What’s less well known about the hospice is the story of how it came to be founded. It was back in 1900 that five Irish nuns journeyed from Dublin to London to bring comfort and care to the sick of the capital’s overcrowded, disease-ridden East End. The nuns were Sisters of Charity, members of an order set up eighty-five years earlier by a young woman whose vision, determination and dedication were to prove inspirational not only to many of her own generation, but to generations to come, right down through the years to this day.
That young woman was Mary Aikenhead. She’d been born in Cork in 1787 to a wealthy family, and had been struck from her teens by the great needs she saw around her.  
Her father, David Aikenhead, was a doctor who spent as much of his own time as he could working amongst the poor of the city, and who also at times spoke out at the unfairness of discrimination against those living in poverty. Mary’s spirit of solidarity with, and a desire to work alongside, the materially disadvantaged almost certainly had its roots in her father’s attitude and sense of justice.
Her father did more than prompt her vocation – he also gave her a truly rounded background, in the sense that he was a Scottish Presbyterian. As a young child, Mary was in fact raised as a Presbyterian, despite the fact that her mother was a Catholic – but when, as a small child, she suffered from ill-health, it was felt the country air might improve things for her, and she was sent to stay, long-term, with a Catholic couple who lived in a rural area. Not only was the air purer for Mary, but the chance to attend Mass and to be grounded in the Catholic faith was also pivotal in forming her into the person she became. She developed a deep love of the Church, and although back in Cork her father seemed at first disapproving, he in turn became interested in the Church, and was in fact converted to Catholicism on his deathbed. Mary, then fifteen, followed him into the faith.
In her early twenties, Mary went to live in Dublin with a friend of her mother, and it was with this friend that she began her real work with the poor. She felt increasingly drawn to a life of dedication to the poor, and to fighting not only poverty itself but the causes of poverty – but it was difficult to see a way of fulfilling her ambition. Becoming a nun didn’t immediately strike her as the best way forward, because at the time all the religious orders in Ireland were enclosed, or at least convent-based: the sisters didn’t work out in the community, but the needy of the community came to them (in the sense of children and the sick coming to be educated or nursed in schools and hospitals attached to convents). Working outside the convent walls, for nuns, was unheard of – so for a while the religious life seemed not to hold the key.
It was a meeting with the Coadjutor Bishop of Dublin, Daniel Murray, that was to change all that. He felt Mary had what he later described as ‘a great heart and a willing mind’, and it happened that he had long felt there was a place in Ireland for a new order of nuns who could work outside convents among the poor and needy. At first daunted by the bishop’s suggestion of founding such an order, after a period of reflection Mary decided she would after all embrace the challenge – and she was sent to York, to the Institute of the Blessed Virgin convent there, to be grounded as a novice in the ways of a religious order.
By 1815 she was back in Dublin and opening her first house: and the women who joined her, in addition to vowing poverty, chastity and obedience, made a fourth promise – they would live a life of service to the poor. Over the years and decades that followed, the Sisters of Charity followed their founder ‘Mrs’ Aikenhead (all her nuns were known as ‘Mrs’ throughout the nineteenth century, not becoming ‘Sister’ until as late as the mid-twentieth century) into the poorest streets, alleys, prisons and communities of Dublin and beyond. They provided education, health care, friendship and support to the most needy – and they did it with respect, with love and with a sense of justice that set them apart.
Their commitment to education, and provision of low-cost or even free secondary schools, meant the chance to continue an education beyond primary level for generations of Irish girls. Vivienne Kellett was one of the many thousands who benefitted directly from Mary Aikenhead in this way, and she recalls an adolescence infused with the spirit of the order’s founder. ‘There was no recruitment drive, no push to make us think about joining the order or anything,’ she says of her school.
 
‘But the sisters were always there, always impressive, and I always noticed how much they genuinely cared for people. There was no way I’d have been at school at all by that stage of my life if they hadn’t run a school like that, so I owed them a very real debt…but it was their spirit, their sense of practical care for others, that really left its mark on me.’
Decades later, Vivienne is Sister Vivienne Kellett, a member of the sisters’ community in Birmingham.   Her work today, she feels, is a direct reflection of Mary Aikenhead’s original aim of being alongside those in need. ‘In many ways the work I do is nameless, but there’s certainly a huge need for it,’ she says. ‘I have formal roles, such as working in parishes and in RCIA programmes…but what I feel I do most importantly is simply to be available, to be able to respond where I see a need. Many people in the world are too busy, with their children and their work and so on, and that’s entirely understandable…but what being a Sister of Charity gives me is the space to listen and act when I am aware of someone who needs me, whether it’s an elderly person or a family or anyone.’
In common with so many religious orders, the Sisters of Charity have very few novices in Britain and Ireland these days. Sister Vivienne reflecting on this said: In the past, when Mary was founding the order, being a nun was one of the few ways in which a Catholic woman could live out a vocation of service to the poor,’ she says. ‘These days, there are so many ways of doing it. So it’s not that our work won’t continue, but that it will continue in another way perhaps. God does different things in different times, and we need to recognize that.’
What’s more, says Sister Vivienne, the spirit of the Sisters of Charity has never been contained entirely within its religious communities – it was always Mary Aikenhead’s intention, and she succeeded in this, to draw a wider community of lay women into her work. Most of the schools and hospitals founded by the Sisters of Charity had many dedicated laywomen, as well as sisters, at their heart – a strong preparation, perhaps, for the world of the twenty-first century, in which so many religious orders will have to be continued by laypeople, their spirit kept alive in new ways.
Sister Vivienne has no worries that this is how it will be (although she points out that the order certainly isn’t without new recruits – Sisters of Charity communities in countries like Nigeria and Zambia are thriving). ‘God calls people to serve him – it doesn’t have to be through the religious life,’ she points out. Sister Una Casey, a fellow Sister of Charity, says that looking back at Mary Aikenhead’s life, what you notice most clearly is that she chose to do work that no one else was doing…and, she points out, it’s all too easy to realize that there’s still plenty of that on the planet needing to be done!
So: times may have changed, the world may be very different, vocations in the west may be in decline, but there’s every reason to hope that Mary Aikenhead’s spirit lives on, and will continue to do so. A hundred and fifty years after her death, which came at the age of seventy-one, Sister Vivienne says her case is being considered for canonization but quickly adds – and you feel this is entirely what Mary herself would have said – that, for her and her sisters, that task is very low on the to-do list. ‘There are far more important priorities,’ she says candidly.We’re far more interested in carrying on her work than we are in seeing her made a saint but if she was canonized that would be wonderful and a cause of great celebration.’
Written by Joanna Moorhead who is a freelance writer and author who specializes in writing about family life.