The Friends' Ambulance Unit (FAU) was a volunteer ambulance service, founded by individual members of the British Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), in line with their Peace Testimony. The FAU operated from 1914 to 1919, 1939 to 1946 and 1946 to 1959 in 25 countries. It was independent of the Quakers' organisation and chiefly staffed by registered conscientious objectors.
The Unit was founded as The First Anglo-Belgian Ambulance Unit at the start of World War I in 1914 and later renamed the Friends' Ambulance Unit. Members were trained at Jordans, a hamlet in Buckinghamshire, that was a centre for Quakerism. Altogether it sent over a thousand men to France, Belgium and Italy, where they worked on ambulance convoys and ambulance trains with the French and British armies. The FAU came under the jurisdiction of the British Red Cross Society. It was dissolved in 1919.
It was refounded by a committee of former members at the start of World War II in September 1939 with the establishment of a training camp at Manor Farm, Bristol Road, Northfield, Birmingham. More than 1,300 members were trained and went on to serve as ambulance drivers and medical orderlies in London during the Blitz, as well as overseas in Finland, Norway and Sweden (1940), the Middle East (1940–1943), Greece (1941, 1944–1946), China and Syria (1941–1946), India and Ethiopia (1942–1945), Italy (1943–1946), France, Belgium, Netherlands, Yugoslavia and Germany (1944–1946) and Austria (1945–1946). Its first female member was Angela Sinclair-Loutit, who joined in 1940 after her studies at Somerville College, Oxford were interrupted. [1] [2]
The Sino-Japanese War had led to deteriorating conditions in China and in 1941 agreement was reached for the FAU to deploy 40 volunteers to deliver medical aid (dubbed the "China Convoy"). At first, their job was to secure the delivery of supplies via the "Burma Road", the sole remaining route. When Burma fell to the Japanese in May 1942, the FAU volunteers escaped to India and China. They regrouped and took on the distribution of medical supplies delivered by "The Hump", the air transport route to Kunming. It is estimated that 80% of medical supplies to China were distributed by the FAU.
The FAU's role expanded and they provided a range medical treatments, preventative measures and training of Chinese medical personnel. This expanded further into the reconstruction of medical facilities, notably the hospital at Tengchong in 1944, and into agricultural improvements and training. [3]
The activities in China were international, employing personnel, men and women, from Britain (the largest national group), China, United States, Canada, New Zealand and elsewhere. Around 200 foreigners and 60 Chinese took part, eight died and others had their health permanently damaged. About half of the recruits were Quakers but all had a commitment to pacifism and wished to deliver practical help. Most of the Chinese members were Christian students from the West China Union University of Chengdu. [3]
Responsibility for the relief work in China was passed to the American Friends Service Committee in 1946. [3]
Two 12-man sections with eight vehicles, FAU Relief Sections Nos 1 and 2, landed at Arromanches, Normandy on 6 September 1944 from a tank landing craft. Attached to the British Army's civilian affairs branch, the FAU sections provided relief to civilians in Normandy. No 2 FAU was then posted to a newly liberated refugee camp at Leopoldsburg, Belgium, managing reception, registration, disinfection, catering, dormitories and departures.
In November 1944, in response to a request from 21st Army Group, a further five more sections were established and arrived in Europe at the end of 1944. One new member was Gerald Gardiner, who subsequently became Lord Chancellor in Harold Wilson's Labour Party government of 1964–1970.
After a period in Nijmegen, assisting local civilian medical organisations during Operation Market Garden, No 2 FAU cared for a colony of the mentally ill near Cleves in Germany which grew to a population of 25,000. By April, the main work had become the accommodation and care of displaced persons until they could return home. No 2 FAU was heavily involved with the care and support of inmates at the newly liberated Stalag X-B prisoner-of-war camp near Sandbostel, between Bremen and Hamburg in northern Germany in May 1945.
The FAU was wound up in 1946 and replaced by the Friends Ambulance Unit Post-War Service, which continued until 1959.
The work of the Friends' Ambulance Unit was referred to in the 1947 award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Quakers worldwide and accepted by the Friends Service Council and the American Friends Service Committee.
The original trainees in the 1939 training camp issued a statement expressing their purpose:
We purpose to train ourselves as an efficient Unit to undertake ambulance and relief work in areas under both civilian and military control, and so, by working as a pacifist and civilian body where the need is greatest, to demonstrate the efficacy of co-operating to build up a new world rather than fighting to destroy the old. While respecting the views of those pacifists who feel they cannot join an organization such as our own, we feel concerned among the bitterness and conflicting ideologies of the present situation to build up a record of goodwill and positive service, hoping that this will help to keep uppermost in men's minds those values which are so often forgotten in war and immediately afterwards. [4]
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Much archival material has survived and has been deposited at the Library of the Society of Friends, Friends House, Euston Road, London.
