Old photograph of a shop in the village of Forgue, Aberdeenshire, Scotland. John Fordyce was born on 7 March 1819 at Forgue, the fourth son of James Fordyce and Ann, née Adam. Following study at the University of Edinburgh, he became a schoolteacher at Kelso and was a Free Church of Scotland elder and preacher there, closely associated with Reverend. Horatius Bonar, in the 1840s. By 1851 he had entered New College, Edinburgh, to study theology, and he was teaching at a private ladies’ academy in the city in 1852. During or prior to this period he came to the notice of Rev. Dr Alexander Duff who contrived his appointment, by the Free Church Ladies’ Committee for the Promotion of Female Education in India, as Superintendent of the Calcutta Female Institution. Fordyce arrived in Calcutta in late 1852 with both responsibility for the Female Institution, an orphanage that clothed, fed and taught native girls aged between 3 and 16, and a mandate generally to “ elevate Native Female Education. " He launched the female education initiative in India known as the Zenana Missions. He has been credited with introducing the rickshaw to India. Due to his wife’s ill health, Fordyce returned to Scotland in 1856, but his scheme was continued across India by a large number of missionaries’ wives. He died on 23 November 1902 in Cambridge and is buried with his wife at St Andrew's church in Chesterton.
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