Born 6 October 1874, Horsell, Surrey, England, the first child of Richard and Isabel (nee Lillie).
Childhood with her parents, brother Marmaduke and sister Rhoda in Rangiora, Canterbury, New Zealand, under the guidance and tutelage of a governess, until after the death of her father in April 1885.
Educated at the Christchurch Girl's High School, followed by two years at the Oxford High School for Girls, Oxford, England, and one year at a boarding school near Nyon, Switzerland.
Social work in both Christchurch, helping to establish the Boys' Gordon Hall, now the boys' work component of the YMCA, and in London, doing parish work under the auspices of the Women Workers for God in South London (the Grey Ladies), an Anglican deaconess community.
Suffered pneumonia, Christmas 1902, and left the Grey Ladies. Spent several months in California and a year's convalescence in New Zealand before returning to England and keeping house for her mother in London, doing freelance social work in London and Dundee, and making frequent trips to Europe.
In Christchurch again in 1909, bought a house in Webb Street, which was later to be gifted to the Church of England for a House of Sacred Learning and the training of deaconesses.
In London during the First World War, worked with the Scout Movement, helped at the New Zealand Soldiers' Club, and assisted with many other similar efforts.
Five years after returning to New Zealand in 1919, bought a house on Cashmere Hill, overlooking Christchurch, which she shared with her friend of twenty years, Effie Henrietta Dorothy Pollen. Named the house 'Rise Cottage', in memory of Rise, the Bethell family seat in Yorkshire, England.
The ten years at Rise Cottage, until the death of Effie in November 1934, saw the production of the major part of her published poetry.
Ursula spent her last ten years living on the margins of life at the House of Sacred Learning in Webb Street, grieving her beloved Effie and then, at the eleventh hour, discovering a new friend in Kathleen Taylor, who she was able to 'let go of' into marriage with the Rev Merlin Davies in a way she had been unable to let Effie go in death.
Mary Ursula Bethell died 15 January 1945, Christchurch, of cancer of the cheek bone. Buried with her parents in the Rangiora Church of England Cemetery.
She was a woman of independent means with a social conscience in conflict with an artistic temperament.
She was a woman of high ideals who was often quite critical of those who could have been expected to achieve more.
She was a woman who attracted people to her side wherever she went, often continuing to write to the people she met on her several sea voyages to and from New Zealand, as well as on other excursions, for many years afterwards.
She was a woman with an encyclopaedic range of interests and knowledge.
She was a woman ahead of her times in her wish to see women as highly trained for the work of the Christian Church as the male clergy.
She was a patron of the arts and artists, particularly in New Zealand in the 1930s and 1940s, when a whole new sense of what it meant to be a New Zealander demanded a different poetic, musical and artistic expression.
In short, she was an amazing woman, and one I have been privileged to meet, albeit through the inevitable limitations of the written word.
"Autumn on the plains," by Anon, The Press, 17 June 1939, p. 18.
Day and night, poems 1924-1934, by the author of "Time and Place" (Christchurch, Caxton Press, 1939).
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