The Religious Community that almost never existed...
How Adela Curtis was on the point of leaving Dorset forever and moving to Richmond
A very warm welcome to this post. I’ve had a good break and am pleased to be back with you all once again. The post that follows is an edited version of a blog which I wrote originally back in Spring 2021, when we were in one of the Covid lockdowns. We couldn’t meet real people, so I decided to go back to the time of the first community that lived here and get to know them. This post was published that March on the Dorset History Centre website, as one of their guest blog posts. I am sharing it here because it has an interesting story to tell of how Adela Curtis almost sold this land and property in the late 1920s and if she had done so, the Othona Community, of which I am part, would never have come to Dorset. It is one of those ‘what if’ scenarios!
Miss Adela Marion Curtis (1867-1960) founded a community which existed just outside Burton Bradstock for almost 30 years in the mid 20th century. The members were known locally as The White Ladies because of the flowing white robes they wore. I have been researching papers relating to Miss Curtis and the community which include:
A Chronicle of the Community, type-written by her niece, Phil Hutchinson in 1972
Letters written by Miss Curtis in the 1920s, 1930s and early 1940s to her sister Clara who was living in America
Notebooks and a diary belonging to Miss Curtis
A Prospectus for the ‘Bible Students’ Colony’, dated 1930.
Evidence has been found in this particular piece of research that when she bought the 17 acre plot of field and scrub on the south side of the Coast Road between Burton and Swyre in 1921, Miss Curtis had no intention of building a community house. Moreover, the farmhouse which she did have built on the site, she put on the market in the late 1920s. If it had sold, the history of the site, which has also been the home of the Othona Community for almost 60 years, would have been very different.
In 1921, Adela Curtis, a Christian mystic, teacher and author, was 53. Phil Hutchinson’s Chronicle states that she had moved to Dorset intending to live a life of retirement here. Adela had already had experience of leading a community at Cold Ash Common in Berkshire, called The Order of Silence, but it had recently closed and this had been a bitter blow to her.
She invited her nieces, Phil and Eve Hutchinson from New Zealand, to live with her in Dorset and by 1924, they were all living in huts on the land. Miss Curtis wanted to provide a more permanent home and in a notebook from 1926 records her intention to:
‘Build stone farmhouse for self, Phil, Eve, & Francesca as housekeeper, with two guestrooms. Keep cows & hens; & 2 sheep for spinning & wearing. Plough up the 4 acre for oats, mangolds, cabbage & clover hay. Improve grass & and hurdle off for hay. Train Daisy Esp as maid & milker.’
The building now known as Community House, was originally envisaged and built as a family home and Adela’s vision was that they would be as self-sufficient as possible here in food and clothing. In her Chronicle, Phil describes the early days of what was then known as Little Farm:
‘It had a fine dairy with thick slate shelves for dairy produce and storage shelves for bottled fruit and vegetables. Joined to the outside of the walled garden was a mouse-proof granary for storage of fresh fruit and roots and foodstuffs for the stock. This granary and the cow sheds formed the North side of a spacious enclosed yard for the cows and later goats, before they went out into pasture.’
Their life on the farm was short-lived however. The Coast Road in those days was not tarmacked, and it would have been hard to have met other people. We could imagine her nieces, Phil and Eve, young women in their 20s, wondering if they would ever establish themselves in careers or marriage if they continued to live so remotely.
On 9 June 1928, Adela wrote to her sister Clara who lived in the States, to let her know about the latest developments:
I ‘shall be camping in one little room over the bookshop… at 7 Ladbroke Road [in London]… until I can get a cottage at Richmond & move my furniture up from Dorset. I am trying to sell the house I built there as it is too lonely for Phil and Eve who want to live in London.’
If she had sold Little Farm then, neither her own Christian Contemplatives Charity, nor Othona, would have existed in this part of the country.
Adela Curtis had restarted her bible teaching whilst in Dorset and students would come and stay to attend her lectures. Whilst she was waiting for the farmhouse to be sold, Adela had let rooms in it to some of these bible students to cover the costs of maintaining the building. For whatever reason, it did not sell and the plan to move to Richmond was dropped. Miss Curtis was known for embracing change and this she did, to the extent that by 1930, she had published a Prospectus, describing the house that she had tried to get rid of just two years before, as The Bible Students’ Colony. For the second time she established a community around her and this one would flourish in the 1930s in particular. It was in this way that a family home became a community house, with the chapel and cloister added later, in 1937. Her community, the Christian Contemplatives’ Charity, became legally constituted as an independent charity in 1939.
Phil’s Chronicle continues to recount how during the Second World War, the house was requisitioned by the Army and the Sisters had to move out into small huts on the land. In another of her letters to Clara, Miss Curtis describes how they had to store the main house’s furniture in their beloved chapel. The Community did not really recover after the war and by the late 1950s Miss Curtis was the last of them to remain living on the site. She died in 1960 at the age of 92. She had stipulated that the site could not be sold but that a successor community must be found and this was how the Othona Community came to take it on from 1965, with a small resident community continuing to live here to the present day.
2021 marked the centenary of Adela Curtis’ purchase of the field and in July of that year we held an event here that celebrated her life and ministry. The talks that I gave then were recorded on zoom by Tony Jaques and they have been edited, thanks to my son Andy Howlett, and I am delighted to share the first one with you on this site. You will see that as this was in the last days of social distancing, wearing of face coverings was still part of our lives, although I stood far enough away from the audience that I could dispense with a mask whilst talking. This first session told the story of Adela Curtis’ life up to 1921. Do take a look if you would like to!
Adela Curtis: Celebrating the Centenary - Talk 1: in the year 1921