�1

Each generation has faced situations that have challenged their beliefs. Dur-ing the two world wars, Quakers struggled with their pacifism and how to live out their faith in the context of what seemed to many to be ‘just wars’. Each Quaker responded according to his or her own conscience. Some actually fought. Some became conscientious objectors and paid a high price for fol-lowing their conscience. Some served in the Friends Ambulance Unit (FAU) providing humanitarian aid to anyone in need whilst allowing members to serve close to the front line without engaging in fighting and in line with the Quaker Peace Testimony.

The Friends’ Ambulance Unit: A Record of GoodwillArthur Hinton - A Case Study

By Evelyn Price - Faculty of Social Sciences

�2

Slide 2:

1661: George Fox and eleven other Quakers write to King Charles II to declare their refusal to take up arms

Few people today have even heard of the FAU, least of all me. But last year I was very honoured to meet a FAU veteran who lives locally. Despite being 96 years old, his memory is as sharp as ever and he kindly allowed me to interview him on several occasions. This is his story.

Slide 3:

“All bloody principles and prac-tices we do utterly deny with all outward wars, and strife, and fighting with outward weapons,

Arthur is on the back row, second from the right

�3

Arthur Hinton was born to a Christian family of pacifists. As World War two erupted, Arthur knew he could not take a life, and when called to enlist opted to face a tribunal under the National Service (Armed Forces) Act of 1939. They accepted his Christian convictions and granted him exemption, suggesting he join the Royal Army Medical Corps which he refused as he knew they were trained to use guns. Fortunately, they acceded to his request to work as a volunteer with the FAU, but unfortunately, due to the long waiting lists for FAU training camps, it was suggested that he join the Quak-er Civilian Service Corps and work at a hospital before re-applying at a later date. Thus, after a year at Ramsgate hospital, he was called for an interview and in Ju-ly1942 gave up his paid employment to begin his training at Manor Farm, Northfield, “the nursery” of the Unit according to FAU historian, Tegla Davies.

Slide 4:

“We regard the central conception of the [Military Service] Act as imperilling the liberty of the individual conscience – which is the main hope of human progress…” (Friends House: minutes of The London Yearly Meeting 1916, ‘Quaker faith & practice’ 23:92)

• Quakers believe that there is “that of God in everyone” and therefore it is wrong to take life

• In 1916 the Military Service Act prompted Quakers to lobby the UK government for a “conscience clause” providing ex-emption from combatant service

• Conscientious Objectors (C.Os) had to go before Tribunals who were less than sympathetic to those refusing to fight

�4

This was “military training with religious conviction” in Arthur’s own words, involv-ing six weeks of first aid, nursing, drill, physical fitness, and working as a team.

Slide 5 :

“The conscientious objec-tor is a prettyindividualist character and one of the things we had to do in those early training camps was to break down the members […]The spirit of the camp real-ly seemed to work”

- Michael Cadbury

There followed several weeks in hospitals across the country doing work as required whilst observing medical procedures. There were also courses on dealing with infec-tious diseases and lectures by renown humanitarian, Francesca Wilson on the physi-cal and psychological problems of refugees. Finally, after driving and mechanical training (which Arthur admits he was not very good at) and further specialist training in foreign languages for service abroad, Arthur was called to FAU HQ in London to be told he was heading to France. However, the Unit would be joining other civilian relief teams such as the Scouts and the Salvation Army who were not yet in a position to leave. Arthur noted the FAU were clearly better trained and organised, and even the Red Cross Officer who was supposed to be in charge of co-ordinating the volun-teers was deemed “incompetent”, leaving the FAU to take charge of arrangements. Despite these delays, on the fifth of September 1944 Arthur’s team was amongst the

Manor Farm, Northfield, Birmingham - FAU Training Camp

�5

first civilian relief workers permitted by the military authorities to enter North West Europe.

Slide 6:

Following the advancing army, Arthur and his team passed through Belgium trans-porting sick civilians from vulnerable towns, and then at Arnhem near the fighting front operating an ambulance service for the victims of German flying bombs. The FAU dealt with as many as fifteen hundred refugees a day helping with feeding and spraying with DDT; grouping them into camps; ensuring sanitation, medical attention and registration. At this point I asked Arthur if he was aware of any animosity from the military, bearing in mind they were all COs, and the answer was that they were all on good terms and even felt respected by the fighting troops.

Slide 7:

“We can understand you fellows not wanting to fight. What we cannot understand is that, having been exempted from the army, you come out here as volunteers, whereas if we had the chance we would get away as quickly as possible”

- Member of 30 Army Corps

�6

In fact, the Civil Affairs Director of 21st Army Group were so impressed with Arthur’s Unit that they requested several more teams to provide each army corps with FAU assistance. Thus the start of 1945 found seven FAU sections serving the libera-tion of North West Europe.

I continued by asking if Arthur felt at all compromised by working so closely with the military, but Arthur assured me that without this co-operation FAU could not have had access to those suffering the consequences of war. Other Quaker relief bodies such as the Friends Relief Service saw this as collaboration and did not approve.

So, as the British troops crossed the Rhine on the 23rd March 1945 Arthur and his team prepared to face perhaps the greatest challenge for any Pacifist … Germany.

