Honoured in her own country

The Rev Mark Pattison fathered two sons and ten daughters, disliked most and hated the rest, forbade them from marrying and had a poor, downtrodden, unemancipated wife who may many times have wished that she herself had avoided matrimony's meretricious embrace, but who remained silent and subservient until the end.

It was at the end, on her death bed, that her husband refused her holy communion.

Pattison was an evangelical Protestant, sometimes mentally ill, always foul tempered, a self-obsessed man who could smell Popery in a pigsty. The parish was neglected and the rectory gloomy, says a history of Hauxwell church.

"Will you join the Papists in the drawing room or the poor, solitary, persecuted Protestant in here?" he would demand of visitors to his home.

Hauxwell is in North Yorkshire, close enough to Catterick Garrison for road signs to warn that tanks might be turning, but sufficiently off the track to be many a mile from anywhere.

It was from that small village, however, that, in 1861, Dorothy Wyndlow Pattison - the rector's eleventh child, then almost 30 - finally made her break. Soon afterwards she became Sister Dora and it was Sister Dora - the first uncrowned woman in England to have a public statue erected in her memory - who, last Sunday in Hauxwell, was finally honoured in her own country. It is an extraordinary story.

Dorothy briefly became a teacher in Buckinghamshire, recuperated at Marske-by-the-Sea after becoming ill in 1862 and then joined the Redcar house of the Christ Church Sisterhood, led by the self-styled "Mother Theresa" Newcomen, a wealthy widow.

There's a picture of the sisters with their dog in one of Dora's biographies. Even the dog looks like it's just left a particularly vexatious confessional.

Their good works included nursing, even then a calling regarded as not entirely respectable. From the first, Dora always remembered the text from Matthew: 25, engraved on her heart and on the lintel over the door: "Inasmuch as ye have done it to the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me".

She was moved to North Ormesby Cottage Hospital, founded by the sisters to help the burgeoning steelworks population on Teesside, and, in 1865, went to another early hospital in Walsall.

The nearest had been nine miles away, in Birmingham. Birmingham, legend has it, sent a message to send more money and fewer patients.

In just 13 years in the Midlands, until her death from breast cancer at the age of 46, Sister Dora's dedication was so great and her courage so constant that - then as now - she is mentioned in the same breath as Nightingale and Cavell.

'That the very first public statue erected in this country in honour of an Englishwoman who did not happen to wear a crown should have been reared in the market place of dingy Walsall, to commemorate a hospital nurse, is not such a surprising circumstance as it might appear at first sight," observed the Daily Telegraph in 1886.

Sister Dora, it added, was remembered for her care of the sick and the poorest, her commanding form, aristocratic refinement and personal beauty - "a general philanthropist and a sister of mercy".

A century later, the people of Walsall again saluted their heroine in the refurbishing and resiting of the statue. The town's hospice also carries her name. On Sunday afternoon, Sister Dora, daughter of the rectory, was affectionately remembered in the church of St Oswald, Hauxwell, the nearby Garriston Beck albeit overflowing in its excitement.

They'd talked about doing something for getting on 20 years, contemplated a Sister Dora charity, but decided it too ambitious, unveiled instead a plaque the in church in her memory and a memoire by Dr Judith Gowland, who now lives in the village.

Dr Gowland, once an immunologist but now an art restorer, had barely heard of Sister Dora - "I think there might have been a film, Dorothy Tutin or someone" - before coming to Hauxwell.

She was joined by Sheila Bailey and by the Rev Don Tordoff, shortly to retire as incumbent of Hauxwell and the neighbouring parishes of Finghall and Spennithorne.

"We felt pretty ashamed that we knew so little," said Dr Gowland. "A few Walsall people had visited but we'd never really made a proper link," said Mrs Bailey.

On Sunday, far better late than never, they did it properly, the service led by the Bishop of Ripon, the little church filled with Sister Dora devotees from as far away as Japan, but not, for the first 25 minutes, with the Mayor and Mayoress of Walsall.

"I know it's awfully hard to find," said the Rev Margaret Tordoff, when finally they arrived.

The Bishop, the Rt Rev John Packer, told of Sister Dora's indomitable care for smallpox victims, for those grievously injured in colliery and industrial accidents, and of how she had driven herself to exhaustion.

Margaret Tordoff, the Rector's wife, recalled her equal concern for the fighting man, the drunken woman and the thieving child - and the contempt in which she was held for it.

Always Sister Dora would refer her accusers to the text from St Matthew: "Inasmuch still holds good."

We heard of her 16-hour working days, her interrupted nights, her constant prayerfulness and how she left the sisterhood after refusing to move from Walsall. "I am a woman," said Sister Dora, "not a piece of furniture."

Dr Gowland had also written - "warts and all and far better for it," said the Bishop - of young Dorothy's "understandings" with more than one young man of the district and of her thwarted romances thereafter.

(Sister Dora also gave her name to a style of nurses' cap, in use very many years later, but we have been unable to get to the top and bottom of that one.)

Many thousands lined Walsall's streets for her funeral; many thousands more gathered for the unveiling of her statue. There was never such a devoted Sister: inasmuch still holds good.