Sophy Gray, born Sophia Wharton Myddleton in Yorkshire in 1814, married Robert Gray in 1836 and sailed with him to Cape Town in 1847 when he was appointed the first colonial bishop of the Cape. She took with her a stock of English church plans, largely ecclesiological Gothic Revival, and spent the next twenty-four years adapting them to Cape sites, Cape stone and Cape thatch, while also keeping the diocese's records, accounts and correspondence and riding with her husband on all but two of his visitations. Desmond Martin's research attributes at least forty of the roughly fifty churches built during Robert Gray's episcopate to her. The attribution is contested: only eleven of her drawings survive, and Martin's argument that her role was deliberately suppressed has been challenged from the bishop's own correspondence. She died at Bishopscourt in 1871.
