| The Society of St Margaret was founded in East
Grinstead, by a young Church of England priest, John Mason Neale, in 1855.
He was moved by the appalling poverty in rural Sussex and the order of religious
women begun by him had the specific work of cottage nursing. Eleven years later he was asked to send three of the Sisters to Haggerston (present day Hackney) in East London to serve among people working and living in desperate conditions. The summer of 1866 saw a severe outbreak of cholera and some |
of our Sisters helped with nursing in the temporary
hospital in Spitalfields. Others did what they could in local homes -
feeding, nursing, clothing and laying out the dead. Few but the Sisters
dared go near the victims.
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Their work continued and during the next twenty years they
built St Saviour’s Priory on the present site. During the First and
Second World Wars, the Priory was registered as an air raid shelter and
it thronged night after night with local people. The Sisters’ religious life and work remained almost |
unchanged until 1976 when a new Priory was built to replace
the original. With it came a new vision, for much of our earlier work was
now undertaken by the Health Service.
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St
Saviour's Priory, Society of St Margaret