Kathleen Peach (1912-2012) née Houghton was born in north London and educated at a Roman Catholic school. While hearing a sermon at the age of 15 she was convinced she should become a missionary, and, following study at a college in Warminster, she was sent by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel to Borneo in 1939. Her future husband, John Peach (1911-94), studied at Warminster at the same time, and although they met in 1934 they did not marry for another ten years.
Kathleen was teaching at St Mary’s School, Kuching, when war reached the area in December 1941 and she needed to escape. It was a close-run thing, and she was only allowed onto an already-full plane to Java because the pilot refused to fly without her. From Java she was able to get a boat to South Africa through the good offices of the wife of the British Consul.
John, by then ordained and serving as a chaplain in the Middle East, joined Kathleen in South Africa and they married in Johannesburg in June 1944. Following a spell in the UK, where Kathleen undertook some teaching and John served a curacy in Essex, both returned to Borneo in 1950. In 1951 Kathleen was appointed Principal of St Mary’s, then the largest girls’ school in the country, and she used her position to redesign the curriculum and introduce more modern teaching methods.
Following a further period of separation, when John went back to the UK to raise money for a new cathedral in Kuching, the couple returned to the UK for good in 1956. John was inducted into St John’s in the September, and, as was often the case at the time, Kathleen served as an ‘unpaid curate’. She was involved in many activities and committees at the church, and had responsibility for running the vicarage.
Leaving Bury in 1968, John served at Ipswich, where Kathleen trained and worked with the Samaritans. On retirement in 1975 the couple moved to live in Wells in Somerset, where Kathleen was able to indulge her love of gardening while caring for her husband and giving talks about her work in Borneo and South Africa. John died on their Golden Wedding anniversary, 15 June 1994. Kathleen survived until her hundredth year.