Wellesley Bailey

Wellesley C Bailey was the founder of international charity The Leprosy Mission. In India in the 1860s he witnessed the severe consequences of the disease and vowed to make caring for those with leprosy his life work. The Mission he established all those years ago is still active today.

Wellesley Bailey was born in Ireland in 1846. He grew up in Abbeyleix, Queens County where his father was an estate manager for the Cosby family. The Baileys earned enough to send Wellesley and his three brothers to boarding school at Kilkenny College.

Ireland in the 1840s and '50s was a tough environment to grow up in – the country was immersed in the potato famine. Over one million people emigrated from Ireland during the late 1840s. North America and the colonies were the favoured destinations of those who could afford to leave.

It is not surprising then that Wellesley himself dreamed of finding a new, more promising life, in distant lands. In 1866 he set out to find his fortune in the goldfields of Australia.

Three years later he returned to Dublin, his ambitions unfulfilled. But it wasn't long before he was setting sail again. One of his brothers was serving in the police force in India and invited Wellesley to join him. Always on the look out for a challenge, Wellesley departed for Faizabad, North East India, in 1869.

Although Wellesley Bailey had gone to a Church of Ireland church as a child, he'd never particularly taken the Christian faith seriously. That was until he found himself at the start of a voyage that was to take him a long way from home. In Gravesend, fog delayd the departure of his ship bound for Australia. Remembering his childhood girlfriend's request to him before he left to attend church whenever he could, he stopped by one Sunday at Gravesend Parish church. There, he says he had a sense of God's presence in a way he'd never known before and he committed his life to Christ.

When Wellesley reached India in 1869, his brother had been moved to the north west of the country and he found himself alone in a strange land. He put aside his original intention to join the police and instead focused his energies on learning Hindi.

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