Career
Born as Phyllis Kirkus in York, she was a historian of English convent life whose own biographical work has provided research tools for historians of the English recusant period. Sister Gregory presided over a collection of antique books, artefacts and manuscripts at the Bar Convent in York, the oldest convent in England, and a girls" school from 1686 to 1985. She gained a place at Newnham College, Cambridge in 1929, eight years after the university voted against conferring its degrees on women.
Training in librarianship, her application for a post at Southampton University was thwarted by a pilfering office boy who destroyed her letter.
She later ascribed this disaster to divine providence, as it led to a job in the University of Hull, where she explored her growing sense of a vocation to religious life. Phyllis" Anglican family was not accepting of either her conversion or her decision to enter religious life, yet she did so anyway.
Entering the novitiate, she took the religious name Sister Gregory. The outbreak of World World War II necessitated the temporary evacuation of Saint Mary"s Convent, Hampstead, where she was teaching, to the East Sussex mansion of Lady Catherine Ashburnham.
After a second evacuation, the school found a permanent new home at Coombe House, Shaftesbury, in 1945.
As headmistress of Saint Mary"s School, Shaftesbury, Sister Gregory determined to run an exemplary school for women of the future. This was during the turmoil of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965). With the help of educator (and Catholic convert), Doctor Margaret Wileman, Sister Gregory administered educational programmes for her own province and two international summer schools where sisters from around the world, responsible for running schools around the world.
Her influence as an educator encouraged improvements which enabled the Bar Convent Grammar School, and Street Mary"s Schools in Hampstead, Ascot, Shaftesbury and Cambridge, to successfully evolve to schools administered by laypersons.
Around 1981 set up the Bar Convent Museum, archives and library. She wrote numerous sketches of school and convent life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for the Catholic Record Society.
She died, aged 96, on the feast-day of Saint Margaret Clitherow, like Ward and Kirkus, a Yorkshirewoman, whose relics are kept in the Bar Convent chapel.