Mary BRAGA [1914-1965]

Mary Braga

Born, Hong Kong, 14 March 1914; died, Hong Kong, 15 July 1965, aged 51.

Music teacher and missionary.

Mary Braga was the last of thirteen children of José Pedro and Olive Pauline (née Pollard), but the first to die in adult years. Born in Hong Kong, she was, like her sister Caroline, principally educated at home by her elder sister Jean and her brothers Noel, Hugh, James and Tony, though Jean paid for her to attend St Stephen’s Girls’ College for her final three years. As the youngest member of a large family, she was brought up within a community of energetic and creative people, but seemed swamped by the dynamism and focused endeavour that characterised many of her siblings. Caroline was closest to her in age, and Mary’s upbringing closely followed that of her sister, slightly more than two years her elder. She never married.

Both sisters learned the piano from an early age from their mother and Jean, who was responsible for most of the household arrangements. Jean took in piano and violin students, and her younger sisters naturally picked up the ability to play.

The Chinese community contained many who wanted their children to acquire the ‘polite accomplishments’ of cultivated Westerners, including the ability to play the piano. While Caroline made a successful life-long career as a piano teacher, Mary did not develop the same degree of professionalism and competence as her older sisters, though she was painstaking and earnest in all that she endeavoured, and did have some piano students. A few surviving letters show that she was an excellent letter-writer. During her early adult years in the 1930s, Mary led a sheltered life in the family home in Knutsford Terrace, Kowloon.

Over time her mother became greatly dependent on Mary, who willingly accepted the role of carer. In common with other family members, she sought refuge in Macau during World War II, returning in 1945 to Hong Kong. At the end of the war, she was so ill that doctors suspected tuberculosis, then a major killer of young women, and her vitality seemed permanently sapped. She went to Australia to recuperate, living in a girls’ hostel at Ashfield, a Sydney suburb. She was offered a teaching job in a girls’ school, but returned to Hong Kong because of her mother’s declining health.

After her mother’s death in 1952, Mary went to London, where she studied for her L.R.A.M. (Licentiate of the Royal Academy of Music), living in a hostel run by the China Inland Mission for some two years. She hoped to join the mission in Japan, as a teacher of missionaries’ children, but no place was available. Instead, she was offered a place in a Mission school in Manila, but declined the offer.

Returning to Hong Kong, she continued to teach the piano a little, and put much effort into her Sunday school lessons. In 1959 she went to teach music at the Christian Academy in Tokyo in a position similar to the one that she had hoped for with the C.I.M. Here she developed breast cancer, which was not detected for some time.

Returning to Hong Kong, she had a radical mastectomy, but it was too late. Her brother Hugh arranged for her to go to Sydney in 1964 for radiotherapy at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, which possessed the latest equipment for the treatment of cancer. On her discharge from hospital, she stayed with Hugh and Nora for some months.

However, her health continued to decline, and she died some months after returning to Hong Kong. Her family maintained a vigil at her bedside round the clock during her last weeks.

Mary had a sweet and loving personality, and was characterised by an other-worldliness that perhaps stemmed from the fact that others had always made her decisions for her. Like her mother and several of her brothers and sisters, she was a devout Christian. Quite unlike her brothers, all of whom became men of affairs in one walk of life or another, Mary seemed to belong to an age of greater gentility than the bustling and ruthless world of the twentieth century. Her family understood this, seeing in Mary much of what they valued in their Mother. It was natural that she should be laid to rest alongside Olive in the Protestant section of Happy Valley Cemetery, Hong Kong. Olive Braga’s grave bears the inscription: ‘In Thy presence is fullness of joy; at Thy right hand are pleasures for evermore.’ (Psalm 16, verse 11), highly appropriate for both mother and daughter.

Stuart Braga
24 October 1996, revised 7 December 1996, 4 April 2001 and 18 April 2008. illustrations added, 14 April 2022