We note with deep regret the death at Pretoria of
Mrs. Sarah Heckford. It is impossible within the limits of a short note to summarise the achievements of this remarkable woman, who began her career of practical philanthropy as a volunteer nurse in the cholera epidemic of 1866, and founded, with her husband, the East London Hospital for Women and Children, of which Dickens has left a memorable description. On the death of her husband she travelled in Italy and India —always interesting herself in the sick and oppressed—and on the annexation of the Transvaal settled there as a colonist and farmer. Ruined by the Boer rising of 1880, she spent a few years in England, but returned to South Africa, where her home was again destroyed in the recent war. Latterly she made herself known, not only as a fearless champion of the natives and a spokesman of the Transvaal loyalists, but as the moving spirit of the " Transvaal Education Union," and the advocate of a scheme for self-supporting farm schools for Boer children. Her heroic and disinterested exertions, all the more remarkable in view of her frail physique, recall Burke's famous eulogy of Howard, of whom he said that he had "visited all Europe,—not to survey the sumptuous- ness of palaces, or the stateliness of temples but to dive into the depths of dungeons ; to plunge into the infection of hospitals; to survey the mansions of sorrow and pain to remember the forgotten, to attend to the neglected, to visit the forsaken, and to compare and collate the distresses of all men in all countries It was a voyage of discovery ; a circumnavigation of charity."
Previous page
