Ruth Alice Fisher
Ruth Alice Fisher, née Hurditch (1875-1959), sometimes referred to as Ruth B. Fisher, was a British CMS missionary to Uganda. Her Times obituarist labelled her "one of the great Victorians". Life Ruth Hurditch was born in Marylebone in 1875, the sixth child of an evangelical missioner, C. Russell Hurditch. She helped her father organize mass meetings in Exeter Hall. In 1900 – despite a Cockney accent which led to some opposition from the Ladies' Consultative Committee – she travelled to Toro, Uganda to work for the Church Missionary Society. In On the Borders of Pygmy Land (1904), Fisher described the women of Toro "before the advent of Christianity", in terms which are clearly freighted with gender, class and imperial expectations: In 1902, she married the Rev. Arthur Bryan Fisher, another CMS missionary whom she met at Kabarole. The couple moved to Bunyoro, where she became interested in local history and began to collect oral folk tales. She published her collection as Twilight Tales of the Black Baganda (1911). After returning to England, she acted as unpaid curate to her husband, in Leeds, south London and Sussex parishes. She had six children, including the clergyman and writer A. S. T. Fisher.