Adelaide Ellen Grace: from Shoreditch to the Congo
- 10 hours ago
- 2 min read
Adelaide Ellen Grace grew up in Shoreditch and, within months of completing her nursing and midwifery training at Mildmay, sailed for Africa in 1924 as a Protestant missionary in the Belgian Congo, now the Democratic Republic of Congo.
She would spend the next twenty years there with the Congo Balolo Mission.
After a four-week sea voyage to Boma, she travelled a further two weeks by train and river boat to reach Bongandanga, a mission station on the Lopori River in the central African rainforest. There, alongside teaching, her task was to establish a small hospital from nothing; there was no missionary doctor, and no medical service provided by the Belgian colonial administration.
In 1926 she married fellow missionary, Harold Hall, and moved to Ikau on the Lulonga River, where the couple built a second hospital and a girls' boarding school. Missionaries served four-year terms before a year's home furlough; during her first, Ellen spent six months in Antwerp learning French for work in the Belgian colony.
Her medical work covered malaria, sleeping sickness, tuberculosis, leprosy, obstetrics and trauma. Before the arrival of the first mission doctor in 1929, women in obstructed labour could not be saved, as caesarean section wasn't possible. On one occasion, though, Ellen saved a man gored by an elephant, closing his abdomen with more than fifty sutures - without anaesthesia.
After several miscarriages, she had a son at thirty-eight. The family returned to England for good in 1944, where Ellen went on to unofficially foster seven children of former missionary colleagues still working in the Congo, and spent her later years active in church work and overseas mission.
Her son, Reginald Hall, a retired consultant urological surgeon, has since written about her life in Mission Impossible? Taking Christianity to the Congo.
Read Adelaide's story in our Staff Stories archive.
Ellen's story is one of many we hold in our archive, tracing the lives of of the many people who trained and worked at Mildmay Hospital. A hundred years on, that same commitment continues through our Universal Fund, supporting vulnerable children and young people in Uganda today.
