Mother Teresa Walsh and Mother Francis Gerard - Mother Evangelista O’Donnell
Mother Anna Kennedy (Judy) and Mother Bernadette Warnock - Mother Colette Hooper Mother Paula McCorry and Consuelo Conroy
Mother Teresa Walsh was the Spanish Provincial and Mother Peter Claver’s sister. This was the first time the Gibraltar nuns had been able to visit Castilleja since before the War. Now the Spanish Province was able to work again on the completion of the holiday house in Chipiona, which they had bought in November 1928. After the foundations had been laid work was interrupted by the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath. The house was used by the Spanish Province for the first time in 1945, seventeen years after the land was first acquired.
After 1946 the Gibraltar nuns began to spend part of their summer holidays in Chipiona with the nuns from the Spanish Province. At school in Gibraltar on the first day of Term after the summer holidays the girls were always fascinated by the nuns’ sun-tanned (sometimes sun-burned!) faces against their white coifs.
In 1948 Mother Francis Gerard resigned as Head of Loreto High. She had completed her mission of establishing the Girls’ Grammar School, putting it on a solid footing that went with it to the end of its history. Mother Evangelista O’Donnell, another outstanding woman, took her place.
Handsome, socially and personally full of giftedness, she was amongst the most promising headmistresses we had in the Province, a great educator, full of ideas and imagination and ready to take risks. That suited us down to the ground because immediately Judy (Mother Anna Kennedy) and I got down to producing “The Quaker Girl” and we did it with fifteen-year-olds; we had to leave out those who were taking the School Leaving Certificate and depend on the younger group. But they rose magnificently to the challenge and “The Quaker Girl” was a rip-roaring success, the talk of the town for days afterwards
The Quaker Girl - Edwardian musical comedy by James T. Tanner
Mother Evangelista will be remembered by everybody for the development which took place in her time, not only academic, but also in the whole area of Sport and Drama, those extras that are the heart and soul of a great school. I would remember especially, as Sister Consuelo would remember, the big Sports Days, the getting of the new green uniform… That’s why we were called “the Green School!
Mother Bernadette Warnock and Mother Colette Hooper spent Christmas 1949 with their Spanish friends at Castilleja.
