Catherine Spence

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Catherine Stafford Spence, author and teacher, was born on the 16th of July, 1823 in Lerwick. She was the fifth of twelve children born to William Spence, a surgeon in Lerwick (b.3.9.1782, Hamar, Unst) and his wife Jane Fea (b.1792, Hull). The family are recorded in the 1841 census as resident at the Hillhead, Lerwick.

Catherine Spence was educated by Moravians in the Lerwick Subscription School, and became a teacher for the rest of her life. Unmarried, she taught in private schools, some her own; was a governess for several years to a Shetland clergyman; and became headmistress briefly at a reformatory in Perth. In 1875 she became female principal of the Church of Scotland College at Madras, India, and in the 1880s taught at a board school in New Zealand.

In her late sixties she returned to Shetland, and became headmistress at schools in West Yell and Gulberwick. Her log book for Gulberwick survives in the Shetland Museum and Archives: each entry, unusually, is an account of her teaching methods, and her efforts to teach Scandinavian history to pupils.

Catherine Spence was a gifted translator, from Danish, Dutch, Italian and other languages. She tackled theology and novels, and in old age Jakob Jakobsen’s great dictionary of the Norn language in Shetland. Her little book Earl Rognvald and his Forebears (1896) is an attractive introduction to Shetland’s Viking history. She edited the letters and papers of Arthur Laurenson (1901).

A local newspaper celebrated Catherine Spence’s ability ‘to fight the world almost unaided and alone’ – ‘by sheer force of the character which strenuous work, a hard fight, and high ideals inevitably produce, [she] has left a name and memorial’.

She died on the 21st of September, 1906 in North Yell: obituaries in the Shetland Times and Shetland News, 29 September 1906