Wilfrid Gore Browne

Wilfrid Gore BrowneThis is the correct spelling of his name, as indicated inter alia on his tomb stone, West End Cemetery, Kimberley – buried 16 March 1928; as well as in his Church Times obituary He was described as a saintly bishop with "a keen sense of humour" and "a winning courtesy."

Early life and education Gore Browne was born in Auckland, New Zealand, the youngest of the family of Col Sir Thomas Gore Browne. He spent his early years in New Zealand where his father was Governor. He was educated, with his brother Frank Gore Browne, K.C., at Harrow School (from 1873) and at Trinity College, Cambridge where he took his degree in 1881. Before his ordination Gore Browne enlisted with the 11th Hussars for six months "with the object of getting experience which would help him in his work among men."

Bishop of Kimberley and Kuruman Promotion to the episcopate came in 1912 following his election as the first bishop of Kimberley and Kuruman, a vast, newly established diocese, in extent, carved out of the existing Diocese of Bloemfontein, with a portion from the Diocese of Cape Town, and half of Bechuanaland Protectorate which had until then been administered as part of the Diocese of Mashonaland (Southern Rhodesia). He was consecrated at Bloemfontein Cathedral on 29 June 1912. "The brilliant copes and mitres of the consecrating bishops, the banners, crosses, pastoral staffs, the music of trumpet and organ, gave a glorious feeling of preparation for warfare. It was the Church Militant in South Africa gathered around a new commander, to invest him with its authority, to equip him for his command." Soon the work organising the new diocese was presenting immense difficulties. His dean, T.C. Robson was away ill, leaving the cathedral in his hands. "Native work" needed to be developed but there were no funds. With the outbreak of war in 1914 the Kimberley mines were shut down, causing huge loss of jobs; further afield in the diocese "droughts seemed almost continuous" and "poverty irremediable."

Gore Browne's watercolours Bishop Wilfrid Gore Browne was an accomplished watercolourist who left a sizeable collection of painted studies (and sketches) of Africans with whom he met or engaged in the Kimberley mine compounds and during his travels around his vast diocese. Hailed as being of importance as ethnographic record by A.J.H. Goodwin, they depart from stereotype and, unusually for the era, sensitively depict real individual and often named personalities from the margins of South African society. The collection is preserved at the McGregor Museum in Kimberley, and was show-cased in a patronal festival exhibition at the cathedral under Dean Thomas Stanage in 1976 and in an exhibition opened by Dean Brian Beck of St Cyprian's at the William Humphreys Art Gallery in 2003.