Slide 8:

�7

At Bedburg, near Cleves, three hundred yards from the German lines, Arthur’s team discovered a lunatic asylum which still housed four thousand mentally ill patients and three thousand refugees sheltering in the cellars. Over the next two months, twenty-five thousand more German refugees arrived including some displaced persons (DPs) who should have been taken care of by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (U.N.R.R.A.), but this new agency was ill prepared leaving the FAU to take over. I asked him how he felt about dealing with the German refugees whilst clearly in breach of the non-fraternisation order issued by Montgomery— he stated that undoubtedly some of them had been Nazis, but “they were people who needed help and we gave what help and comfort we could”. The FAU had never observed the order as it was not the Quaker way.

Slide 9 :

�8

However, their compassion was to be severely tested as they were urgently sum-moned by the army to assist with the clearing up of the Stalag X-B prisoner-of-war camp at Sandbostel, northeast of Bremen. Besides some fifteen thousand prisoners of war, there were eight thousand political prisoners who were starving in appalling conditions and dying at a rate of twenty to thirty a day. As with many other concen-tration camps, the mountains of dead bodies needed to be cleared. Arthur supervised the teams of local German women who were brought in to do the work. Despite the restrictions on fraternisation, the FAU attempted to reassure the women they were only there to help, and even offered them their own accommodation which they found difficult to understand.

Slide 10:

It was one of the grimmest jobs ever undertaken by the Unit. Here I asked about Arthur’s faith and if his religious beliefs had been shaken after such dreadful scenes - he answered that they all discussed this question every day, but could find no answer.

After catching diphtheria and taking a break of two months, Arthur returned to Ger-many to join his team who were now at a DP camp in Osdorf, near Hamburg. The DPs here were a mixture of Poles, Russians, Serbs and Croats, newly liberated forced labourers, many of them surly and full of bitterness. Arthur remembers that the Serbs often left the camp at night to take revenge on the local Germans, and the Russians frequently syphoned off the petrol from the military vehicles to make schnapps and get drunk!

�9

The FAU also worked at the Altona hospital, Hamburg with Jewish survivors from the Auschwitz death marches. These were mostly women and girls. I asked how these DPs had reacted to these helpers in their Khaki uniforms? Arthur remembers them as being very withdrawn and unable to believe they were there to help them. He ob-served a slow recovery helped by the gifts of food, toiletries and most of all, make up. As a German speaker, Arthur also started to give English lessons as a form of therapy “giving them an interest beyond their immediate needs and helping in some small degree to take their minds off their worries and fears”.

Slide 11:

By August of 1945 FAU had eleven sections in Germany with 150 workers in the British zone. Arthur’s arrival in Berlin coincided with the mass expulsions of Germans from lands ceded to Poland and the USSR at Yalta. Mainly women, children and old men, some 18 - 20,000 passed through Berlin every day with scant resources available. The Red Cross would not allow these refugees to be helped, so in an at-tempt to impress upon the allies the urgency of the situation, Arthur and his Unit compiled a report which reached London HQ in September. From there, twenty copies were sent to the Foreign Office, MPs, the Press and leading clergymen. I asked Arthur why they could not work with the German refugees? Apparently Germans were the responsibility of German Welfare organisations - at this time there was little sympathy in Britain, with most believing the Germans deserved their fate, but the FAU report contributed to efforts by British humanitarians to do more to help.

�10

Slide 12:

University of Warwick archives

Despite the restrictions, Arthur did what he could for the German population, being involved in Operation Stork whereby 25,000 children and pregnant women were transferred from the British sector of Berlin to the British zone in co-operation with German officials and the Military Government.

In late 1945, Victor Gollancz organised “Save Europe Now” – a campaign to per-suade the British Govern-ment to allow British people to send food parcels to Germany. At the time this was forbidden.

�11

Slide 13:

Likewise, Operation Waif moved orphans to avoid the coming winter. It was at this time that Arthur became aware that the Catholic nuns were smuggling children out of the Russian zone to the West, but the FAU were glad to help.

The Quakers considered their assistance as person-to-person help: they faced those in need of assistance not as an anonymous organisation, nor did they consider the Ger-mans only as “relief recipients”. They knew that the climate, the human atmosphere, was an essential element in relief work, especially in the Germany of the first post-war years. Spiritual support, help for the soul, the mind, the strength of moral convic-tion, was no less urgent at this time than practical aid toward the alleviation of suffer-ing.

�12

The FAU ceased operations on June 30th 1946, and Arthur went on to com-plete a degree in education and moved to Hong Kong where he worked with lepers, eventually receiving an honorary doctorate from the Hong Kong Insti-tute of education.

Finally, I asked Arthur how he felt today about his war time experiences - he said “The FAU was an extremely important part of my education, far more important in many ways than my years at University - as a pacifist, part of our role is to maintain hope and I think there have to be pacifists to keep the concept of alternatives to war alive.”

Slide 14:

Arthur Hinton 2017

�13

For more information on Arthur’s story see:

Arthur Hinton, Only a Teacher, (York University Canada-Hong Kong Project, 2004)

Also, “Bill Turnbull talks to Arthur Hinton about his work during World War II”, Songs of Praise,10 No-vember 2013 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01kyyb1

�14