Strangers in Chaotung

by Frank Tovey (Author), Jenny Knowles (Editor), Winifred Tovey (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2010

  $3.24

  Winifred Tovey, born in 1919, nee Hill, came from a working class background in Bedford. On leaving school she learned shorthand and typing and started work at a timber yard. Later she enrolled to train as a nurse, but circumstances made her change to become one of the first medical secretaries in Britain. At Bedford Hospital she met the young surgeon, Frank Tovey. They found that they had interests in common, but it was not until Frank was confronted with the call by the Methodist Missionary Society to go to China immediately for at least the next five years, that he realised he had better ask her to marry him immediately. Six days after their wedding by special license they were on their way to China aboard the converted troop ship, TSS Empire Brent. Their first months in China were spent in Hankow, where Frank studied mandarin and worked at the Methodist General Hospital. Communist incursion was already threatening any Chinese people who associated with foreigners, and foreigners themselves, but coming from war-torn England, Winnie and Frank pay little heed to the dangers. In October 1948 they arrived on foot after dark, strangers in the remote town of Chaotung, up in the mountains of Yunnan, where Frank was to run the small hospital that had originally been set up by the Red Cross. The ailments of patients arriving at the hospital were often serious and the equipment rudimentary. Frank performed surgery with Winnie giving anaesthetic by ether, a challenge in winter when the only heating was an open charcoal burner. The dangers of Mao Tse-Tung's Communist uprising were never far away and in June 1949 Winnie and new-born Rosemary, along with a number of other missionary families, were evacuated over the mountains in the cargo hold of the Lutheran Dakota plane. Frank stayed on at Chaotung Hospital until the end of August, leaving just four days before the Yunnan revolution.