On joining the Woodchurch Ancestry Group facebook page, new member Hugh Nightingale intriguingly posted that ‘A first cousin of Edith Louisa Cavell was married to a Rector of Woodchurch’. Until Hugh’s post, there was no known connection between the Cavell family and Woodchurch, but a few minutes’ online research confirmed it.
Edith Cavell was a British nurse working in Belgium at the start of the First World War. She was arrested by the German authorities for assisting Allied soldiers to escape from German-occupied territory. Cavell was tried for treason, found guilty and, despite worldwide appeals for clemency, executed by a German firing squad in 1915.
The connection to Woodchurch is through Edith’s first cousin, Edith Parrin Hayllar, who married the Reverend Edward Bruce Mackay at Wallingford in 1896. Edith Hayllar’s mother was Ellen Phoebe Cavell, the sister of Edith Cavell’s father Frederick.
E. Bruce Mackay would become the rector of Woodchurch in 1918.