Arabella Catherine Hankey

HANKEY, Arabella Catherine (‘Kate’). b. London, 12 January 1834; d. London, 9 May 1911. She was a daughter of a wealthy London banker, Thomas Hankey, a member of the ‘Clapham Sect’, the group of influential and well-to-do evangelicals whose great achievements had been the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and of slavery in 1833. They continued to be a close-knit and powerful group (see E.M. Forster, Marianne Thornton, 1797-1887: a Domestic Biography, London, 1956). Kate Hankey (in official documents she was ‘Arabella Catherine’) was a Sunday School teacher, and she also organised a Bible study class for shop girls in the West End of London. She was very interested in missionary work,...