Lady Ruth Beall Kempthorne
A Remarkable Life
Bishop Leonard Stanley Kempthorne & Lady Ruth Evelyn Beall Kempthorne.
Ruth Evelyn Beall Kempthorne (1896 - 1977)
Mrs. Kempthorne, the former Ruth Beall of Newman, was an extraordinary individual who gravitated to an extraordinary position in society despite (or perhaps because of) her very humble upbringing in the earlier years of our rural community.
Ruth Evelyn Beall was born in Sanger, California to John and Marie Beall on October 31, 1896. In 1906 the family moved to Newman where her father took up employment as a creamery operator. While growing up in Newman, Ruth attended Newman schools graduating from Orestimba High School in 1916 (trivia: Ruth's high school graduation ceremony was held at the "Star Theater", a silent movie venue which was owned by her father John Henry "J. H." Beall and her uncle Gustav "Gus" Johnson, the old Star Theater building is currently occupied by the "Newman Food Center" on Fresno Street).
Ruth Beall married Ernest Raymond Bagby in 1917, together they settled in Stockton, CA. After the Bagby marriage ended she met and married an Australian (in 1929, Honolulu Hawaii) by the name of George Spence Wride after which the couple moved to Sydney Australia. Sadly, after just one year, Wride took his own life. Soon thereafter, in 1931, Ruth met and married the Bishop of Polynesia, Leonard Stanley Kempthorne. As related in the text that follows in this article, the couple established, as instructed by the church, a home in the city of Suva on the island of Fiji in the South Pacific, living there together until 1963 when the Bishop passed away.
During their life in Fiji, with the Bishop being the designated representative of the Church of England in Polynesia, the couple met and welcomed a number of heads of state to their home and to their church, most notably the future King of England, George VI and later, his daughter, Queen Elizabeth II.
Bishop Leonard Kempthorne welcomes Queen Elizabeth II to Suva, Fiji, December 18th, 1953.
The Queen bestowed the Bishop with the title CBE (Commander of the British Empire) during this same 1953 visit to Suva, Fiji.
Mrs. Kempthorne's January 13, 1977 Obituary
Former Newman resident Ruth Beall Kempthorne, 80, passed away Saturday in an Episcopalian rest home in Valle Verde, near Santa Barbara.
Mrs. Kempthorne was a 1916 graduate of Orestimba High School. She is survived by her two brothers, Ernest Beall of Newman and Cmdr. Elvyn J. Beall of Modesto.
Mrs. Kempthorne was the wife of Archbishop Kempthorne. She and her husband were assigned to the Fiji Islands for many years. Bishop Kempthorne once preached in the Orestimba Presbyterian Church on a visit to Newman.
She was born in Sanger, Fresno County, in 1896, the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. J. H. Beall, an early creamery operator.
Bishop Leonard Stanley Kempthorne CBE (1886 - 1963)
From a diocese "Centennial" booklet:
When he formally retired as Bishop in Polynesia in 1961, Leonard Kempthorne was the longest serving Bishop in the whole Anglican Communion. By all accounts he was a gentleman in all senses of the word. One diocesan official for example described him as a “Christian and a gentle man, who loved easily after the example of his Lord; slow to rage, gentle in reproof, always a friend, and certainly long suffering".
He came from a family of clerics. He was born in 1887 in Nelson, New Zealand, where his father later became archdeacon. After study at Oxford in England and serving as a missionary in West Africa, he was ordained priest in 1914. He later served as a missionary in Malaya and was also for 4 years as domestic chaplain to the Bishop of Lichfield in England, who just happened to be his cousin!
According to Kempthorne's later recollection, out of the blue he received a letter from the Archbishop of Canterbury inviting him to accept the See of Polynesia. No one he knew could tell him much about it, but one important ecclesiastical, whose advice seemed more knowledgeable than anyone else's wrote advising him not to accept. But that letter went astray and only reached Kempthorne some six months after he was established in Suva!
These contacts gave him a rich field of potential supporters to draw on after he was consecrated Bishop in 1923. Soon after his arrival in Suva, he began the series of Quarterly Gazettes, through which he aimed to help all the workers in this very spread-out Diocese stay in touch with each other, but also to appeal to supporters, especially in England and New Zealand for "prayers, persons, and pounds in Polynesia".
Kempthorne's personal links with New Zealand made it relatively easy for the Province of New Zealand to accept the Diocese of Polynesia, like the Diocese of Melanesia. In 1925, the Archbishop of New Zealand visited the Diocese to mark this status, and to attend the first Synod of the Diocese.
Because bishops are usually persons of "riper years", it is rare for a Bishop to be married in his own cathedral, especially for a first marriage. But it has happened for two of the five bishops of Polynesia! The first was Bishop Kempthorne, who met his wife Ruth in Suva, and married her in 1930, when he was still only 43 years old. She was originally from America, and although she was about the same age as him, it was her third marriage. Her first two husbands had each committed suicide (Editor's note: Ruth Kempthorne's first husband, Ernest Bagby, did not commit suicide), which gave rise to a bit of speculation in Suva society about Bishop Kempthorne's prospects. But as it turned out, the couple enjoyed over 30 years of married life before his death in 1963. Bishop Kempthorne's remains are now interred in the Holy Trinity Cathedral, of which the first stage was built during his episcopate.
Holy Trinity Cathedral in Suva, Fiji. Photo: Matthias Süßen