Barbara Lomas was a missionary nurse who was born in 1909 to Charles and Elizabeth Lomas in Withington, Manchester. The 1911 census tells us that Charles was a warehouseman for a company dealing in cotton goods and the family with two girls and Elizabeth’s widowed mother lived in a respectable Victorian terraced house.
In the 1921 census the family have moved to Wellington Road but Charles is missing. Barbara is aged 12 and attending school.
After leaving school, Barbara trained with the BCMS at Carfax College, Bristol and at the age of 22 she went out to Hong Kong on the Kashmir from London arriving in January 1932 to help at The BCMS Foundling Home in Broadwood Road. There were about 35 children there and the Home was a stopping off point for missionaries going up-country. The idea was for her to learn the language for two years and then go on to join one of the Mission stations in Guangxi Province, China. She and Mildred Dibden regularly went down to Wongneichong Village to conduct Sunday services and teach stories from the Bible.
Jill Doggett says, ‘Everything about Barbara was big. Her frame, her heart, her wide smile, all-embracing gestures and the amount of love she expended.’ As a trained nurse she was in her element when nursing the sick.
When the Foundling Home moved to Taipo in 1933, Barbara too went along and assisted Mildred Dibden and Grace James when superintendent Miss Elizabeth Lucas retired.
In 1934 the Home was under Miss Dibden, Miss Lomas, Miss Loudwell, and Miss James.
Later that year a mission station was opened in Ham-Chow, Guangxi, by the Rev G A and Mrs Margery Hook (was Bennett) and Barbara went from Taipo to join the work there to take charge of a newly opened dispensary.
In June 1936 after her missionary work finished in Hong Kong and China, she went back to England on the Rajputana, aged 27, and headed back to Manchester, Chandos Road, Heaton Chapel.
In 1939 we find her as a nurse-probationer at Manchester Royal Infirmary, where her older sister Muriel worked.
In later years she was appointed matron of a hospital in the Isle of Man. Her parents must have followed her there because her father died there in 1949 and her mother in 1951.
I have it from Ancestry that she died in 1985, aged 75, in Reading, Berkshire, but that seems rather far from home so I’m not convinced it’s our Barbara Lomas.
Sources:
The Yip Family of Amah Rock - Jill Doggett
Ancestry
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