Orders, Decorations, Medals and Militaria

An exceptionally rare Uganda campaign pair awarded to Miss Gertrude E. Bird, Church Missionary Society, who came to be regarded as the ‘spiritual mother’ of the Ugandan missionaries

East and Central Africa 1897-99, 1 clasp, Uganda 1897-98 (Miss. G. E. Bird.); Jubilee 1935, unnamed as issued, on lady’s bow riband, extremely fine and extremely rare (2) £1,400-£1,800

This lot was sold as part of a special collection, The Norman Gooding Collection.

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Collection

Ulrich Collection 1952.

Gertrude Elizabeth Bird was born in 1864 and lived in Balham, London. A former Lady Superintendent of the Young Women’s Christian Association, she joined the Church Missionary Society in 1894 and was trained at ‘The Olives’, being accepted as a missionary on 4 June 1895. To fully appreciate her remarkable life, it would be appropriate to consider the words of Mr. Albert R. Cook, when speaking of her retirement from the Uganda Mission:

‘Miss G. E. Bird was one of the pioneer lady missionaries in Uganda, and had it not been that she had to leave the mission for five years, from 1909-1914 (being perforce kept at home by family circumstances), she would have had the longest term of service of any Uganda missionary. As it is she had thirty-five years of active work in the Mission.

Miss Bird joined the missionary staff in 1895, being stationed for a year at Frere Town on the Coast with the idea of learning sufficient Kiswahili during that time, to be a help to the ladies with the porters of the large missionary caravan which it was purposed to send up to Uganda during the following year.

There we found her on October 1, 1896, when our party disembarked at Mombasa, and during the trying two months’ wait at the Coast with its heart-breaking delays in getting the caravan together, and the three months’ strenuous march to Uganda that followed, we learnt to admire the equable temper and the quiet courage of Miss Bird. For it must be remembered that it required a great deal of physical endurance as well as patience and cheerfulness for ladies to undertake such a journey in those days. Few things struck the Prince of Wales more during his visit to Uganda in 1928, than the story of their march.

The other two ladies who shared her experience in 1896 were Miss Timpson (now Lady Cook) and Miss Bertha Taylor (now Mrs. Harry Maddox). These three, happily all still alive, arrived at Kampala in Feb., 1897, and Miss Bird was located with Miss Pilgrim to Ngogwe in Kyagwe, where she worked under the Rev. G. K. Baskerville... Here, for nearly four years, Miss Bird found a field worthy of her energies and laid the foundation of her wide knowledge of women’s work in Uganda. Located to Namirembe, she became a real power in Christian work. Visiting, teaching the woman or school children, or taking bible classes, and committee meetings occupied a very full life, and yet I think those who knew her most intimately would agree that it was more what she was than even what she did, that was of greatest value. Few have won a more fragrant tribute from Baganda.’

Bird received the East and Central Africa Medal for her part in staffing the hospital at Namirembe during the Sudanese uprising of 1895-96. Alongside other missionaries, she took care of the wounded and sick Waganda tribespeople. Her Jubilee Medal is further confirmed in the records of the Church Missionary Society: ‘Miss Gertrude Elizabeth Bird, Missionary, Uganda’. Exercising a gracious influence throughout her long life, Gertrude E. Bird died on 17 April 1949.

Sold with copied research confirming the above.