MARY SLESSOR - Key Persons
Mary Mitchell Slessor was born on 2 December 1848 into a working class family in Aberdeen. The family moved to Dundee in 1857 in search of work. Her father was a trained shoemaker but due to his struggle with alcoholism, the family suffered very severe hardship. Mary, her mother and older brother Robert had to find work in the mills to support the family, she had five younger siblings and they all lived in a one room house in a slum area of Dundee.
The experience of living in poverty and struggling to survive helped Mary to develop the resilience, drive and determination that would prove invaluable in her later life as a missionary in Africa.
Mary became a mill girl in the Baxter Brothers and Co. Ltd. Lower Dens Mill and attended the mill's half-time school. The Scotland Education Act of 1872 encouraged employers to provide some education for the children that they employed. This meant very long working days for the children who would often attend school for six hours after they had finished their shift in the mill. By the time she was fourteen, Mary was a linen power loom weaver, a skilled job. She became an avid reader and like David Livingstone, would read when she could during her working day, with a book propped on her loom.
Mary gradually won the trust of local people as she lived with them, learning about their lives and helping them. She was gradually asked to mediate in disputes and resolve issues. Working tirelessly she tried to improve the lives of women and children in particular, sometimes putting her own life at risk in dealing with highly charged confrontations with chiefs, other local leaders and witch doctors.
Mary suffered from serious bouts of malaria and other tropical illnesses throughout her life in Africa. In June 1879 she was sent home to Dundee for her first furlough (leave of absence) following a particularly severe bout of malaria. The normal tour of duty as a missionary at that time was four years before being allowed to return home on leave. Mary was allowed home a year early for this first furlough.
There is a permanent exhibition in the Upper Gallery of the McManus, with some audio visual capability, which incorporates a number of notable artefacts but particularly Mary's bible, awash as it is with notes, thoughts and messages, written along the perimeter of virtually every page.
Mary's application to the Foreign Mission Board to go to Calabar was accepted. She travelled to Edinburgh for a three month training course in the skills that were thought to be important to become a missionary. Many of the practical skills that Mary already had as a skilled weaver and a resourceful woman having grown up in very difficult circumstances, were probably more useful for the life she was about to embark on.