Mrs. Brockway

Mrs. Brockway is remembered in Calcutta as an advocate for women who might otherwise have worked as bar hostesses. The wife of the pastor of Union Chapel, she left a legacy described not through direct action witnessed in the narrative but through the testimony of people who connect her compassion to the absence of women serving alcohol in the city’s hotels.

Identity and Remembrance

In conversation with Sutherland, Hobbs recalls Mrs. Brockway as the person best placed to answer a question about women serving in bars. The subject carries him back to a distant past, and he speaks of those days as gone for good. His recollection makes her a link to an older history of Calcutta’s bars, one that the present-day hotel can no longer readily explain.

The account supplies little personal biography beyond her marriage to the pastor of Union Chapel. Instead, it gives shape to her character through a repeated image of concern: Hobbs has heard that she used to weep for the women. Her sympathy is presented as sincere and focused on the hardships attached to bar work, rather than as a matter of social convention.

Concern for Bar Hostesses

Hobbs gives her concern a concrete consequence. He imagines that without Mrs. Brockway’s intervention, women might still be serving beer or whisky in the bars of the Hotel Shahjahan and other hotels. His remark is counterfactual, not a detailed account of a campaign, so the narrative does not specify what she did or how she persuaded others. It does, however, preserve the belief that her efforts helped prevent women from being drawn into that work.

Sutherland later expresses relief that the hotel bar no longer employs hostesses and directs his gratitude toward Mrs. Brockway. He believes that she spared many women a life of hardship as barmaids. By connecting a present-day employment practice to her earlier concern, his account turns her private compassion into a remembered civic influence.

Legacy

By the time Sutherland reflects on her, Mrs. Brockway has died. Unable to visit her, he has written to her son, Frenner Brockway, and imagines that the blessings of many unknown women rest upon her. The tribute enlarges her legacy beyond the recollections of Hobbs and Sutherland: the women she sought to protect may never have known her, yet their unrecorded gratitude is central to how her life is remembered.

Mrs. Brockway remains a figure known through absence: the women are no longer behind the hotel bar, and she is no longer alive to be thanked in person. The narrative offers no account of her methods or private life, but the contrast between the vanished practice and the continuing gratitude gives her remembered concern lasting force.