[1][3] A correspondent describing his pioneer work at St Hilda's mission in a slum district of Darlington wrote of "a sheer spiritual romance, full of interest, delight and humour.
The writer remembers finding a dying child in a filthy bed in a slum, playing with the gold watch and chain which he had left for its amusement.
Guests at the clergy house were liable at any time to sit down to high tea between an earl and a thief fresh from prison.
[8] "The brilliant copes and mitres of the consecrating bishops, the banners, crosses, pastoral staffs, the music of trumpet and organ, gave a glorious feeling of preparation for warfare.
With the outbreak of war in 1914 the Kimberley mines were shut down, causing huge loss of jobs; further afield in the diocese "droughts seemed almost continuous" and "poverty irremediable.
[7] During sixteen years in Kimberley and Kuruman Bishop Gore Browne is recorded as having visited and ministered in every part of his far-flung diocese (which has since shrunk, no longer including the enormous area which is now the southern half of Botswana).
"He spared himself nothing on his long treks," the Church Times obituary notes, "often having to walk for hours through deep sand when his motor stuck."
[1][7] Gore Browne is well known for the special ministry he developed to the migrant workers and convicts on the mines in Kimberley, amongst whom he was "trusted and greatly loved and respected".
[3] Bishop Wilfrid Gore Browne died unexpectedly following emergency surgery at Kimberley Hospital on 15 March 1928.
[7]: 520 In order to present more than mere schooling the diocese had the government Education Department officially recognise Perseverance, in 1917, as a teacher training centre.
[10] Bishop Wilfrid Gore Browne was an accomplished watercolourist who left a sizeable collection of painted studies (and sketches) of Africans with whom he met or engaged in the Kimberley mine compounds and during his travels around his vast diocese.
Goodwin,[7]: 516 they depart from stereotype and, unusually for the era, sensitively depict real individual and often named personalities from the margins of South African society.