A conscientious objector is an "individual who has claimed the right to refuse to perform military service" on the grounds of freedom of conscience or religion. The term has also been extended to objecting to working for the military–industrial complex due to a crisis of conscience. In some countries, conscientious objectors are assigned to an alternative civilian service as a substitute for conscription or military service.
Robert Calverl(e)y Trevelyan was an English poet and translator, of a traditionalist sort, and a follower of the lapidary style of Logan Pearsall Smith.
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Nora Waln was a best-selling American writer and journalist in the 1930s–50s, writing books and articles on her time spent in Germany and China. She was among the first to report on the spread of Nazism from 1934 to 1938. She traveled widely in Europe and Asia, contributing articles to the Atlantic Monthly and other magazines. She was one of the few correspondents who reported from Communist China and Mongolia, reporting for the Saturday Evening Post for three and a half years, including reporting from the Korean War (1947-1951). She regularly contributed to the Atlantic Monthly from 1925 to 1962.
Mark Plowman, generally known as Max Plowman, was a British writer and pacifist.
Mary Greig Campbell (1907–1989) was a New Zealand librarian, Quaker and relief worker in Shanghai, China, after World War II.
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The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) is a Religious Society of Friends (Quaker)-founded organization working for peace and social justice in the United States and around the world. AFSC was founded in 1917 as a combined effort by American members of the Religious Society of Friends to assist civilian victims of World War I. It continued to engage in relief action in Europe and the Soviet Union after the Armistice of 1918. By the mid-1920s, AFSC focused on improving racial relations, immigration policy, and labor conditions in the U.S., as well as exploring ways to prevent the outbreak of another conflict before and after World War II. As the Cold War developed, the organization began to employ more professionals rather than Quaker volunteers. Over time, it broadened its appeal and began to respond more forcefully to racial injustice, international peacebuilding, migration and refugee issues, women's issues, and the demands of sexual minorities for equal treatment. Currently, the organization's three priorities include work on peacebuilding, a focus on just economies, and humane responses to the global migration crisis.
The Non-Combatant Corps (NCC) was a corps of the British Army composed of conscientious objectors as privates, with NCOs and officers seconded from other corps or regiments. Its members fulfilled various non-combatant roles in the army during the First World War, the Second World War and the period of conscription after the Second World War.
Thomas "Corder" Pettifor Catchpool, born Leicester, was an English Quaker and pacifist, actively engaged in relief work in Germany between 1919 and 1952. He was awarded the French Mons Star for his relief work with the Friends Ambulance Unit on the Western Front (1914–1916), subsequently imprisoned in Britain for his absolutist conscientious objection to the Compulsory Military Service Act 1916. After the First World War he was released from prison and critical of the implications of the Treaty of Versailles, played an active role in reconciliation with Germany: in 1919 he assisted with the Friends War Victims Relief Committee in Berlin, an organisation that was involved in organising the feeding of up to one million children per day. Returning to Britain he worked as a welfare coordinator for a Lancashire firm at Darwen, and was responsible for the invitation to Gandhi to visit the mill to witness the impact of the nonviolence campaign on conditions.
American Ambulance, Great Britain (AAGB) was a humanitarian organisation founded in 1940 by a group of Americans living in London for the purpose of providing emergency vehicles and ambulance crews to the United Kingdom during World War II. The idea for the service came from Gilbert H. Carr during a meeting of The American Society in London shortly after the Dunkirk evacuation.
The Joint War Organisation (JWO) was a combined operation of the British Red Cross Society and the Order of St John of Jerusalem during the World Wars. It was first created in 1914 and ceased operations when World War I ended in 1919; the organisation was re-formed upon the British entry into World War II in 1939 and was active until its permanent disbanding in 1947. The Joint War Committee (JWC), a non-government administrative body, controlled the JWO and the Joint War Finance Committee managed its finances and concentrated on raising donations and funding.
John Sturge Stephens was born into a prominent family of Quakers in Cornwall. During the First World War, he was a pacifist and conscientious objector and between the wars travelled extensively throughout Europe, on behalf of the Society of Friends, with a view to creating a peaceful future for the continent. In 1938 he helped numerous Austrian Jewish refugees to escape from Nazi persecution, and accommodated several of them at his homes in England.
Fred Haslam was a Canadian administrator and pacifist.
Angela Sinclair-Loutit was an English social justice activist, pacifist and nurse.
The Friends Relief Service (FRS) was a voluntary humanitarian relief organisation formally established by a committee of Britain Yearly Meeting in November 1940. Largely staffed by pacifists and conscientious objectors, its aim was to provide humanitarian relief and social welfare to civilians affected by World War II. Key areas of operation included British cities affected by The Blitz, and refugee camps throughout north-west Europe, the Balkans and the Middle-East. One of its teams was also amongst the first humanitarian groups to reach Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The organisation had three changes of name: Friends War Victims Relief Committee (November 1940 - February 1942); Friends War Relief Service (February 1942 - September 1943) and the Friends Relief Service (September 1943 - May 1948). The FRS was closed down on May 29, 1948.
