Head, Elizabeth (Bessie) Ann Porter

b Norfolk 1850, d Wimbledon, Surrey 1936. Also known by her maiden name as Bessie Porter, her various forms of Christian service included the YMCA, as secretary of the Swansea branch. From 1897 to 1901 she worked with the South Africa General Mission in Cape Town and Port Elizabeth, maintaining her work for the society, including magazine articles, on her return. In 1907 she married an old family friend, the widower Albert A Head, an early chairman of the Keswick Convention, thus becoming stepmother to the remarkable disabled engineer Alfred Head. A little earlier Bessie was one of a distinguished group of Christian leaders who paid a warm tribute to Albert’s first wife Caroline, née Hanbury, in a biography written by Caroline’s sister Charlotte in 1905. Caroline came from Quaker stock who became evangelical Anglicans; Elizabeth Porter wrote: ‘May the Holy Spirit teach us how to live “Praise