Small woman with a big faith

Gladys Aylward was born on February 24 1902 to a working class family in Edmonton in north London.

Her parents both worked for the Post Office, and she worked as a humble parlourmaid. It was when Gladys attended a church service one evening and heard about mission in foreign lands that she embraced the concept of people working in far-flung destinations for the Kingdom of God. Subsequently she became aware of the vast country of China which had hardly even heard of Christianity. These thoughts challenged the young Gladys who had given her life over to God’s service, but she was still not sure what that might be.

She shared her thoughts with many of her friends and family. No one else felt quite like Gladys about this calling, and one day her brother said to her, ‘If you feel so strongly about going to China, why don’t you go there yourself?!’

Called to China

She was taken aback, but, with the overwhelming feeling that God wanted her to go to distant China, she enrolled at the China Inland Mission founded by Hudson Taylor. Despite her enthusiasm it was decided by the missionary board that Gladys was simply not educated or qualified enough to be sent to China or learn Chinese.

This was a heavy blow for the determined young Gladys and anyone else would have easily given up, but not Gladys Aylward. She knew God wanted her in China and that was that. She enquired about the cheapest tickets to China from London, which was by the Trans-Siberian railway, and dutifully paid a deposit on a one-way ticket to Tientsin!

Journey of a lifetime

Gladys worked day and night to save towards her ticket, doing overtime on her days off, and meanwhile reading anything she could lay her hands on concerning China to learn as much as she could about the country.

She borrowed books one at a time from the library of a rich explorer, for whom she worked. She was subsequently caught reading them without permission, which very nearly cost her her job, but she explained how she had to read them, for she was going to China. She was allowed to continue reading the books and before long she had her ticket paid for.

On October 15 1932, Gladys Aylward set off from Liverpool Street Station in London on the journey of a lifetime. She had no idea what would be facing her, only that she was going to help an elderly widowed missionary in Yangcheng in Shanxi Province called Ginnie Lawson.

Her family and friends gathered to see her off, except for her father who went to work because he could not bear saying ‘goodbye’ to his beloved daughter, whom he affectionately called ‘our Glad’. She boarded the train with her suitcases and few belongings and food for the journey. That journey would take her across Holland, through Germany to Russia and Siberia before reaching Tientsin in China.

War zone

All did not go according to plan, as a war had broken out on the Russian border, with skirmishes bringing the train to a standstill. The authorities in Russia mis-read her vocation in her passport which stated ‘missionary’. They understood it to be ‘machinery’ and were reluctant to let this young entrepreneur go until the mistake was clarified! Gladys had to flee for her life from a hotel in Vladivistok where she caught a boat to Japan, before finally arriving at her destination, her beloved China.

Inn for hungry travellers

Upon arrival at Yangcheng by mule, her welcome by Ginnie, an elderly Scottish woman, was less than cordial. The two women did not always agree, but Gladys still knew that God had called her to this special land for a special purpose. Shortly after, Mrs. Lawson had an accident, falling from a rotten balcony and dying. The missionary board ceased to send further finance and Gladys was left very much alone in this remote mountainous village where no ‘foreign devils’ had lived before.

Gladys continued with Mrs. Lawson’s plan to open an inn for passing muleteers by learning Chinese and telling Bible stories while the hungry travellers ate. At this time a new law had been passed by the government in China to outlaw the ancient and very cruel custom of binding the feet of women and little girls, as Chinese men liked women with small feet. Gladys was chosen by the Mandarin of Yangcheng to act as an official foot inspector as her feet as a foreigner were unbound. This provided the essential income to keep the inn and also allowed her to spread her message of the gospel to all the outlying villages in the region. Those were happy days for Gladys Aylward.

However, war was breaking out between the Chinese and Japanese and, before long, Yangcheng was caught up in the middle of the conflict. Gladys proved to be an invaluble source of information, as she moved from village to village, and the Japanese put wanted posters up for her capture. She had been given the Chinese name, Ai-weh-deh, meaning ‘Virtuous One’, although this originally came about through Yang, her Chinese cook, not being able to pronounce ‘Aylward’.

