in Manchester. Among the subjects taught were reading, writing, grammar, composition, music, Bible knowledge, geography and arithmetic.  
New Bethlehem and the Nazareth chapel were visited in 1842 by a threeman delegation from the Basel Mission, a Protestant mission headquartered in Basle, Switzerland, and devoted to spreading the Gospel beyond Europe; one member of the delegation was the product of one of its earliest overseas missions, the by then discontinued station in present-day Liberia. The Mission was contemplating the establishment of a centre in the Gold Coast and, since the Moravian Church and the Basel Mission were both headed by Germans, they formed complementary communities of religious activists. The Basel Mission therefore knew of the proselytizing work of the Moravians among the enslaved people of Jamaica since 1754, and its outreach to Jamaica was an effort to recruit black Christians to help to run its new location in West Africa - it was thought that black people could better survive the environment of the malarial tropics and, furthermore, that the lived example of black Christians would encourage the African population to receive more favourably the religious message of the missionaries. In the end, the Basel Mission delegation successfully attracted 25 persons to accompany them to the Gold Coast: a group comprising six married couples, four unmarried adults, nine children and Catherine Mulgrave.  
Catherine had been added to the group because the Moravian hierarchy in Jamaica, saw the young Liberian, George Peter Thompson, as good marriage material for her and decided to promote their union. Arranged marriages among members were customary in Moravian Church and Basel Mission circles; and Thompson, taken from Cape Mount, Liberia, at the age of eight years, had been educated at a Christian orphanage in Basle, spoke fluent German and was going out to the Gold Coast as a schoolteacher. The marriage of the two well-educated and Europeanized Africans took place on 11 December 1842.