Stella Jane Reekie | |
|---|---|
 in 1945 | |
| Born | 29 July 1922 Gravesend |
| Died | 28 September 1982 (aged 60) Glasgow |
| Resting place | St Margaret's Church, Kent, England |
| Occupation | Inter-faith missionary worker |
Stella Jane Reekie, (29 July 1922 - 28 September 1982) was a missionary and inter-faith worker who worked with refugees during World War II and later, set up the Church of Scotland's International Flat in Glasgow for refugees and immigrants. [1]
Reekie was born in Gravesend on 29 July 1922. [1] She was the daughter of Arthur Reekie and Jane Reekie and was the youngest of eight siblings. She attended the Bronte Villas School and then Gravesend Country School for Girls. [2]
While working in the nursery at Cadby Hall during World War II, Reekie visited the Greek Embassy and watched a film shown by the Red Cross detailing the wartime conditions and deprivation in Europe, and the need for relief workers. While continuing to work, Reekie trained with the Red Cross to work overseas with refugees. [2]
As a British nurse and childcare specialist who trained with the Red Cross, in 1945 Reekie sailed with a group of other workers to Belgium. Bergen Belsen concentration camp was discovered on 15 April 1945. [3] as a civilian, Reekie worked within the Polish School at Bergen Belsen catering for the physical needs of nearly 500 children between the ages of 7 and 16. [2]
Following the closure of Bergen Belsen, Reekie oversaw the Children's Block of the British Red Cross Hospital for T.B. displaced persons at Bad Rehburg.[ citation needed ]
From 1949–1951, Stella studied to become a missionary at St Colm's College in Edinburgh. In 1951 a group of missionaries, including Reekie, sailed from Liverpool on the S.S. Cilicia for Karachi and Bombay. Reekie worked at the Welfare Centre in the Sialkot district of Karachi, where training was given to local midwives and clinics were organised for mothers and babies. [2]
Reekie visited villages on foot helping women in many practical ways such as delivering relief food and clothing, and promoting and supervising women's sewing; defending their work against the traditional views of men and missionary wives. [2]
In 1968 Reekie returned to Scotland and was appointed by the Home Board of the Church of Scotland to work three days a week in Glasgow with displaced people and those in need. Suitable accommodation was required as a safe place for the refugees. Originally Reekie used her own tenement flat and in 1972 the Church of Scotland bought a flat at 20 Glasgow Street which became known as the International Flat where refugees, immigrants and their families were welcomed. [4]
On 28 September 1982 Reekie died after suffering from cancer. [5]
Bergen-Belsen[ˈbɛʁɡn̩.bɛlsn̩], or Belsen, was a Nazi concentration camp in what is today Lower Saxony in northern Germany, southwest of the town of Bergen near Celle. Originally established as a prisoner of war camp, in 1943, parts of it became a concentration camp. Initially this was an "exchange camp", where Jewish hostages were held with the intention of exchanging them for German prisoners of war held overseas. The camp was later expanded to hold Jews from other concentration camps.
The Gorbals is an area in the city of Glasgow, Scotland, on the south bank of the River Clyde. By the late 19th century, it had become densely populated; rural migrants and immigrants were attracted by the new industries and employment opportunities of Glasgow. At its peak, during the 1930s, the wider Gorbals district had swollen in population to an estimated 90,000 residents. Along with its relatively small size, this gave the area a very high population density of around 40,000/km². Redevelopment after WWII has taken many turns, and the area's population is substantially smaller today. The Gorbals was also home to 16 high rise flat blocks; only six are standing as of 2023, and two of them are set to come down in the next couple of years.
Red Clydeside was the era of political radicalism in Glasgow, Scotland, and areas around the city, on the banks of the River Clyde, such as Clydebank, Greenock, Dumbarton and Paisley, from the 1910s until the early 1930s. Red Clydeside is a significant part of the history of the labour movement in Britain as a whole, and Scotland in particular.
New Lanark is a village on the River Clyde, approximately 1.4 miles from Lanark, in Lanarkshire, and some 25 miles (40 km) southeast of Glasgow, Scotland. It was founded in 1785 and opened in 1786 by David Dale, who built cotton mills and housing for the mill workers. Dale built the mills there in a brief partnership with the English inventor and entrepreneur Richard Arkwright to take advantage of the water power provided by the only waterfalls on the River Clyde. Under the ownership of a partnership that included Dale's son-in-law, Robert Owen, a Welsh utopian socialist and philanthropist, New Lanark became a successful business and an early example of a planned settlement and so an important milestone in the historical development of urban planning.
A tenement is a type of building shared by multiple dwellings, typically with flats or apartments on each floor and with shared entrance stairway access. They are common on the British Isles, particularly in Scotland. In the medieval Old Town, in Edinburgh, tenements were developed with each apartment treated as a separate house, built on top of each other. Over hundreds of years, custom grew to become law concerning maintenance and repairs, as first formally discussed in Stair's 1681 writings on Scots property law. In Scotland, these are now governed by the Tenements Act, which replaced the old Law of the Tenement and created a new system of common ownership and procedures concerning repairs and maintenance of tenements. Tenements with one or two room flats provided popular rented accommodation for workers, but in some inner-city areas, overcrowding and maintenance problems led to shanty towns, which have been cleared and redeveloped. In more affluent areas, tenement flats form spacious privately owned houses, some with up to six bedrooms, which continue to be desirable properties.
