Miss Ashe: Bible Training College Regular

Miss Ashe was one of Oswald Chambers‘ most interesting students at the Bible Training College.

Once she met Oswald, Katherine Ashe’s life was never the same and she remained a devoted friend to the family for the rest of her life.

A tall, thin, “aristocratic, learned and cultured lady, with a sheaf of white hair,” according to Kathleen Chambers, everyone called her Miss Ashe.

(She always reminded me of the Old Lady in the Babar books, but don’t tell her.)

Miss Ashe was a social worker and became a social justice warrior–for the Kingdom of God.

First Meeting

A granddaughter of the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, Katherine Elizabeth Ashe was born in 1867 to Reverend Weldon Ashe, the prebendary of Tuam (near Galway) and his wife Catherine Plunkett. Miss Ashe’s parents died when she was seven years old.

Miss Ashe and her sisters spent part of their childhood in Australia. She recounted many stories of fantastic marsupials and hair-raising adventures to Oswald’s daughter Kathleen, years later.

She was living in a Belfast boarding house in fall 1908 when the landlady announced a member of the League of Prayer would join them for a month.

Without meeting or knowing anything about Oswald Chambers, Miss Ashe had an opinion.

“Imagine, an ignorant evangelist. Fancy having him in the house. Whatever can we talk about? We won’t have any conversation. He’ll be absolutely appalling.”

Events proved otherwise, according to Kathleen.

“She was completely staggered by my father because he could outmatch her in literature and all the rest. And she ended up going to one of his meetings.”

Oswald seldom included an altar call at his meetings, but he did that night in Belfast.

To everyone’s surprise, Kathleen said, the “completely unforgettable lady walked slowly up from the back of the hall to the front as a sign she’d given her life to God.”

Years later Miss Ashe described the experience as being “a wholly supernatural conversion . . . a very agonizing birth from above,” followed by “an intensely painful period of readjustment of every point of view . . . to honorably accept the New Testament standard.”

Once Miss Ashe made a decision, she did not waver. She applied herself immediately to Bible study.

Bible Training College

Miss Ashe loved the idea of a Bible Training College and joined the school in 1911. She studied, prayed and taught during the school’s four and half years and even wrote a book about it, An Account of the Bible Training College.

The pages are filled with vivid descriptions of a place and people she loved well.

“From the Principal down to the least “other wordly” student, we were human stuff of the most ordinary kind; with all the moral littleness, absurdities and crudities of any other group of men and women gathered together.”

Miss K.  Ashe, M. R. S. I. taught a class on Christian Sociology in 1914.

During the summer breaks, she visited Askrigg in the Yorkshire Dales with the Chambers family.

A lovely photo exists of her sitting in a field awaiting her tea.

With the YMCA in Egypt

A half-dozen BTC students followed Oswald Chambers to Egypt to work for the YMCA.

Miss Ashe was among them, arriving in February 1916 and joining the Chambers family at Zeitoun.

She described Zeitoun in her usual poetic terms:

“A space of sand within a low stone wall set in the open desert with, for interpreters, the desert sky, and the desert’s limitless space. . . . The house faced eastwards and looked clear out towards the morning, to the peace and to coming life of the world.”

During her years in Egypt, Miss Ashe worked at a Soldier’s Home in Alexandria, at the side of the train station in Benha with Kathleen Ballinger and at a YMCA hostel in Jerusalem.

About the soldier’s life, she wrote:

“Ineptitude bore heavily upon them; the pitiless heat, the fierce relentless sun, the scorching sand, the insects—the flies and swarming insatiable mosquitoes—bore hard upon their courage and endurance.”

Miss Ashe repatriated back to England with Biddy, Kathleen, Mary Riley, Jimmy and Flo Hanson in July 1919.

Post-World War I

Miss Ashe loved the Chambers family, particularly Biddy, but her character tended to overpower.

“She had that kind of affection for my mother that doesn’t allow you to breathe,” Kathleen said.

The aging spinster lived with Kathleen and Biddy in Oxford for nine years.

Like Biddy, she spoke on the Methodist Circuit and would catch a train to a neighboring town to speak on many Sundays.

But her heart remained in Egypt and in 1929 at the age of 62, Miss Ashe returned to Cairo where she worked with the International Bureau for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women and Children.

As a result of her Christian faith, Miss Ashe sought to help prostitutes escape their lives but ran into difficulties with authorities.

“It was incredibly dangerous what she did,” Kathleen said. “Government officials in Cairo owned the brothels. She had to work with police protection for years.”

During her years in Egypt, Miss Ashe wrote forwards to several of the Oswald Chambers books Biddy published, including The Graciousness of Uncertainty and The Pilgrim Song Book.

She remained in Egypt until 1947–returning to Biddy’s household as an 80-year-old veteran of missionary work.

Four years later Katherine Ashe moved to an Eastbourne nursing asylum, where she lived until her death in 1956.

Why did I like her?

A woman raised with all the comforts of life, who loved literature and music, had her life spun around by God when she was 41-years-old.

Miss Ashe followed that God for the rest of her life–into harsh conditions in Egypt during a world war.

(Look–she’s such a good sport, we’ve got a photo of her on a camel!)

And if that wasn’t enough, she returned to Cairo after the war to free women from sexual slavery and trafficking.

With her formidable intellect, aristocratic bearing and confidence in the Bible, Miss Ashe refused to bow down to powerful men in her search for justice.

A character used by God to His glory and none other, Miss Ashe was a social justice warrior long before the term was known.

Tweetables

A wraith of an old lady takes Bible school training to the brothels of Cairo. Click to Tweet

How Oswald Chambers’ teaching transformed an aristocrat into a social justice warrior. Click to Tweet