Mrs W A Burris

Isabel Burris was born at Four Paths, Clarendon in 1865, the eldest of the six children of Thomas Brown and his wife. It was a talented family: her brother John trained in the U.S.A. and Britain to become a doctor, and her brother Tom graduated with honours from Clark University. She was taught by her father until 1884, then spent three years at Westwood High School (then Manchester Girls’ School). She became a member of the school staff until 1889. For some time she lived with her uncle, the Rev. W. N. Brown, at Salter’s Hill, St. James, and was Headmistress of a Private School at Moor Park. Next she returned to Chapelton and taught a Private School of her own.

Her desire to be active in mission work developed as early as the age of 12. She became a good student of the Bible, and delighted in teaching it. In 1895 the Bishop of Sierra Leone had visited Jamaica and appealed for missionaries of African ancestry to go to West Africa from Jamaica. In 1896 Isabel married William Burris, who had been studying for mission work at Codrington College in Barbados, and went with him, along with A F O March and J Walrond to the Rio Pongas, an area adjacent to Sierra Leone which was claimed by the French. They were the first contingent of Anglican missionaries from Jamaica to West Africa.

William Burris was ordained to the Anglican priesthood in 1902 in Sierra Leone, and he and his wife worked indefatigably to spread the Gospel. Their reports of their work were printed in the local press and in 1910 they returned on furlough and toured Jamaica giving talks about their work and the needs of the mission. Sadly, shortly after they left, Isabel’s brother John, who was practising as a doctor in St Mary, was washed away and drowned by a flooded river while returning from visiting a patient at Albion Mountain.

The Burrises had three children, two girls, the elder named Hilda, and one son, Willie, named after his father. They spent their early years in West Africa, but later were sent to school in England, causing the sadness of separation within the family.

The Rev and Mrs Burris ran the mission in the Rio Pongas until 1925, when they returned to Jamaica. William Burris died in 1940, but no information about Isabel Burris’s later years have so far come to hand.