Viva Brighton Issue #46 December 2016

HISTORY
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Mother Riccarda
Beatific Brightonian
“This is not a simple little nun
thinking ‘oh, I’ll do my best’. No,
no, she would have been aware,
absolutely would have been
aware,” says the journalist Joanna
Bogle. “If you sheltered Jews, you
were risking your life.”
***
Catherine Hambrough was
born in 1887, into the “minor
aristocracy”, and spent part
of her childhood in Hove. It’s
unclear how long she was here,
though Bogle feels that “certainly
this was her home… It was
in Hove that her parents made the decision to
become Catholics, and it was that that defined the
rest of her life.” She was baptised as a Catholic at
St Mary Magdalene’s, on Upper North Street.
Someone of her background “would have had
access to a rather pleasant social life,” Bogle says.
However, Hambrough preferred to go to Rome,
in her mid-20s, and take up the austere life of
a Bridgettine nun, under a new name: Sister
Riccarda.
By 1943, she was Mother Riccarda, and evidently
quite senior among the Bridgettines. When the
Germans occupied Italy, she was effectively put
in charge of the convent’s efforts to hide dozens
of Jews.
These fugitives were sheltered in the nuns’ own
quarters, so that if soldiers insisted on searching
the building, the sisters could say demurely,
‘please, not our bedrooms!’
The situation “made life very difficult for the
nuns,” Bogle says - particularly as the Jews could
no longer claim their food rations.
It fell to Riccarda to deal with the food issue (she
appears to have gone hungry
herself), and to smooth over
any cabin-fever-type tensions
among the fugitives. One of
them, interviewed by Bogle years
later, said that ‘you instinctively
went to her when you were
troubled… she put everyone at
ease. We called her Mamima –
Little Mother.’ Riccarda is now
being officially considered for
sainthood.
“To be honest, it would have been
relatively easy for the nuns to
shut the door and say, ‘we know
you want help, but we really can’t,’” Bogle says.
“They were extremely vulnerable. Remember
that these nuns had nothing; they never imagined
themselves doing this. One reason you join a
convent is, not for an easy life, but let’s say an
ordered life, a certain academic… it’s reading and
praying and studying, and helping other people
to study, and teaching. It’s not exactly adventure
work, you know.
“It’s interesting - we all like to think, don’t we,
that we’d be heroic. But the evidence is that lots
of us aren’t, when it comes to it. It’s interesting
that, particularly in the case of Mother Riccarda,
these were women who’d made a decision to live
in a more austere way, and to give the whole of
their lives to something that was true and good.
And so, I think they didn’t really hesitate when the
question was put to them. I think the decision to
lead a nobler life, if I can put it like that, certainly
can lead you to do heroic things. I find that quite
touching.” Steve Ramsey
Joanna Bogle’s book, Courage and Conviction, is
published by Gracewing
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