Featured on my Facebook page, and posted here for archiving.

Elizabeth Fowkes Bradley (1857-1952) had a brother living in the United States, who asked that Mormon missionaries call on his sister in Derby, England. They did, and Elizabeth was baptized in 1896 – as was her husband, and each of her five children as they came of age. The family were stalwarts in the Church during some of the hardest days for British Latter-day Saints.

That may not have been of particular concern to Elizabeth – she was too busy being a Latter-day Saint. Her family remembered a time – it had to have been very soon after her baptism, when she still had very young children – when a sister in the Derby branch fell ill and Elizabeth began a routine of pushing her two youngest children in their carriage for ten miles to the ill sister’s home, tending to her and her housework, and then pushing that carriage the ten miles back to her home.

In 1910, when Parliament considered the idea of banning Mormon missionaries and curtailing the civil rights of British Mormons, Elizabeth had other things on her mind. She was called that year to be president of the branch Relief Society … a calling she would hold for thirty-six years. During both world wars, Elizabeth helped to fill the gaps created when men were called into military service: She served as a missionary herself, taking tracts door to door and inviting people to talk about the gospel, as well as carrying on her responsibilities as Relief Society president – becoming, in time, the oldest and longest-serving Relief Society president in British church history.

At the District Conference (i.e., equivalent to a stake conference in a mission) of October 1946, Elizabeth was finally released from that position. Age 90, she accepted her release, then stood at the pulpit and bore her testimony yet again, urging her fellow Saints to keep the commandments. She lived another five years before going, as she had often expressed it, to her “place in celestial glory.”