Interview
Britain’s first female peacetime firefighter, who is also a nun and has run Wormwood Scrubs Pony Centre in London for more than three decades, tells Julie Harding about her extraordinary life
Sister Mary Joy Langdon on her extraordinary life as a nun, running Wormwood Scrubs Pony Centre in London and being the first female firefighter
MARY JOY LANGDON is wearing jeans and a thick jumper. It is a cold winter’s day, so why wouldn’t she? After all, she runs Wormwood Scrubs Pony Centre (WSPC) and a vast chunk of her life is spent in the great outdoors (or standing relatively still while coaching children in a cold, cavernous indoor school).
However, Mary Joy has a slightly unusual prefix — it isn’t Miss, Mrs or Ms. She is Sister Mary Joy, a member of the Roman Catholic congregation Sisters of the Infant Jesus, but today there is no evidence of a coif secured by a wimple and no tunic covered by a scapular and cowl.
“I don’t look like your typical nun. I’ve never had a habit,” admits the 70-year-old. “I’m just a stable girl. You’ll always see me in jeans or jodhpurs.”
There are other things about Mary Joy that are less than conventional. In the 1970s she joined East Sussex Fire & Rescue, becoming the first female in Britain (and Europe) in peacetime to officially fight fires. That was followed a decade later
by the foundation of WSPC. Not out of the ordinary in itself, but how many nuns do you know who run a riding establishment?
The pony centre grew in the shadow of Wormwood Scrubs Prison, an irony in that the humanitarian Mary Joy has almost shared the same air as some-time inmates Moors murderer Ian Brady and Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe. Has there ever been a more disparate pairing of buildings, with the stables and their equine residents and the imposing indoor school filled with kindness and gentleness, as experienced by thousands of children down the years, both able-bodied and those with mental and physical challenges. Multiple sclerosis. Epilepsy. Down’s syndrome. Cerebral palsy. Sister Mary Joy and her various ponies have helped those local to the centre with such challenges, be that on the ground with pony therapy or in the saddle.
“Children come to a simple place. It’s old fashioned, but the young people who have passed through here have benefited in so many ways. There is such a purpose for the centre, and there’s even more need for it now with emotional and psychological difficulties on the increase.”
There are currently 17 equine residents — three horses, including a Welsh Cob, three small ponies (two Welsh, one Shetland), plus several 14.2hh Camargues, one Arab and two donkeys — but they have all been out of work for most of the year due to the pandemic. Few young human hearts, then, have leapt at the sight of a grey, bay, piebald, or black face looking out over a door on the yard in the past 12 months.
“The ponies went away last spring, came back in August and were used for five weeks in September/october before we were plunged into more lockdowns,” explains Mary Joy.
Covid has been the biggest challenge in the centre’s history.
“All staff are furloughed to a certain degree, and we’re doing Just Giving and Crowdfunding. No one is going hungry and we have enough food in the store, but hay is very expensive — you have to get it into London— and so our ponies are mostly on haylage.
“When the ponies went out to grass last spring, it was so sad to see the empty stables and the lack of buzz from the children,” says Mary Joy, who, with other members of staff, has been having to keep the equines busy over the winter because the turnout field has been under water. “We run them in the school and lunge them and, when it’s possible, we get as many people riding them as we can.”
Back in 1989 there were no stables, school, or fencing in this place. The first Christmas after Mary Joy started the centre, this openness led to gypsies stealing the ponies.
“A man from the council rang on Christmas Eve and told me that the ponies had been found, so I cycled to their location to get them back. But then I wondered where I was going to leave them over Christmas and luckily I was offered the girls’ changing rooms at the local sports stadium!
“After that the stables were put up by volunteers using second hand timber sourced from skips. We fund-raised to buy the fencing.”
In those early days there was just an outdoor school in which riders would swelter in the summer and freeze in the winter. A volunteer called in the cavalry in the form of Anneka Rice and a raft of builders, and they all descended on Wormwood Scrubs and built a giant indoor within the obligatory 72 hours that made up every Challenge Anneka — one of the most watched programmes on the
BBC at the time, which attracted around 11 million viewers at its peak. In the final scene Sister Mary Joy can be seen with tears cascading down her face, deeply touched by the generosity of so many people she had never even met and whose names she didn’t know.
“I wondered where I was going to leave [the ponies] over Christmas and luckily I was offered the girls’ changing rooms at the local sports stadium”
One day in the mid-1980s, following a visit to her family’s home in Battle, Sussex, Mary Joy was driving along the Tonbridge bypass when, in the distance, a vehicle flipped up into the air and somersaulted multiple times. There was a violent meeting of metal on tarmac as it slid to a halt on its roof. Mary Joy stopped her own car, ran across the dual carriageway and expected to find a driver who hadn’t survived. Instead she found a man, Steve, very much alive, but trapped.
“There were flames coming from the underside of the car, which was now at the top,” says Mary Joy. “The door was buckled and when I found that I couldn’t open it myself, I stopped a passing motorist — several others had sailed past without stopping to assist. I asked this man to help me open the door. He did so and then promptly drove off! Within