Repose of Joan Rutt, 3 April 1919 - 17 September 2007

Canon Richard Rutt writes:

Joan`s parents, Arthur John Ford (clerk in the railway Clearing House) and Esther Paine, came from Cheddar, where Joan spent her childhood summer holidays. She was born at Chertsey,Surrey, but brought up in Teddington. She attended Station Road Infants School and Twickenham County Girls `School.

Their parents did not attend church, but somehow Joan and her brother John began attending SS.Peter and Paul, Teddington, a stronghold of Anglo-Catholicism. When they took their parents to a children`s service, their father was so shocked by the bells and smells that he forbade them to go there again.

Joan`s mother died after surgery in 1935, and she took over the housekeeping for her father and John. A perceptive headmistress sent her in1936 au pair with a French family named Maitre (no circumflex) at Plancoulaine near Tours. They were devout Catholics and took Joan to church. She often visited them in succeeding years and came to regard Madame Maitre as her second mother, who taught her the excellent spoken French that won her the plaudits of French people for the rest of her life. Soon after this she returned to church.

In 1938 Joan gained a scholarship to Girton. She graduated in1941, carrying off two college prizes: Charity Reeves for 1st Class honours in both parts of the Tripos, and Girton`s senior prize, the Therese Montefiore, for highest achievement during the whole three years.She never spoke about these prizes. I did not find out about them until shortly before she died.

Her brother John had not completely recovered from the loss of his mother when he escaped at Dunkirk in 1940, with serious psychiatric damage. Joan played a major part in nursing him.

On graduating. Joan undertook training as “one of Octavia Hill`s women”,including spells in Swansea and in Notting Hill, to qualify with the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors as a woman housing manager. She took up a post at Mitcham, Surrey, in 1943 and worked there on the big St. Helier Estate through the V1 and V2 air raids, finally leaving in1947, when asked to become joint general secretary of the ecumenical Fellowship of St.Alban and St. Sergius. Her partner, who became her dearest friend, Helle Georgiadis, was an Orthodox Greek brought up in England, who later became a Greek Catholic. Joan was responsible for running St.Basil`s House, which she organized as an international guest house, usually full of students and Eastern Orthodox clerics.(of recent years she had been liable to refer to many a Levantine hierarch as `one of my boys').

She met me first in 1948 at a Fellowship conference, while I was still a student at Kelham. She was one of the group of churchwomen who persuaded Bishop Cooper of Korea, when he was released from Communist internment in 1953, to invite me to join his mission, which was desperately short-staffed. (She confessed to this when we married in 1969).

In 1956 she toured free Europe for months, studying religious drama from Finland to the Mediterranean for the Religious Drama Society. About the same time she organized an appeal for Fr Duncan Ferguson (who gave the eulogy at her funeral) to build an ecumenical chapel in northern Ghana.

Both she and Helle left St. Basil`s House in 1957 and became teachers. Joan worked at Channing School in Highgate until she flew to Korea. I was now Bishop of Taejon. Out wedding took place in Hong Kong on 5 May 1969. She soon became a lecturer in English Literature at Sungsil University, Taejon. She edited a Korean cookery book and the autobiography of the last Korean Crown Princess, among other books.

When we came to the bishopric of St.German, Cornwall, in 1974 (living in Truro), Joan became head of English at St. Clare`s School, Penzance. She retired in 1979 when we moved to Leicester, where she is remembered for caring for the wives of the clergy without bossing them.

Joan returned to her beloved West Country when we retired to Falmouth in 1990. For several years she served as convenor to the fledgling group that became Carrick MIND. She revived the Cornish branch of the Ecumenical Society of the Blesssed Virgin Mary; she was active in Falmouth`s St. Vincent De Paul Society, assiduously visiting the elderly until she had her first stroke. She worked hard and skilfully at editing my two thick books of Oriental studies (she knew enough about Chinese script to be useful), and herself wrote and published an account of St.Basil's House in W.McLoughlin and J.Pinnock, Mary for Time and Eternity (Gracewing 2007).

She had several mini-strokes during 2006, and a big one on New Year's day 2007. After many weeks being nursed at home or in hospital in Truro, Penzance and Falmouth, on 11th September she entered Sheldon House, a care home 15 minutes' walk from our house. She was settling in well by Holy Cross Day. 14th September, when she received Holy Communion on the anniversary of her baptism in 1919 and reception into the Catholic Church in 1993. She seemed radiantly happy and peaceful. Three days later, on Monday 17th September, having been anointed the previous evening and received Holy Communion again that morning, she died of heart failure, peacefully in her chair at midday. I was with her 30 minutes earlier and her last word to me was `Good`.

During the last week she loved to be prayed with, always insisting the Salve Regina (`Hail Holy Queen`) was said. She suffered much from dementia, but was always silent and recollected for prayer. She could not know that her burial would take place on the feast of St. Cosmas and St. Damian. She and I had shared a devotion to them ever since we visited (separately) their basilica in Rome during Holy Year of 1950. Fr Jonathan, our parish priest, had her big ikon of them set up by the altar for the funeral. She loved the Greek description of them as `healers of man and beast` (including especially her successive Siamese cats).

I led seven other priests celebrating her funeral mass, Fr Jonathan supporting me like an affectionate son. St.Mary`s was full. We sang `Praise to the Holiest in the height`, `Let all mortal flesh keep silence`, `Soul of my Saviour`, and `Jerusalem the Golden`. She was buried in the same grave as my mother in Falmouth Cemetery, overlooking the Swanpool Bay. Our grand-nephews, aged 4 to 17, of whom she was very proud, stood beside her in the Cornish morning sunshine.