Bow Church The Emma Bussell Warren Window
This window on the south wall of the nave is in memory of Emma Warren and seven of her children who died under the age of five. She was born in about 1814 in Berbice, part of British Guyana, in South America. Her parents were Frances Bussell (whose father had been Mayor of Exeter) and Jan Jacob de Mey, a Dutchman who owned a slave-run coffee plantation in that colony. Both her parents died when she was four years old. She was then brought to her relatives in Exeter. In 1841 she married William Robert Warren. From 1844 to 1868 he was a doctor in Bow, living at Winsor House on the main street. They had ten children, although only three survived to adulthood.
In 1856 Emma Warren died aged 42 of scarlet fever.
The window, made in 1868 by Beer of Exeter, represents her as a mother surrounded by seven children. (Click on image below for more detail.) It was erected by her only surviving daughter Frances Hicks Andrews, who also commissioned another window in the church to the memory of her three children.
by Peter Selley