The Times Great Women's Lives

by Sue Corbett

  She applied to stay with the Medical Missionary Sisters in Patna, who condensed her medical training into four hectic months. They knew she wanted to start a new congregation whose members would devote their lives to the service of the destitute. Her nuns would be expected to live exactly as the bustee people, and she originally planned a diet of rice and salt — the poorest food of all. The Medical Missionaries persuaded her that this would be morally wrong, for if her future congregation were to give “their all”, it was her responsibility to see that they would have a diet suited to their obligations. It was indeed sound advice which she accepted, and the food at her Home for the Destitute and Dying in Calcutta and her other missions around the world, although simple, is nutritious and adequate.

  Mother Teresa — known simply as “Mother” — was a woman of courage and spirit. She was born of Albanian parents in Skopje, christened Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, and educated at the local government school. She was first inspired by the writings of Pope Pius XI and also by the letters written to the school by Jesuit missionaries who were working among the poor in India, in the archdiocese of Calcutta.

  She felt called to join a religious order, and entered the congregation of Loreto nuns who worked in Bengal. Before going to India she was sent to learn the English language in Dublin. From Ireland, she went to Darjeeling, situated in the most beautiful and wealthy part of the country, and found herself completing her novitiate in the famous Loreto School, where the daughters of the rich Indians and colonials obtained the best public school education for their children. On March 24, 1931, Agnes Bojaxhiu made her first vows and took the name of Teresa.

  The young Sister Teresa was transferred to St Mary’s School, Entally, where she taught geography and history for 17 years. It was here that she took her final vows on May 24, 1937, and eventually became the Principal of the school.

  In December 1948, after her medical training in Patna, Sister Teresa returned to Calcutta and initially stayed with the Little Sisters of the Poor. Bengal had been torn by riots resulting from the religious conflicts between Hindu and Muslim. In the city there were tens of thousands dying of starvation, tuberculosis, leprosy and other diseases resulting from malnutrition. Teresa was not afraid, although she knew the immensity of her task, and she began work by starting a pavement school for the bustee children, teaching them to write using the mud and dust as a blackboard.

  On March 19, 1949, a small, shy former Bengali pupil, Subhasini Das, became Mother Teresa’s first postulant, and took her old name of Agnes. She was followed by nine other former students who formed the nucleus of her community, the Missionaries of Charity, which today numbers over 3,000 novices and professed nuns supported by nearly 40,000 lay co-workers operating more than 400 homes in nine countries.

  The community was recognised as a new, separate order and in addition to the customary religious vows, a fourth promise was added: “to give wholehearted, free service to the very poorest”. The majority of the sisters were from the Third World. Unlike many other religious organisations who insist that novices should be at least second generation Christians, Mother Teresa was happy to accept girls from Indian families who wished to work with her. There were many parents who, faced with the crippling dowry prospects, were only too relieved that their daughters could be accepted into the security of such a community.

  In 1952, through the Missionaries of Charity, Mother Teresa opened the Nirmal Hriday (Pure Heart) Home for Dying Destitutes. In 1965, the order was recognised as a papal congregation under the protection of the Vatican and in 1967 a Congregation of Brothers was formed. Mother Teresa was well aware that, although her community was increasing at an alarming rate, it was still important that lay people should be involved with the work among the destitute, and in 1969 a constitution was drawn up in Rome to unite these co-workers into one association. There were eventually tens of thousands of lay people — including a special group called the sick and suffering co-workers — from more than 40 countries.

  Mother Teresa was a tireless worker, and it was surprising that her small frame managed to keep up with the speed of her activities. “God gives me the strength,” she said. “There is no need to worry.” When other nuns were ordered to rest, Mother Teresa was writing letters or attending to the queues of people who would be waiting outside the parlour to tell her their problems, and ask for her advice, or answering questions to the press, who were constantly around her.

