Alice Seeley Harris

Alice, Lady Harris ( Seeley; 24 May 1870 – 24 November 1970) Alfred John, Margaret Theodora, Katherine Emmerline (known as “Bay”) and Noel Lawrence.

Alice spent many years in Frome in Somerset and died at the age of 100 in 1970 at Lockner Holt in Guildford, Surrey.

Career

In 1889, aged 19, Alice entered the Civil Service and was later appointed to the Accountant General's office in General Post Office, London. Alice gave her spare time to Frederick Brotherton Meyer's mission work at Regent's Park Chapel and later Christ Church, Lambeth.

Alice left the Civil Service to enter Doric Lodge, the training college of the Regions Beyond Missionary Union. Four days later, as her honeymoon, Alice sailed with John on the SS Cameroon to the Congo Free State as missionaries with the Congo-Balolo Mission. Leopold was partly exploiting the local population so fiercely to profit from increased rubber demand after the invention of the pneumatic or inflatable tyre by John Boyd Dunlop in Belfast in 1887. Methods of coercion included whipping, hostage-taking, rape, murder and burning of villages.