Her grandfather was a religiously intolerant Irishman known for his bullying, violence, and intense hatred of Catholics. Her father was a failed law student. Apart from both men bearing the stigma of having been convicts, her father had the additional shame of having been transported to Australia for his crime. Despite that family background, Isabel Grant Gray (1855-1933) was able to rise above it all as an intensely passionate Christian who lived a life of fervent piety.
The stories of Sam Gray (1782-1848) and his son James Gray (1820-1899) are more fully detailed in Bodies Under The Tavern and Convicted And Banished From Ireland. Family redemption began when James, finally obtaining his freedom, went on to become a respected member of the Tasmanian Parliament. Isabel took it to the next level with her fervent embrace of Christianity and eventually, the family coming full circle, joining the Catholic Church which her grandfather had so despised.
James had only one surviving child, Isabel Grant Gray, to whom he left his entire estate. This daughter who never married died December 7. 1933 in Hobart. Her religiously intolerant paternal grandfather would have been aghast to know that his granddaughter, for a time having served as an Anglican nun, eventually converted to Catholicism and left her entire estate to Catholic causes.
Isabel Grant Gray was born in Hobart, Tasmania May 5, 1859 to James and his wife Mary Newton. About 1877, after her mother’s death the year previous, Isabel accompanied her father for an extended trip to Ireland to stay with relatives. Although her father remained for about three years before then returning to Hobart, Isabel stayed on longer, eventually settling for a time in London, England as part of her life-long religious journey. It is there she can be found on the 1881 census in Clerkenwell in Islington as a nun, a member of the Sisters of Bethany, a High Anglican religious order, albeit one not officially constituted by the Church. Founded in Clerkenwell in only 1866, it was an Augustinian order for pious Anglican women who took the traditional vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience while living in a closed religious community. Amongst those living in the mother house with Isabel was Yorkshire born Esther Eliza Carter who was destined to be Isabel’s life-long companion on her religious quest.
In due course, Isabel, accompanied by Esther, returned to Tasmania on the SS Arawa in 1888 a few months before her father’s 1889 death. Although James’s obituary implies her return may have been prompted by her father’s poor health, an article in the Launceston makes it clear her return was also to be the next step in Isabel’s religious journey. Both she and Esther were planning, according to the newspaper, to use their English sisterhood experience and personal funds for “ministrations to the work of visiting the afflicted, reclaiming the strayed, and engagement in other offices of disciplined philanthropy”. Their eventual goal, it was stated was to found their own Anglican sisterhood in Hobart which others might join.
Although there is no evidence that Isabel and Esther were ever able to establish the sisterhood which they had envisioned, they continued with their religious odyssey. Known for visiting the sick and needy and their works of charity, they regularly attended Hobart’s St. David’s Anglican Cathedral. Later, however, troubled by aspects of certain Anglican Church positions and its ability to give them certainty in areas of faith and practice, they “crossed the Tiber” and made the momentous decision to convert to Catholicism. This defection of two of its most faithful was said to have caused great local upheaval amongst Anglican clergy. After the two were officially received into the Catholic Church and baptised at Hobart’s St. Mary’s Cathedral on May 10, 1899, they marked the occasion by presenting a pair of brass candlesticks which now are part of the heritage collection of the Church.
Said to be well educated and widely read in history, the two were instantly recognizable when in public, always dressing in the nuns’ habits from their sisterhood days in England. Although perhaps a bit over the top, this was tolerated by both Anglican and Catholic authorities since the Sisters of Bethany had never enjoyed any official status.
Although both women always seemed to have been of some means, it is believed this may have been a result of perhaps from family inheritances since Isobel had Tasmanian and Irish assets and Esther Tasmanian and English assets at the time of their deaths. Isabel was the first of the inseparable two to die, death coming in 1933. Her good works in a sense outlived her since the bulk of her estate went to a Benedictine Abbey in Gloucestershire. Esther lived on until 1953 when she died at the age of 94, leaving the bulk of her estate to an English cousin.
In the course of three generations this branch of the Gray family transformed itself from one defined by religious intolerance and criminal behaviour to one defined instead by religious devotion and good works. Progenitor Sam Gray would never have understood how it all went so wrong.
David Arntfield
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