SISTER FLORENCE was the last of the Oxford Mission Sisterhood of the Epiphany still in India. The sisterhood was founded in 1903, when the Anglican Brotherhood of the Epiphany, which had been working among India’s poorest in Calcutta since 1880, decided that it must have “ladies” to help it.

1903 was also the year of Sister Florence’s birth, so her remarkable century of life spanned the whole of the sisterhood’s history to date. She was first of all a nurse, and did not feel a call to the mission field until she was more than 40. In 1946 she sailed for India to find a new life dedicated to the service of God’s poor and a new use for her medical skills.

Florence Bell was born to parents with a great admiration for Florence Nightingale, after whom she was named. A nursing career was the obvious choice, and in 1926 she began her training at the King George V Hospital, Ilford. She enjoyed her time there, and remembered vividly the excitement of the visit to the hospital in the 1930s of the Duke of York, who was afterwards King George VI, and his Duchess. During the war she was in charge of a casualty station in the East London docks, a heavily bombed area

The call to a religious life in India came to her late. At first she resisted the message of a visiting preacher from the Brotherhood: “I was a comfort-loving creature — I liked nice undies,” she wrote. “I thought, quietly, comfortably, ‘Of course I am too old’. But, strangely, the inner push went on.”

Father Whitcombe, BE, made short work of at least one of her worries: “I remember him looking me up and down . . . and saying, ‘You do not look too old to me’.” He sent her firmly to the London office of the Oxford Mission. The Mother Superior in India, when told of her interest, sent a telegram: “Send her at once!”

Sister Florence’s medical qualifications were soon tested. Within three weeks of her arrival in the heat and dust of Calcutta, she was sent out to the villages to deal, almost single-handed and with very few facilities, with an outbreak of smallpox.

Short but sturdy, and full of determination, she threw herself into the work. She was horrified by the conditions; having been used in hospital to a laid trolley with everything to hand, she found she had little to use in treating the patients, and had to ask for such basic requirements as cotton wool and powder. Even the local doctor refused to accompany her into one hut, and at first she and the sister with her had to do everything, including burials.

There were lighter moments. She acquired oranges and lemons for the patients, but was shocked by the way that they simply dropped the peel on the ground. With no Bengali as yet, she would go round saying: “Pick it up at once!” Cheeky little boys, when they saw her approaching on the road, would cry: “Here she comes! Pick it up! Pick it up!”

She looked after the health and welfare of the brothers and sisters, as well as the staff and boys on the Oxford Mission compound. But her main work for many years was with leprosy patients, whom she picked up off the pavements of the city and tended with care and loving kindness. When she was too old for this work, she carried on serving the poor through her helpers in any way she could.

It was formidable work. Sister Florence dressed the lepers’ diseased limbs — a call to supporters in Britain brought her bales of used tights to keep the dressings in place — and tried to give them hope. She started a friends’ fund and bought prostheses for those who had lost limbs.

Her work was not unrecognised. In 1987 she received Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother’s Award for Outstanding Service in the nursing profession. And two years later she was invited to Clarence House to meet the Queen she had so admired as Duchess of York. She was made to feel quite at home. “We were just like two old ladies taking tea together anywhere”.

In later years, too old for active work, she used her friends’ fund to send poor villagers and pavement-dwellers food and clothing. She started Poor Children’s Music Chance, to provide talented youngsters with violins and tuition and to help with living expenses. She watched tenderly over the little boys in the Oxford Mission’s orphanage who had always been her especial care. Living simply in her cottage in the compound, and very deaf by then, she remained keenly interested in the outside world and listened to the BBC World Service at top volume. Friends would be addressed at length, with only the need for a nod and a smile in reply. She loved them all, enjoyed letters telling her their family news, and remembered faultlessly the ages and characteristics of their children and grandchildren.

Her 100th birthday was celebrated with a tremendous party at the mission. There were tributes in Calcutta papers and on local television, and even the Marxist chairman of the West Bengal Left Front Committee sent a greeting. But she was amazed at all the fuss — “Such an ordinary little person” — and simply thanked God for His blessing in sending her to care for the poor in that beloved land.

Sister Florence, SE, Anglican missionary, was born on June 28, 1903. She died on April 17, 2004, aged 100.