On 7 June 1891, Reverend Mother Ignace Pollenus, the Superior of the Religious of the Christian Instruction in Ghent, Belgium, arrived in Sherborne with seven nuns to establish a Roman Catholic community in Westbury in a former Sherborne School boarding house.
The Order had many English students in Ghent whose parents wanted them to open a school in England, with the result that in June 1891 the Order opened St Antony’s Convent School in Sherborne, offering to young ladies the opportunity of a high class education ‘with Continental advantages’.
Later, junior and preparatory schools were opened which local Anglican girls and boys could attend. The schools proved very successful and in 1948 the senior school moved to Leweston Manor, where they were joined in 1993 by the younger children.
The Church of the Sacred Heart and St Aldhelm was built in the grounds of the convent and opened in April 1894.
Early members of the community are buried in the Roman Catholic sector of Sherborne cemetery where some of their headstone can be found and also where there is a collective monument to those sisters who died between 1892 and 1953.
Rachel Hassall