Agnes Weston

Dame Agnes Elizabeth Weston, GBE (26 March 1840 – 23 October 1918), also known as Aggie Weston, was an English philanthropist noted for her work with the Royal Navy.

Born in London, the daughter of a barrister, Weston was influenced from her teenage years onward by the Rev 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 three Royal Sailors' Rests (two in Plymouth and one in Portsmouth), or clubs for sailors, by the start of the First World War. She published a monthly magazine, Ashore and Afloat, and established temperance societies on naval ships. 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 at age 78 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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