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Cornelia and the Duchess
was not to be outdone. Grant was told, ‘We are going to have a bazaar
in London’; and she extracted a letter from the Jesuit general warmly
recommending all Jesuits in England, France and Spain to support this
‘great benefactress of religion’. Mother Connelly organised a gigantic raffle
(which nearly fell foul of the law but was saved by the legal ingenuity of
Sir George Bowyer). It was put under the patronage of foreign royalty and
English aristocracy, and the pope himself sent a gift. His ‘Mosaic Brooch
Mounted in Fine Gold’ headed the list of several hundred prizes ranging
from ‘An Alderney Cow and Calf’ down to books and railway wrappers.
Tickets were sixpence each and 80,000 books were printed for distribution
in Britain, India, Australia and America. By March 1865 the little convent
at Mayfield had a community of five and Cornelia was often there. The
drawing of prizes was to be in October and Bellasis, who was one of the
community, wrote that Cornelia’s correspondence was so heavy that
‘the letters had to be delivered by the worthy wife of the postmaster in a
wheelbarrow each morning! The writer remembers the good lady remarking,
“Is it always going to want a wheelbarrow? It will be the killing of me if it
does.” ’
One of the statements made on the raffle tickets was that the funds raised
were for a ‘Female Orphanage’. Cornelia sent personal letters on its behalf.
The restored ruins at Mayfield were to be appropriated as much to orphans
as to the novitiate, she said, ‘and it is for the orphans’ share I plead’.
Whether or not friends responded as she hoped, the five sisters there began
their life with twelve orphans to teach and train.
During December 1864 the Ore orphanage had been robbed and the
chapel desecrated and just before that her grace’s orphanage for boys in
Hastings had been broken into. These events determined her to remove
them both to a safer location and she seems to have arranged with Cornelia
to transfer the girls’ orphanage to the Old Palace. But at the very time that
Cornelia was printing raffle tickets naming a ‘Female Orphanage’ as one of
the objects of the restoration, the duchess was having a better idea. ‘I mean’,
she wrote to Grant, ‘to purchase a farm at Mayfield and remove them both
there.’ This change of plan might have suited Cornelia if the ‘farm’ had
been conveniently placed close to the Old Palace. But in the duchess’s hands
one farm became three and the location of the girls’ orphanage receded
further and further from the Palace. Cornelia knew how difficult it was for
Grant to find priests for outlying missions, but her grace disregarded the
fact that to people on foot winter and summer as a daily necessity, four
miles of muddy cross-country lanes was very different from one mile, and
chose for the girls’ orphanage, which the sisters would serve, the one furthest
from Mayfield village. Cornelia would now have to provide for two separate
establishments just too far from each other to be able to share chaplain or
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