Margaret Sinclair left school at fourteen and went to work: first as an apprentice French polisher at the Waverley Cabinet Works, then, when it closed, in the McVitie's biscuit factory. She was a trade unionist and once went out on strike. She was engaged, and broke it off. Everything about her life is ordinary and that is the whole of the point of it: she is the only figure in this catalogue whose sanctity was worked out entirely on a factory floor and in a tenement in the Cowgate.
In 1923 she was accepted by the Poor Clare Colettines at Notting Hill and travelled south with her brother to enter, taking the name Sister Mary Francis of the Five Wounds. She was an extern sister, which meant she did the begging and the errands outside the enclosure. Within two years she had tuberculosis of the throat and was sent to a sanatorium in Essex, where she died on 24 November 1925.
Her fame was posthumous and immediate and entirely working-class; Scotland took her up as one of its own. Her remains were brought home in 1927 and now lie in St Patrick's in the Cowgate, the parish she was baptised in. Paul VI declared her Venerable on 6 February 1978, the centenary of the restoration of the Scottish hierarchy.