A
couple of years later Elsie joined the Sisters of Mercy and spent well over
thirty years working in a number of hospitals in and around Dublin, run by the
Sisters. Then at the age of fifty-eight
she had another major career shift. She,
together with three other sisters, was chosen from the Order’s most experienced
nurses to be part of a crack team to go to Kenya. They were to set up that country’s first
Catholic Hospital. On Holy Thursday 1956
– forty Easters after getting the week off from the GPO – Elsie arrived with
her fellow sisters in Mombasa Harbour with forty-six crates of luggage
including a hospital start-up kit of bed-linen, crockery and medicines. Easter was evidently very early in 1956 and
St Patrick’s Day fell during their sailing.
Being on an English ship the St Patrick Day celebrations concluded – to
the amusement of the sisters – with God Save the Queen.
This
was a very turbulent time in Kenya. The
Mau-Mau uprising against British rule was at its height, with Nairobi central
to the struggle – and Nairobi was where the hospital was to be
established. The Mau-Mau leader, Dedan
Kimathi, was captured soon after the sisters’ arrival. His death is commemorated annually on Kimathi
Day on 18th February. Elsie
Waldron – long since known as Sister Dolorosa – returned to Ireland in 1970 at
the age of seventy-two. She left behind
her not just the original hospital but a network of Mercy-run clinics, schools,
teacher-training facilities and a girl’s secretarial college with a combined
force of thirty-eight nuns. She died in
1972.
The
tremendous work of so many Religious – male and female – is often forgotten nowadays
and the spotlight is placed on the scandals of the few. But the good done by so many deserves to be
celebrated and their lives of love remembered.
Many
touching stories continue to emerge from the tragedy of the Titanic. This luxury liner sank on 16thApril
1912 after hitting an iceberg on her maiden voyage to New York with the loss of
over fifteen hundred lives. There were
about six hundred and ninety survivors.
Just recently the identity of all those who perished has been
established. For some time there was one
passenger who continued to be unidentified.
He had called himself ‘John Horgan’ but that was not his true name. Who was the last unknown passenger of the
doomed ship? One hundred and two years
later the puzzle has now been solved.
‘John Horgan’ was really John Landers and he came from Dungarvan, Co.
Waterford, not far from my birthplace.
The confusion did not arise from the swapping of tickets or the absence
of passports but it was a case of deliberate planning on his part.
Landers
was a former naval officer who had been unceremoniously discharged and
sentenced to three months hard labour for stealing Postal Orders. (Few people
used cheques in those days.) Now Landers
was trying to make a fresh start and he decided that sailing away on the
Titanic was the way to do it – under an assumed name. So he embarked using the name of one of his
neighbours in Dungarvan. This detective
work was carried out by a Titanic expert, Senan Molony. He found out that a lady spoke afterwards of
being led to the second-class deck of the Titanic by ‘a man from
Dungarvan.’ Her name was Katie McCarthy,
the last person but one to board the last Titanic lifeboat. She said that her guide was someone who knew
his way around ships and he got her to safety just in time. The lifeboat had barely pulled clear, she
recalled, when the great hull broke in two and went down.
Like
Eliza (‘Elsie’) Waldron who also took a new name (when she became a Sister of
Mercy), John Landers was another unsung hero.
Perhaps Jesus, the great expert in human nature, will surprise us some
day and discover in us some greatness that we never suspected. May he make us to shine like the stars for
all eternity – or at least to twinkle!
I am indebted to Frank
McNally writing in the Irish Times
