Clodagh Finn: An African wedding, three funerals, and a suitcase of lost letters

Olive’s husband-to-be Patrick Kerr Dixon would later be decorated for his work in setting up an eye hospital at Chibambo, in the south of what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). He treated people mauled by lions too and, indeed, he was once badly bitten on the shoulder by a lion himself.

On that evening in April 1926, though, the focus was on the young couple’s reunion in Malambwe when the whole village gathered around while Patrick and his colleague Mr Last ran back to their room in the school-house to look for their clothes.

“Every minute,” wrote Olive, “we would hear Patrick’s hearty laugh. He was falling over chairs or tables, and he and Mr Last were putting on each other’s clothes by mistake in their hurry and excitement.

“Soon they reappeared ‘clothed and in their right mind’ and… set a little table out there by the camp fire and gave us some food. We had boxes for chairs, and one lantern and the brilliant stars overhead for lights.

Shall I ever forget that meal? I was too busy talking to Patrick to eat anything.”

Their wedding was planned for the following week, but Olive’s wedding dress was missing; it had been lost during the treacherous journey by canoe along crocodile-infested waters outlined here last week.

Indeed, this is the third week in a row that An Irishwoman’s Diary is doing exactly what it says on the tin — that is, report on the real-life diary entries written by Irish women about their now, largely forgotten travels.

We would know nothing of Anna Whitney’s fascinating train journey across Siberia in 1908, featured here on January 25, had the young daughter of a Quaker missionary not written it down. In the same way, Olive Archer’s experience as a missionary and new wife in Africa is preserved because she wrote it down and her family saw the value of it

Her great-niece Jane Ellis has gathered all of that research and is now working to expand a short story on her aunt into a book. She has read Olive’s diary several times and is intrigued by what it says, but also by what it omits. Olive, for example, doesn’t say what she felt about striking out for a country so far away, one that is now beset by deep conflict.

Olive does, however, offer eye-popping detail about what were considered practical travel arrangements a century ago. She and her fellow missionary Miss Bryde travelled with an iron bath tub — in a canoe.

Jane continues the story: “When they set up camp each night, two men lit fires to cook and heat water for the ladies’ bath. Even though the temperatures were stifling, the ladies found the hot baths refreshing.”

If the travellers brought western ways with them, it is also clear that Olive was quick to adapt to, and appreciate, her new surroundings.

Despite the challenging conditions, she loved her new environment and even saw similarities with home. On April 4, 1926, she wrote: “1pm. The heat is awful. I am sitting in my tent with both ends open to the breeze from the river which is just below, but the sun is terrific. Somehow this village, and many of these riverine villages, remind me of some of the Achill [Island] ones down beside the sea. The same scattered huts — untidy grass about and glimpses of the water and blue hills beyond.”

Wedding dress or not, Olive and Patrick Kerr Dixon were married on April 15, 1926 by the British Consul in Elizabethville (now Lubumbashi).

A Mrs Yates, who was planning to send her 10-year-old daughter Peggy to Alexandra College in Dublin, made a wedding cake and prepared a spread that would not have been out of place at home.

Olive wrote: “The table looked lovely when the door from the veranda was opened and we were brought into the big, cool dining-room. There was a snowy-white cloth with a mass of fragrant pink, red, white and yellow roses in the centre (she must have known my love for roses) and the daintiest of light lunches laid out — egg sandwiches garnished with crimply lettuce, very thin bread and butter, delicious, freshly-made scones, and the wedding-cake, a plain sponge with cream sandwich, and pink and white icing.”

The couple honeymooned briefly in Likasi, about 100 miles away. When Olive developed dysentery, her husband put her on a course of medication. 

She doesn’t say much about the illness but reading those lines at this remove offers a sense of foreboding of what was to come

The couple set up their first home in a village called Sangatilas. Jane Ellis recalls that moment: “When she moved in, she said to her husband: ‘Why Patrick this is actually a good deal smaller than the laundry cottage at Laragh [her family home in Co Wicklow]!’”

She seemed to love it, though, and painted beautiful watercolours of the two-bedroomed thatched cottage surrounded by banana trees.

In her last surviving letter home, she wrote of her home, training her new staff — three boys — to cook, iron, fetch water and firewood, and her plans to help her husband in the dispensary when she had time. There were inevitable culture clashes; for example, one of those boys was deeply hurt when he brought salt to the table in his hands to be greeted by loud protests. Olive’s solution? A sense of fun. “Sometimes, we have tremendous laughs,” she wrote.

Those are the last recorded words of Olive Emily Patricia Dixon.

Over to Jane Ellis again: “There are several versions of how Auntie Olive died. My mother Anne recalls being told she died while giving birth to twins in the bush. The babies were stillborn. My aunt thinks she died of dysentery, but we do know that she died a year after her wedding day on April 23, 1927.

She was buried in Chibambo near Lubumbashi. The family story is that her husband carved her headstone, one which Jane Ellis hopes to find one day, in more peaceful times.

In the meantime, while researching details for this article and the book she is writing, Jane came across a search for relatives of Patrick Dixon by staff at Clifton House, the Belfast Charitable Society. They had discovered more than 180 of his letters in an old suitcase and were hoping to trace family members.

Just this week, Jane Ellis and her mother Anne travelled to Belfast and started to read those letters. They are yielding further details about Patrick’s work, how the people of the then-Belgian Congo helped him escape a lion attack and his recovery afterwards.

For Anne Ellis, it’s important to remember: “Looking back at history we hear of many brave, courageous women, such as Olive, who brought hope, joy and relief to our confused planet.”

Niece and great-niece hope their ongoing research will flesh out Olive’s experience in Africa so that now, at last, the final chapter in her extraordinary life can be written.