Looking Back: Nurse Helen Revisits the ‘Haven of Hope’

From March 1965

By Rae Gourlay

Some people, myself included, don’t like plastic flowers. But after meeting a 74-year-old Glasgow woman, recently returned from a world tour, I’m prepared to take another view of them!

The world-traveller is Miss Helen Wilson, retired Church of Scotland missionary, whose name is forever linked with medical work among refugees at Rennie’s Mill, Hong Kong. And plastic flowers, she tells me, are providing work for many of the 10,000 refugees there.

Helen Wilson came home from Hong Kong in 1958 – “for good”, she thought. But after the death of two friends last year she found herself with legacies worth £700. An Aberdonian by birth, she faced the situation with characteristic candour:

“I’d never had so much money in my life. What on earth was I going to do with it? I didn’t want to leave it for other people to spend, and I didn’t want to give it away in donations! So I decided to visit my friends.”

Visiting friends, for Helen Wilson, meant a journey through Canada and the United States to Hong Kong, with stops on the way home at Calcutta and Athens. The original tour was supposed to take four months, but pressure from friends forced her to extend it to six!

In New York she had a reunion with Mary Myers, the American nurse who persuaded her to take up refugee work in Hong Kong in 1951.

Helen Wilson chuckled as she recalled the incident. Tired and dispirited after her expulsion from China by the Communists, she had wanted to rest in Hong Kong. But Mary Myers, who had begun medical work among refugees at Rennie’s Mill Camp, requested her help.

“She asked me to do relief work for her while she went to Japan. But when I asked when she was returning from Japan, she replied, “Oh, I’m not coming back. I’m going home to retire!” That was how it all started."

Great Changes

Eighty refugees were among the crowd at Hong Kong airport last August to give Helen Wilson an unforgettable welcome to Rennie’s Mill. With garlands of orchids round her neck, she made her way back to the hillside which fleeing Chinese had turned into a giant squatters’ camp in 1950.

Nicknamed ‘Hangman’s Ridge’ after mill owner Rennie had committed suicide, the site had been used as an execution ground by Japanese during the war. Nurse Wilson’s first clinic was a table on the quayside, and her second was little better – a bamboo mat hut, where she treated patients through a window, and where she slept, behind a partition, on a hospital bed!

Great changes have taken place at Rennie’s Mill. The site is now referred to as a ‘village’ instead of a camp. Gone are the shabby huts made of paper and bamboo; in their place Helen Wilson saw houses of brick or stone – more durable on the typhoon-swept hillside. Refugees are finding new self-respect through ‘home industries’ such as the manufacture of plastic flowers.

Patients and staff at the Haven of Hope Sanatorium had a special welcome for the Scottish nurse. It was due to her concern for TB sufferers at Rennie’s Mill that the 105 – bed “Haven” was opened in 1955. During the visit, she handed out certificates to the 11th class of graduating nurses.

She also had the opportunity of speaking at the dedication of the new two-story Rennie’s Mill Clinic – built to replace the one destroyed by hurricane in 1962.

Encouraging News

Joining the Church of Scotland medical staff in Ichang in 1920, she experienced Chinese civil war, Japanese invasion (she was interned from 1942 – 45) and the arrival of the Communists in 1949. In 1951 she was deported under military guard after being found guilty on a trumped- up charge.

During her recent visit to Hong Kong Helen Wilson heard some encouraging news of Christians in China. “I met a young doctor – I’d rather not give his name – who had become a Christian in China through the witness of another man. From what he told me, although organised meetings are forbidden, there seems to be a lot going on at the personal level.”

Like another traveller, Helen Wilson brought back a lot of gifts from friends. On her ‘pinkie’ she wears a gold ring – the Chinese characters mean ‘strength’ – presented to her by the man who runs the ferry at Rennie’s Mill Village.

I suspect, however, the gifts which mean most to this lively 74-year-old are those which can be bought almost anywhere.

Yes, plastic flowers!

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