In the Parish Register of September 1889, there is an entry which records the baptism of Herbert Norman Stewart, who was then six weeks old. His address is given as Berryfield and FooChow, China. His parents were Robert Warren Stewart and Louisa Stewart (nee Smyly) Robert?s occupation is described as “clergyman; C.M.S. Missionary”. Rev Henry Galbraith performed the baptism.
The parents had worked in China since 1876. It seems likely therefore that their residence in Berryfield was temporary, while they were in Ireland on home leave. Herbert was their sixth child. There were three older boys already at school, and two girls, Mildred and Kathleen. Two more were born later, Evan and Hilda Sylvia. A later photograph of Herbert shows a beautiful child with abundant blond curls.
On 1st of August, 1895, on the morning of his sixth birthday, Herbert was brutally murdered, along with both his parents, his baby sister, his nurse and six other women , all CMS missionaries on holiday at Kucheng, a hill village in China. The nurse, poor woman, had left Dublin only a few weeks earlier to join the mission. She had been brought up an orphan in one of the Smyly homes. The other victims were Irish, English and Australian.
They were slaughtered for no other reason than that they were foreigners. Their killers were a band of insurgents, armed with knives and spears, calling themselves “The Vegetarians”, who were deeply suspicious of foreigners and resented the influence missionaries seemed to have on the local government. They launched their attack in the early dawn when hardly anyone was awake or dressed, then afterwards fired the houses and vanished back into the bamboo thickets. Most of the women died instantly, but there were survivors. Mildred and Kathleen had been out picking flowers to decorate Herbert?s birthday breakfast table. They ran to hide, were caught , beaten and wounded, but somehow were left still alive. Mildred had such a severe wound to her knee that she could not walk. Unable to see the children in the carnage outside, Kathleen, then aged eleven, ran into the burning house to look for them. She found Lena, the nurse, already dead, apparently sheltering the baby, who had been stabbed in the eye. She carried the child out and laid her on the ground and ran back for Herbert, terribly wounded and dying. Evan , then three years old, was cut and bruised, but not seriously hurt. Kathleen enlisted the help of a Chinese neighbour to help carry the family to find refuge in a wood, where two other women had found shelter, badly cut and traumatised. Herbert died in a few hours and the baby some days later. The remains of the parents and the nurse were incinerated in the house fire.
The massacre caused widespread horror and disbelief, and deep emotional shock to missionary communities. International outrage ensured that the culprits were eventually executed, though the missions felt that the matter would have been better confronted with the gospel than the axe.
Mrs Stewart?s sister, Ellen Smyly, travelled to China to bring the three orphans home to Dublin. Ellen at once launched an appeal for more women to volunteer to go out in place of those lost. There was no lack of a response both in money and personnel. Indeed, Powerscourt parish (and no doubt many others) donated money for decades to the Chinese Mission in Fukien, to help the “Bible Women” carry on their task for Jesus Christ.