1938 - Harry Wyatt, Beulah Glasby, & Hu Shifu

May 5, 1938

Guoyangzhen, Shanxi

Dr. Harry Wyatt

In 1938 a group of British Baptist missionaries in Shanxi Province became caught up in the three-way war between the Japanese, the Nationalists, and the Communists as they travelled towards the town of Dai Xian. The victims, Dr. Harry Wyatt and Miss Beulah Glasby, were shot dead along with their Chinese Christian driver, Hu Shifu.

Harry Wyatt was born in the English community of Blisworth, Northamptonshire, on July 30, 1895—just two days before news of the massacre of 11 missionaries and children at Gutian in China’s Fujian Province shocked the Western world. Harry and his brother were baptized in December 1913 by their father, who was the local Baptist minister.

After gaining credentials as a doctor and serving as a medic in Italy for a year during World War I, Wyatt sailed for China in February 1925. He worked at the Baptist Mission Hospital in Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi Province and the scene of a terrible massacre during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. In 1926 Wyatt met a newly arrived missionary, Edith Holden. Just three months later they announced their engagement and were married a year later in Taiyuan. For the next ten years the medical work grew, and the Wyatts came to be loved and respected by thousands of people who benefited from their labours.

When the Japanese military reached Taiyuan in November 1937, Wyatt moved his wife and children to a safer location outside the war zone, and he returned to Taiyuan to continue his vital work. He was one of a handful of Baptist missionaries remaining in the city when the Japanese army captured it. Dozens of injured soldiers and civilians were brought into the hospital daily as the fighting escalated, while a flood of refugees entered the city and lay huddled together on the streets.

After spending Christmas with his family on the coast, Wyatt returned to Taiyuan believing he would only be there a short time before he was replaced by new recruits coming from England. The stressful conditions contributed to him having an attack of typhus early in 1938, and it was decided he and his family would leave for a well-deserved furlough in their home country in July of that year. Wyatt’s life was snuffed out before that day arrived. Travelling as a passenger in a Chinese lorry, Wyatt headed north towards the town of Xinzhou. After spending the night of May 4th there the lorry departed in the morning, this time loaded with goods and missionaries Rev. and Mrs. Vincent Jasper, and Miss Beulah Glasby.

Glasby had been working in China for 14 years, most of it in charge of an orphanage containing 20 abandoned children. She had volunteered to travel to Dai Xian with the Jaspers in order to bring comfort to Chinese women there whose lives had been devastated by the war. As the vehicle travelled along the bumpy roads, Glasby was seated in the front, next to the driver Hu Shifu. Behind them were the Jaspers and Wyatt.

All went well until they were about seven miles (11 km) south of Guo Xian (now Guoyangzhen) when suddenly a shot rang out and the driver, Hu Shifu, was shot in the arm. He managed to bring the lorry to a stop. The tall and athletic Dr. Wyatt immediately leaped out of his seat and dragged Hu to the opposite side of the road from where the shot had originated. Mrs. Jasper had recently suffered an injury to her hand. She quickly unravelled the bandage and gave it to Wyatt, who used it to try to stem the bleeding from the driver’s arm as a hail of bullets was fired at them. The Jaspers and Wyatt motioned for Glasby to join them under the vehicle, but she said she felt safer where she was crouched down in the front seat.

While the shooting continued, Wyatt decided to make an attempt to save the life of his friends. He grabbed the Union Jack from the rear of the lorry and waved it above his head as he started out in the direction from where the firing was coming. It has no effect. The shots continued, and when a hand grenade was lobbed in his direction Wyatt returned to the shelter of the vehicle. A few minutes later Beulah Glasby, still sheltering inside the lorry, was hit by a bullet and killed. Mercifully, “death came swiftly to her—a triumphant end to a life of eager and valiant service.”[1]

The surviving missionaries divided into two groups and sought cover away from the lorry. The Jaspers ran toward a railway embankment and found shelter on the other side. Wyatt, dragging the badly injured driver, attempted to climb into a ditch but was struck by a bullet just before reaching it. He still had the Union Jack with him and “continued to wave it, as the assailants closed in upon them pouring volley after volley of shot into their prostrate forms.”[2] The Jaspers were surrounded by a group of Chinese soldiers who ordered them to kneel down. After much anxiety their lives were finally spared by the men whom, for some reason, thought the British missionaries were agents of the Japanese. One report notes that the Jaspers were “only saved from execution by the last-minute intervention of an officer who recognized them.”[3]

1. E. A. Payne, Harry Wyatt of Shansi, 1895-1938 (London: Carey Press, 1940), 16.
2. Payne, Harry Wyatt of Shansi, 16.
3. H. R. Williamson, British Baptists in China, 1845-1952 (London: Carey Kingsgate Press, 1957), 162.