  The most important part of the day was the early morning when the daily Mass was celebrated, and Mother Teresa would lead her nuns in prayer, as she did for all the services throughout the day. Sometimes she would be found alone in the chapel, sitting barefoot, her hands folded, her head bent in silent private devotion. Wherever the Missionaries of Charity worked, they tried to set up a Shishu Bhavan, a children’s home, for all unwanted babies and children in need — and a Nirmal Hriday (The Place of the Pure Heart) named after the first home for the dying which was in two rooms given for her use in the Hindu temple of Kalighat. The temple to this goddess of destruction, Kali, was felt to be a fitting home for the “place of the pure hearts”.

  Mother Teresa was proud of the fact that 50 per cent of the dying were brought “back to life” by the care of her community who, for six hours each day, washed, fed and gave medical attention to more than one hundred dying men and women brought in from the streets of Calcutta. Whenever Mother Teresa built new homes, she would have nothing that looked too Western and, therefore, might make the building appear over-bright and expensive to the very poor, for they would then be afraid to enter and to bring those who were ill and in need.

  With her fame spreading, journalists and broadcasters began trekking to her home for the destitute and dying in Calcutta. One of them was Malcolm Muggeridge, who in 1969 made a documentary called Something Beautiful for God. He described it as the most important programme he had worked on and later said the experience had caused him, 12 years later, to become a Roman Catholic. In 1971 the Vatican awarded Mother Teresa the Pope John XXIII Peace Prize and she travelled to London to open a novitiate for the training of novices of her order in Southall — the first to be established outside India.

  The next year she visited Northern Ireland to set up a small community of her nuns in Belfast. But she refused to abide by the unwritten sectarian rules of the divided Northern Ireland society and withdrew them two years later. On another visit, in 1981, she condemned an IRA hunger strike as an act of violence.

  A year earlier the Prince of Wales was one of the VIP visitors to her children’s orphanage in Calcutta and in 1983 the Queen also came to make Mother Teresa an honorary member of the Order of Merit, the only non-British subject to be so recognised, for her work among the sick and destitute.

  In spite of her international renown, Mother Teresa continued to live and work without ostentation. When she travelled she did so either alone or accompanied by just a few of her white-veiled sisters. She never deviated from her rejection of personal reward. Her philosophy was based on a simple belief in divine intervention; she forbade her co-workers from raising money in her name and relied on uninvited donations, which — as her fame spread — were not slow in coming.

  With the growth of the community, there were many other activities which Mother Teresa encouraged among the poor. She arranged for food to be collected and given to thousands of destitutes — feeding 7,000 each morning at Shishu Bhavan in Calcutta. Some said the distribution of free meals made people too dependent, and that for them to make payment in kind would encourage dignity and independence.

  There were medical clinics which gave free medicines donated from many countries. Here, too, some questioned whether medical treatment should not extend to more advanced rehabilitation programmes, and that patients with long-term illnesses should learn how to become self-sufficient and take pride in earning their living. The few who were able to weave provided sheets, clothing and bandages for the Missionaries of Charity homes. But Mother Teresa was particularly
insistent that money should never change hands.

  The community ran family planning clinics, where only the thermometer method was used (for Mother Teresa gave credence solely to the official teaching of the Roman Catholic Church); mobile clinics for leprosy and tubercular patients; schools; malnutrition centres and night shelters. Prison work was carried out and troubled and lonely families were visited. Mother Teresa once said: “I have come more and more to realise that it is being unwanted that is the worst disease that any human being can ever experience.” Those who were unwanted, uncared for and deserted were to be respected by her nuns, cared for and cherished and recognised as people with their own human dignity in their own right.

  She always maintained that those in her community were really contemplatives rather than social workers, hence, although they cared for the dying, handicapped and even minute premature aborted babies, the nuns were never to be considered a nursing order. Because she saw Christ in all people, then their work was contemplation. When she first heard that she was to receive the Nobel award she said: “I accept the prize in the name of the poor. The prize is the recognition of the poor world. Jesus said: ‘I am hungry, I am naked, I am homeless.’ By serving the poor, I am serving Him.”

