Miss Holmes-Orr has always been kind, but firm. One girl had lived at the school from the age of three or four; her mother and brothers had been wiped out by typhoid a few years before the South African War.

Miss Holmes-Orr has faced challenge after challenge with stoicism and true grit, but her financial burdens seem insurmountable. Ageing and worn out, she begins to pin her hopes on the newly established Anglican Diocese of Johannesburg taking over St Mary’s and turning it into a Church school. She is not quite out of the woods yet. The school’s numbers continue to dwindle and the Diocese does not see its way clear to taking on the burden.

The school faces imminent collapse, with only 13 pupils remaining. Finally, the Sisters of St Margaret, an order from East Grinstead in England, agree to take charge and the school now falls under the patronage of the Anglican Diocese.