Aggie Weston

Dame Agnes E. Weston, GBE (26 March 1840 – 23 October 1918), popularly known as Aggie Weston or Ma Weston, was an English philanthropist noted for her work among sailors in the Royal Navy.

Weston was born in London, the daughter of a barrister. From her teenage years she was influenced by the Reverend James Fleming. In 1868 she took up hospital visiting and parish work in Bath, and through beginning a correspondence with a seaman who asked her to write to him, developed into the devoted friend of sailors, superintendent of the Royal Naval Temperance Society and co-founder (with Sophia Wintz) of the Royal Sailors' Rests, or clubs for sailors, at Devonport and Portsmouth. She published Life Among the Bluejackets in 1909.

In June 1918 her work for the Royal Navy was publicly recognised when she was appointed Dame Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire (GBE). On her death in Devonport she became the first woman ever given a full ceremonial Royal Navy funeral.

Charles Causley's first collection of poems, Farewell, Aggie Weston (1951) contained his "Song of the Dying Gunner A.A.1":

Farewell, Aggie Weston, the Barracks at Guz,
Hang my tiddley suit on the door
I'm sewn up neat in a canvas sheet
And I shan't be home no more.

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