YstradHistory

MOVING: Two wartime nurses built St Mary of the Angels in Gloucestershire to help others recover ⛪ Bertha Kessler and Katherine Hudson had both needed psychiatric care after serving as nurses during the First World War, before founding a Catholic community at Brownshill, Gloucestershire. After their recovery, they devoted their lives to spiritual healing and bought a house in the village in 1927 to care for people suffering from the effects of trauma. Their work grew into a community spread across several houses, with a church overlooking the Golden Valley at its heart. They used their own small savings to build St Mary of the Angels and asked architect W D Caröe to design it. The church was consecrated in 1937. Kessler and Hudson died within three weeks of each other in 1963 and were buried side by side beneath simple crosses in the churchyard. The community continued after them, until the nuns left Brownshill in 2006. Friends of Friendless Churches took ownership of the closed church in 2010 and completed six months of repairs early in 2026, renewing the wooden shingles on its little bell tower and repairing and redecorating the interior. St Mary of the Angels is open daily, with the founders still resting beside the church they built. A small church with two lives of care at its heart.