  She made use of the opportunity to expound her total opposition to abortion. “The world has given me the Nobel Prize,” she said as she was about to leave for Oslo in December 1979, “but I ask the world for a gift — I want the abortion laws abolished. This would be a real gift.” At her request, the traditional dinner at the prize-awarding ceremony was cancelled and the money it would have cost was added to her prize money.

  Mother Teresa was a hard-working and selfless woman, helped by the fact that she came of strong peasant stock and by her simple faith. She knew the meaning of loneliness by the very nature of her position. On her visit to London in 1988, she was as moved by the fate of London’s homeless as she had been by the destitute of the Calcutta streets, and personally appealed to the Prime Minister for help in setting up a hostel to relieve their wants.

  Speaking at the Global Forum on Human Survival in Oxford, she described abortion as the greatest threat to the future of the human race and said she would never allow a family which had practised contraception to adopt one of the orphans her missionary order cared for. She also complained that Aids victims were much more cruelly treated in Western countries than in Africa. That year she also visited the Soviet Union, China and South Africa to set up missions among the poor.

  In September 1989, she was taken to hospital in Calcutta suffering from an irregular heartbeat and a high fever and doctors fitted her with a heart-pacemaker. Seven months later the Vatican announced that she would be resigning as head of her Missionaries of Charity order on grounds of ill-health, but in September that year she abandoned her retirement plans when the mission’s electoral college unexpectedly failed to agree on a successor. In December 1990 she returned to her Albanian roots, visiting Tirana where she was awarded the Order of Maim Frasheri, the country’s highest honour.

  Showing little regard for her increasing frailty, she continued to work and travel. In March 1991 she was again in Albania, opening a mission there, and two months later she visited Bangladesh to survey the cyclone damage which had devastated the country. When not travelling, she remained much in evidence at her Home for the Destitute and Dying in Calcutta where, unless her fellow nuns hid her alarm clock, she would be the first to rise. “I want to be the first to wake and see Jesus,” she would say before attending the 6am Mass, sitting indistinguishably from the other nuns on reed-mats.

  Surrounded by children, Mother Teresa photographed in India in 1980

  In November she began a tour of her missions worldwide with a visit to Tanzania. But becoming ill on December 26 in Tijuana, Mexico, during the last leg of her journey, she was taken for treatment to the Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation in La Jolla, across the border in California. In 1993 she was admitted to hospital four times suffering from heart trouble and malaria. She underwent heart surgery but returned to Calcutta.

  In 1995 she published her book A Simple Path, urging materialistic Westerners to ponder the value of “prayer, meditation and silence”. But, increasingly frail, in 1996 she fell and broke her collarbone and was admitted to hospital once again. From then on she was in and out of hospital, finally facing the inevitable when in March 1997 she resigned from running the Missionaries of Charity.

  Mother Teresa had her human failings: she was the spokesman for her community so that, until her retirement, one rarely heard the views expressed of any of her nuns; she was adamant in what she believed and dictatorial within her houses, which she visited regularly all over the world.

  In 1994 a television profile of her was broadcast on Channel 4 in which the journalist Christopher Hitchens presented her as a publicity-hungry egotist, and he followed it up with a book claiming that she promulgated “a cult based on death, suffering and subjection”. But to most of the world she remained the “living saint of Calcutta” and she was loved by people from all countries and all faiths. She had a magnetic aura. Crowds flocked after her and yet held her in awe.

  Mother Teresa, Roman Catholic missionary, was born on August 27, 1910. She died on September 5, 1997, aged 87

  JOYCE WETHERED

  * * *

  GOLF CHAMPION WITH PERFECT BALANCE, AND A SEEMINGLY EFFORTLESS SWING

  NOVEMBER 21, 1997

  Joyce Wethered was the most stylish and successful woman golfer of her day, and is still widely regarded as the best the world has seen. Becoming English Ladies’ Champion in 1920 when she was not quite 19, she held the title for five consecutive years, playing 33 matches without defeat. She went on to be four times winner of the British Ladies’ Open, in 1922, 1924, 1925 and 1929. She also played several important international matches, captaining the British team in three competitions; and she won the mixed foursomes at Worplesdon eight times in fifteen years, with seven different partners. Bobby Jones, the great American golfer, after playing her at St Andrews in 1931, said he doubted whether there had ever been a better player, man or woman.