Pollokshields is an area in the Southside of Glasgow, Scotland. Its modern boundaries are largely man-made, being formed by the M77 motorway to the west and northwest with the open land of Pollok Country Park and the Dumbreck neighbourhood beyond, by the Inverclyde Line railway and other branches which separate its territory from the largely industrial areas of Kinning Park, Kingston and Port Eglinton, and by the Glasgow South Western Line running from the east to south, bordering Govanhill, Strathbungo, Crossmyloof and Shawlands residential areas. There is also a suburban railway running through the area.
The settlement movement was a reformist social movement that began in the 1880s and peaked around the 1920s in the United Kingdom and the United States. Its goal was to bring the rich and the poor of society together in both physical proximity and social interconnectedness. Its main object was the establishment of "settlement houses" in poor urban areas, in which volunteer middle-class "settlement workers" would live, hoping to share knowledge and culture with, and alleviate the poverty of, their low-income neighbors. The settlement houses provided services such as daycare, English classes, and healthcare to improve the lives of the poor in these areas. The most famous settlement house of the time was Hull House, founded by Jane Addams and Ellen Starr.
Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp was a displaced persons (DP) camp for refugees after World War II, in Lower Saxony in northwestern Germany, southwest of the town of Bergen near Celle. It was in operation from the summer of 1945 until September 1950. For a time, Belsen DP camp was the largest Jewish DP camp in Germany and the only one in the British occupation zone with an exclusively Jewish population. The camp was under British authority and overseen by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) with camp directors that included Simon Bloomberg. Today, the camp is a Bundeswehr barracks, having been a British Army base until 2015.
Jane Mathison Haining was a Scottish missionary for the Church of Scotland in Budapest, Hungary, who was recognized in 1997 by Yad Vashem in Israel as Righteous Among the Nations for having risked her life to help Jews during the Holocaust.
Braidfauld is a small area of Glasgow, Scotland which is in the East End of the city slightly north of the River Clyde and south of the Tollcross area. It was also the name of the 45th ward of Glasgow City Council, prior to the re-organisation into multi-member wards in 2007.
Glasgow, the largest city in Scotland, has several distinct styles of residential buildings, and since its population began to grow rapidly the 18th century has been at the forefront of some large-scale projects to deal with its housing issues, some of which have been assessed as being largely successful and others less so.
The Guide International Service (G.I.S.) was an organisation set up by the Girl Guides Association in Britain in 1942 with the aim of sending teams of adult Girl Guides to do relief work into Europe after World War II.
Architecture in modern Scotland encompasses all building in Scotland, between the beginning of the twentieth century and the present day. The most significant architect of the early twentieth century was Charles Rennie Mackintosh, who mixed elements of traditional Scottish architecture with contemporary movements. Estate house design declined in importance in the twentieth century. In the early decades of the century, traditional materials began to give way to cheaper modern ones. After the First World War, Modernism and the office block began to dominate building in the major cities and attempts began to improve the quality of urban housing for the poor, resulted in a massive programme of council house building. The Neo-Gothic style continued in to the twentieth century but the most common forms in this period were plain and massive Neo-Romanesque buildings.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Scotland refers to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its members in Scotland.
Scottish Protestant missions are organised programmes of outreach and conversion undertaken by Protestant denominations within Scotland, or by Scottish people. Long after the triumph of the Church of Scotland in the Lowlands, Highlanders and Islanders clung to a form of Christianity infused with animistic folk beliefs and practices. From 1708 the Scottish Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SSPCK) began working in the area. In 1797 James Haldane founded the non-denominational Society for the Propagation of the Gospel at Home. Dozens of lay preachers, divinity students and English preachers were sent to the region. In the early nineteenth century a variety of organisations were formed to support evangelism to the region.
Simon Bloomberg (1894–1981) CBE, was a Jewish humanitarian known for his work to resettle the displaced persons of Europe after World War II. He was the UNRRA Director of the Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp after World War II and European Director of the Jewish Relief Fund.
St Colm's College was established in Edinburgh in 1894 as a missionary training college for women, with Annie Hunter Small as its first principal.
Peter MacGregor Chalmers LLD was a Scottish architect specialising in country churches, and also being involved in several important restoration schemes.
Jane Rae was a British political activist, suffragist, councillor and Justice of the peace. She was one of the activists involved in the 1911 all-out strike at the Singer Sewing Machine factory at Kilbowie in Clydebank, Branch Secretary of the Clydebank branch of the Independent Labour Party, and a Labour councillor for Clydebank Town Council.
The New College Settlement was a student settlement based on the Pleasance in the Southside of Edinburgh, Scotland. Founded by students of New College in 1893, its work continued until 1952.
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