The movie

Most people will connect Gladys Aylward’s name to the Hollywood movie The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, which starred Ingrid Bergman as Gladys and in which she rescued over 100 children single-handedly by taking them on a gruelling one-month hike over the Shanxi mountains from Yangcheng to Xian, where an orphanage could receive them. This was the epic journey that would make Gladys a household name, after a book about her exploits appeared in the UK called The Small Woman, and later, in 1963, she appeared on BBC TV’s This Is Your Life with Eammon Andrews.

However, anyone who knew Gladys would confirm that she did not relish fame and fortune and, indeed, never received a penny for the film based on the story of her life. Any donations she received from giving talks at churches she gave to the work of the orphanage she eventually founded in Taiwan after the Communists ousted all foreign missionaries from mainland China.

Technically Gladys was Chinese, for she became a naturalised Chinese citizen, renouncing her own British passport, and she certainly dressed like one, but she eventually settled in Taipei after the British authorities in Hong Kong were unable to help her there as she was officially no longer British. Before she left her beloved Yangcheng, the Mandarin who had observed Gladys’s life and conduct over the years made the surprise proclamation that he had become a Christian, a most overwhelming honour for the London parlourmaid who was deemed unsuitable to be a missionary.

Gladys often laughed at how she could speak and read this most difficult of languages, citing the fact that God can do anything! However, many of the aspects of the film upset Gladys: not only its name, as her Inn was called the Eight Happinesses, but also the fact that Ingrid Bergman towered above the diminutive Gladys, although the two women never met. Hollywood couldn’t resist weaving in a romantic storyline and some of the film’s script was baseless. Her Chinese name was to be Jen’ai and her daughter Ninepence was called Sixpence. To top it all, the film was shot in the mountains of Wales, and Gladys lamented that the mountains in Wales looked nothing like the mountains in Shanxi. Another misgiving was the fact that the children in the production sang ‘This old man... Knick knack Paddy whack’ rather than the hymns and Christian choruses that Gladys had taught them, such as ‘Count your blessings’. Nevertheless, the film was immensely popular and had portrayed the bulk of the story and Gladys’s indomitable belief in God.

Gladys’s cousin

When I lived in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk in the early 1990s, I befriended Jack Dyer and his family. Jack was Gladys Aylward’s first cousin and very proud of his famous relative. He was also a postmaster just like Gladys’s parents. Not long after, I went to work for a missionary society in Jaffa, Israel, for the Church’s Ministry among Jewish People (CMJ), a step which led to my sojourning in the Holy Land for over ten years, and which was also inspired by Gladys’s brave story. I often found solace in remembering her difficulties with learning a difficult language and adapting to a differing culture and climate.

In 2002, I returned to my native Northern Ireland and, in 2007, I went to Taiwan where Gladys is buried. Jack had passed away some years earlier, but his widow June asked me to lay a white flower on her grave on behalf of the family. I eventually found the college grounds on the outskirts of Taipei in Guandu Province where ‘The Small Woman’ lay. The college was founded by missionary relatives of Dr. Billy Graham and was a serene spot overlooking Taipei lough in the direction of her beloved China. A wall just behind the tomb is engraved in Chinese with the official red stamp of General Chiang Kai Shek, who honoured Ai-weh-deh for her bravery and contribution to Christianity and the Chinese people.

Back to the inn

In 2008, shortly after the devastating Sichuan earthquake, I travelled to mainland China and visited Yangcheng, where Gladys ran her famous inn. It was a remarkable journey, as I followed Gladys’s harrowing trek from Xian to Yangcheng over the Shanxi mountains, although I had the comfort of the local minibus. I remember reading how Gladys had been invited to Buckingham Palace for tea with the Queen and I wrote to Her Majesty from Yangcheng. I received a cordial reply. It was a privilege for me to have befriended Gladys’s cousin and to have been able to travel in China and Taiwan, but most inspiring of all was to read Gladys’s own story all those years ago, as her brave example is still inspiring individuals and churches around the world to this very day. We should say Xie xie (‘Thank you’) to God for ‘the Small Woman’ who had such a big faith in him.

Gladys Aylward