Eileen Caddy - Early Life

Early Life

She was born Eileen Marion Jessop in Alexandria, Egypt, the second of four children of Albert Jessop, an Irishman, and the director of Barclays Bank DCO, her mother Muriel was English. At six she was sent to school in Ireland, where she lodged with an aunt, and returned to Egypt in the holidays. When she was 16, her father died in Egypt of peritonitis and her family moved back to England, though tragedy struck again, when two years later her mother too died of meningitis. Thereafter she was educated at a domestic college, and later bought and ran a pub at an RAF base in Oxfordshire, with her brother for four years.

Soon she met an RAF officer, Squadron Leader Andrew Combe, whom she married in 1939, just months before the beginning of the Second World War, subsequently she travelled to London, American with him and lastly to Iraq and had a son and four daughters. Combe was a follower of the group called Moral Rearmament (MRA), and insisted that his wife follow the traditions of the group, and joined group’s "quiet times" during which they would listen divine guidance. Though diffident at the time towards the practices which she found restrictive, she later acknowledged the importance of her early attunement to 'quiet times' and 'listening to inner guidance', became an important milestone on her spiritual journey.