Union Chapel

Union Chapel enters the novel not through a depicted service or congregation, but through the remembered work of Mrs. Brockway, the wife of its priest. Her concern for women employed as barmaids in Calcutta gives the chapel a moral presence in the story: it is the affiliation through which a private woman’s compassion is recalled as having changed the prospects of many others.

Association with Father Brockway

In a conversation about women serving drinks in bars, Hobbs identifies Mrs. Brockway as the wife of Father Brockway of Union Chapel. The reference also connects the chapel to Frenner Brockway, their son. Sutherland had tried to learn about Frenner’s mother but found little information; what he did discover was that Frenner’s father had been a priest and that Frenner was born in Calcutta.

Mrs. Brockway and the barmaids

Hobbs remembers Mrs. Brockway as deeply troubled by the fate of Calcutta’s barmaids and says he had heard that she used to weep for them. He credits her with preventing a future in which women might serve beer or whisky in the bars of the Hotel Shahjahan and other hotels. The novel does not describe a formal campaign or specify how her intervention worked; it preserves instead the conviction that her concern helped spare many girls the hardships of bar work.

A legacy recalled after her death

Sutherland later expresses relief that the Hotel Shahjahan no longer has barmaids and gives thanks to Mrs. Brockway. By then she is dead, so he cannot visit her; he writes instead to her beloved son, Frenner Brockway. His letter turns the chapel’s brief appearance into an act of remembrance: the women whose lives Mrs. Brockway helped are unknown individually, yet Sutherland imagines their blessings resting on her. Union Chapel’s significance in this account lies in that remembered association between religious vocation, concern for vulnerable women, and a legacy carried forward by gratitude.