Gladys Aylward: The Mission Board Said No. God Said Go.
Let me tell you about a parlour maid.
Gladys May Aylward was born in 1902 in Edmonton, North London, the daughter of a postman. She left school at 14 to go into domestic service, scrubbing floors and cooking meals for other people’s households for most of her teenage years. She was small, barely 4 foot 10. She had no education to speak of. She had a strong cockney accent that marked her out as working class the moment she opened her mouth.
And she believed, with a certainty she could not shake, that God was calling her to China.
She enrolled in the China Inland Mission’s preparatory course in 1929. The mission rejected her. They said she was too old to learn the language. They said her lack of education made her unsuitable. She was 28 years old. The door was shut firmly in her face.
So she went back to domestic service and started saving.
She saved every penny she could from her wages until she had enough for a one-way third-class ticket on the Trans-Siberian Railway. In October 1930, carrying everything she owned in a single suitcase and with less than three pounds in her pocket, she boarded the train at Liverpool Street Station in London.
The journey was a preview of the rest of her life.
Russian soldiers ordered her off the train in the middle of Siberia, stranded her at a remote station in freezing darkness, and she was nearly arrested by the Soviet secret police. She found her way to Japan, then sailed to China. She arrived in Yangcheng, Shanxi Province in October 1930, speaking not a word of Chinese.
She joined an elderly missionary named Jeannie Lawson who had served in China for decades. Together they opened the Inn of the Eight Happinesses, a lodging house for the mule drivers who travelled the mountain roads of Shanxi. Gladys would literally walk out into the road and grab the mules by the bridle to pull them into the courtyard. Once the drivers were inside, she and Mrs Lawson told them Bible stories. It was the most unusual mission strategy in China, and it worked.
When Mrs Lawson died, Gladys carried on alone. She had learned Chinese by then, with a local Shanxi dialect and accent. She had become so trusted in the community that the Mandarin of Yangcheng appointed her as the government’s official Foot Inspector, tasked with touring the district to enforce the new law banning the ancient practice of footbinding. The job gave her access to every household in the region and she used every visit to share the gospel.
Children came to her from every direction. She bought her first child, a small girl, for ninepence from a woman who was about to sell her into slavery. More followed. By 1938, when Japanese forces invaded the region and bombed Yangcheng, Gladys had over one hundred children in her care. The Japanese had placed a price on her head. The roads were cut off. The only way out was over the mountains.
She led 94 children through the mountains in the spring of 1938. She was wounded from an earlier encounter with Japanese soldiers. She was running a fever. The children ranged from toddlers to teenagers. They had no food and no map. They walked for 12 days. The children sang hymns when the fear got too heavy. After 12 days they reached the Yellow River, where they sat starving on the bank for four days with no boats in sight. A Chinese Nationalist soldier heard the children singing and arranged a crossing. When Gladys heard that a train on the other side could take them all to safety in Sian, she put her hands over her face and wept.
She then collapsed with typhus fever and was not expected to survive.
She survived.
She eventually returned to England, then went back east in 1953, settling in Taiwan where she founded the Gladys Aylward Orphanage in Taipei in 1955. She worked there until the day she died, on January 3, 1970, at the age of 67. The ministry continues today as Bethany Children’s Home.
A Hollywood film was made about her life. She hated it. The studio cast Ingrid Bergman, who was 5 foot 9, blonde, and Swedish. Gladys was 4 foot 10, dark-haired, and spoke with a North London cockney accent. She said the film misrepresented her work and cheapened it. She was not interested in fame. She was interested in children.
The China Inland Mission said she would never learn Chinese. She became a Chinese citizen in 1936 and spoke Shanxi dialect for the rest of her life. They said she was too old and too uneducated for the work. She led a hundred children over a mountain range during a Japanese invasion.
She was answerable to the One who called her. No one else.
The doors were all locked. She went anyway. God does not need your credentials. He needs your obedience.