Rebecca Wakefield

Rebecca Wakefield (19 August 1844 – 16 July 1873) was a British Methodist missionary wife who worked and died in what is now Kenya.

Life Wakefield was born in 1844 in the Leicestershire village of Mountsorrel. Her parents were Rebecca (born Wale) and Simeon Brewin (d. 1857). Her father was a Methodist preacher and a hosier and draper. Her mother was a baker's daughter who was involved with temperance and Methodism in their well-to-do community. She was the youngest child and she had three elder brothers.

She had accepted a proposal of marriage from an old school friend who was a missionary in Ceylon but before the marriage could be arranged he died. when he died in 1879 and Reverend Edmund Butterworth who had arrived with woodworking tools that were first used to create his coffin. Thomas Wakefield married again to Elizabeth Sommers in 1882. He was to return to England where he was asked to be a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in 1889. He died in 1901.