  Joyce Wethered was born at Brook near Godalming in Surrey and educated privately there, being considered too frail for school. It was on childhood holidays that she first experienced golf. At Bude in Cornwall there were games on a windswept headland, and at Dornoch in the Highlands, where the family took a house overlooking the links, there were highly competitive contests with her brother Roger, captain of the Oxford team as an undergraduate and himself prominent in the British game as a gifted amateur for a decade after the First World War.

  Apart from a single golf lesson from Tom Lyle, the professional at Bude, Wethered learnt her golf mainly by imitation, talking to her brother and his friends about technique, and watching and studying such great players as Harry Vardon, John H. Taylor and Jones. She had perfect balance, and a seemingly effortless swing, economical yet full of power. She was a perfectionist, and an outstanding stylist, with sound judgment and a full range of accurate, elegant shots.

  Her temperament was perhaps her greatest strength. Calm and purposeful in competition, she liked to say that she aimed always to play the course, not her opponent. Her concentration was famous. A railway line runs alongside the course at Sheringham in Norfolk, and the story was often told of how, having brought off a crucial putt as a train rattled past the 17th, she was asked whether she had not been distracted by the noise. “What train?” was her response.

  It was at Sheringham that she began her long run of championship form in 1920. Hers was an improbable and unexpected national debut. Still five months short of her 19th birthday, and playing no higher than number 6 in the Surrey county team, she travelled to Norfolk for that year’s English Ladies’ Golf Championship only because a Surrey team-mate, Molly Griffith, persuaded her to come along. Despite being on the point of coming down with whooping cough, she played through to reach the final, where she won a remarkable victory over the redou
btable Cecil Leitch, then the dominant figure in women’s golf. “It was throughout a match full of dramatic incident,” The Times observed.

  The most dramatic thing about it was that Leitch should have been defeated at all, let alone by a young unknown. She had not been beaten in a ladies’ match on level terms since 1913. Wethered’s surprise victory marked the start of an exciting and absorbing rivalry, keenly followed by the public. The two women’s styles were very different, with the powerful Leitch appearing almost flamboyant by comparison with the graceful younger woman.

  Wethered, who was to retain the English Ladies’ Golf Championship for the next four years, met Leitch twice in 1921. On both occasions — at Turnberry in the final of the British Ladies’ Open Amateur Championship, which Leitch had held since 1914, and in the final of the French Open at Fontainebleau — the older woman had the upper hand. In the British Ladies’ of 1922, however, Wethered triumphed once more, impressing spectators at Sandwich (and rattling Leitch) with her inspired strokes and extraordinary coolness under pressure. “A new golfing queen has arisen,” one newspaper headline proclaimed.

  Wethered won the Ladies’ Open again in 1922, 1924 (when she knocked out Leitch in the fifth round), and 1925 (when she beat her in a gripping and hard-fought final). After the last of these wins she retired from competition, but was persuaded back to contest the Ladies’ Open once more, on the Old Course at St Andrews in 1929. There she met another formidable opponent, the American champion Glenna Collett, and came back from five down after 11 holes to prevail in a memorable final.

  She retired from competition once more, but captained the British women’s team in the first Curtis Cup in 1929, against France in 1931, and against America in 1932. In 1933 she took a job as a golf adviser in the sports department of Fortnum and Mason. In 1935 she was paid £4,000 for a tour of America, in which she played more than 50 exhibition matches and advertised equipment. She was not entirely happy with her new-found professional status, however, and was eventually reinstated as an amateur in 1946.