FAU: The Friends Ambulance Unit and the Shandan Bailie School, online talk by Andrew Hicks

In the early nineteen-forties China was in desperate need, struggling to defend itself against the Japanese invaders. In Europe and North Africa, the allied war effort was on the back foot and there was little the UK could do to give practical support to its key ally, China. An important gesture was to send a motley bunch of a few hundred school leavers who had signed up as members of the Friends Ambulance Unit China Convoy to do medical relief work in China. These were pacifists who had been exempted from military service as conscientious objectors, the FAU being the Quaker unit created to offer the opportunity for alternative service. In China the FAU provided medical services and transported medical supplies across vast distances on impossible roads in areas not yet in Japanese hands. It was perhaps a prototype Medecins Sans Frontieres and indeed three of its members were key figures in developing the British relief agency, Oxfam, during its first few decades.

The Japanese invasion had devastated industrial capacity in the East of China and the Chinese Industrial Co-Operatives were established to set up rural industries substituting so far as possible for what had been lost. Technical training was essential and that was the role of the so-called Bailie School at Shandan far into the North West of Gansu Province. It then became a natural fit for the FAU to support the school in Shandan and convoys of supplies regularly left the FAU depot in Chungking to make the arduous journey of just under 2,000 kilometres to Shandan. Several FAU members were also seconded to work full time in Shandan. The school’s headmaster, George Hogg, an idealistic young Englishman tragically died of tetanus. The challenge of the tough conditions in China is again underlined by the fact that no fewer than twelve of the FAU’s young volunteers also died while serving in China.

The story of the FAU and the extraordinary adventures of these very remarkable pacifists, dedicated to promoting understanding with and supporting the peoples of China, including the school at Shandan, is the subject of this talk. It will be illustrated throughout with many never-before-seen photos of nineteen-forties China including a good number of Shandan, a remote and dusty desert town that is hard to imagine today.

Free online talk – reserve your place on Eventbrite here

A Zoom link will be sent shortly before the talk to all those who have registered on Eventbrite.

Speaker

Andrew Hicks is a Council Member of SACU. His interest in all things relating to China was stimulated when lecturing in Law at the University of Hong Kong and later at the National University of Singapore between 1976 to 1988.

He is the author of Jack Jones, A True Friend to China: the lost writings of a heroic nobody; The Friends Ambulance Unit ‘China Convoy’. Earnshaw Books, 2015.