retirement she devoted her time to caring for cats, particularly strays. She appealed for more humane methods of destroying sick and unwanted cats, and pioneered the establishment of catteries to care for strays and find them homes.

She died in Bulawayo in 1969, at the age 91, and was buried in the Bulawayo cemetery. In her memory her son Max Mehliss had a bell tower erected at St Martin’s in the Field in Irene, in South Africa.

Reference - Article written by Anthony Quain in his “Stoep Talk” column published in The Star Johannesburg.