Jane will always be so close to us all
Business boss cherishes links to war heroine
A Paisley businessman was amazed to discover that he had a link with Second World War heroine Jane Haining.
Miss Haining worked as secretary at Coats Mill, in Paisley, before taking up her life’s work as missionary in Hungary – a vocation that was eventually to lead to her death at Nazi death camp Auschwitz Birkenau.
And it was only recently that Marcus Dean, who owns Paisley’s Abbey Mill Business Centre, found out that Miss Haining once lived and studied in his Edinburgh home.
Even more astonishing, Mr Dean is the chairman of the Paisley Thread Mill Museum, which is located in the factory where the Church of Scotland missionary worked before moving to Budapest in 1932.
Mr Dean bought the former St Colm’s College in Edinburgh, which opened in 1909 to train women missionaries tasked with spreading the Gospel across the world. It was there that Jane Haining studied.
And he recently met Deirdre McDowell, niece of Miss Haining, when she visited the Coats factory site to pay homage to her aunt.
Mr Dean said: “We were aware of the sad circumstances of Jane’s life just after we bought the property.
“We decided to keep the chapel unaltered as we felt it had so much history, so it was something special to actually meet a living relation.”
The Church of Scotland missionary died in the Auschwitz Birkenau extermination camp in July 1944 at the age of 47.
She has been matron of the Scottish Mission boarding school in Budapest.
It was her protection of young Jewish girls in her care that led to her arrest, imprisonment and murder in the death camp in Nazioccupied Poland.
Miss Haining, of Dunscore near Dumfries, is remembered on a wooden rollcall board of Church of Scotland missionaries who died in service.
It used to hang on the wall of the chapel at St Colm’s College.
Miss Haining trained at St Colm’s from February 1932 to June 1932 and would have worshipped in the chapel.
Rev Ian Alexander, Secretary of the World Mission Council of the Church of Scotland, said: “Many who passed through St Colm’s, in its 100 years of service, recall a place of creativity and energy, of spiritual enrichment and innovative worship, of ecumenical and interfaith encounters with people from all over the world.
“It was a place where the mission workers of the church learned to share the joys and challenges of life lived in close community, something which often stood them in good stead when they went out to their posts.”
Mrs McDow e l l , f rom Londonderry, Northern Ireland, is related to Miss Haining through her mother, Agnes Haining.