Devoted Her Life To Charity

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31179, 1 October 1966, Page 12

Devoted Her Life To Charity

(By

R. G. HVTCHEON

in the "Sydney Morning Herald")

A N English missionary who devoted her life in Hong Kong to caring for abandoned Chinese babies left for England last month with her last 21 “babies” to start up a new home for them. The missionary, Miss Mildred Dibden, aged 62. has brought up 300 abandoned children during her 30 years in Hong Kong. The babies, mostly girls, are children from poor families who were unable or unwilling to support them.

Even today in Hong Kong, babies are found abandoned at the doors of hospitals or in the streets, wrapped in bundles of newspapers or in a towel. But today all aabndoned babies become the wards of the Hong Kong Government when before they were passed out to charitable institutions.

Since the passing of this legislation Miss Dibden has received no new babies. Any babies given to her by poor parents had to be turned over to the Government. With no babies coming in to her home, Miss Dibden found the donation, on which she relied, dwindled. She was left with 21 young girls of various ages and she applied to adopt these herself and to give them her Chinese name, Yip, after her last 60 babies were found new homes among European and Chinese Christians in Hong Kong. Advantages Of Shift The girls left to Miss Dibden were all of school-age. But as schooling in Hong Kong was becoming increasingly costly, Miss Dibden found it difficult to care for the girls adequately. On the other hand, in England free schooling was available. With friends in England and Hong Kong, Miss Dibden came to the conclusion that she would be able to carry on her work if she migrated with her children.

But even this proved difficult with Britain’s stringent new immigration regulations. The Immigration Department in Hong Kong would not help her unless she was first given permission by the British authorities to enter the country with her children, so Miss Dibden flew to London to see the Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies. After hearing her plans he agreed to allow Miss Dibden and her girls in. Next she had to And a suitable home for the children. Surprisingly this proved to be the least of her problems. A pleasant house and garden were offered in the seaside town of Southsea. The education authorities had to be satisfied that Miss Dibden’s girls had attained a sufficiently high standard in school to be able to keep up with British children. They were surprised to find they have and Miss Dibden hopes the girls will one day train to become nurses or teachers before they return to Hong Kong to serve their own people. Name Retained The Portsmouth health authorities next had to approve the prospective new home, which Miss Dibden had called “High Rock” —named after her well-known babies’ home in Hong Kong—and it was here Miss Dibden ran into her first problems. In selecting her Southsea home she had thought that it would be possible to accommodate the girls in bunks, the same way as in Hong Kong. But the Southsea officials insisted on single beds. Bunks are forbidden by law.

Officialdom also insisted that the numbers in each bedroom were carefully controlled. This meant Miss Dibden had to find another

house for five of her girls who would not be able to sleep in the main home. But as luck would have it, Miss Dibden’s helpers found a house in the same street where the five girls, plus one of Miss Dibden’s “old girls,” now married and with a family of her own, will stay on as guardian and helper.

Near their home in Wilberforce avenue is a church where there are youth activities in which the girls can join. The girls will also find much that is fascinating in Southsea with its large seaside park, canoe lake and long pier. With home and school finally settled and the Health officials placated, Miss Dibden then sets to work on her final task —raising enough money for the air fares for herself and 21 girls to fly to England. A number of people in

Hong Kong contributed to this fund and the Toe H Men’s Association and finally assured her of all the money she would need —more than £5OO0 —Miss Dibden was on her way. A calm, serene person who has lived her life in complete faith and trust that all her needs would be provided, Miss Dibden can look back on a life that has been anything but calm and serene. Started In 1931 She went to Hong Kong from Birmingham ‘in 1931, under the auspices of the Bible and Churchmen’s Missionary Society. She travelled with another missionary, Miss Lucy Baird, and together they started their first children’s home on Hong Kong island. It was the time of the great depression in England and young Miss Dibden found the poverty and hardship in Hong Kong even more dispiriting and heartbreaking than the breadlines in the poorer areas of England. But the two young women had only just got their first home established after a move to the more congenial air of the New Territories

when Mildred fell seriously ill with malaria and was sent back to England. There she yearned to get back to her babies in Hong Kong, but the Missionary Society considered her too ill and refused. Miss Dibden resigned and saved enough money to pay her fare back to Hong Kong on a Japanese ship. Back in Hong Kong she immediately started work on a new babies’ home and after many setbacks eventually became established in the New Territories township of Fanling. Miss Dibden had no trouble finding babies for her home. Some would be left on her doorstep, others would be found hanging in baskets in trees in the New Territories, yet others lying in the street wrapped in warm blankets or in a paper package, which might easily have been mistaken for garbage. Unwanted babies they were mostly girls, since a boy is always prized in a Chinese family—were always a problem for the Government and a home willing to care for them was a boon. In some cases poverty caused families to get rid of their children, in which cases girls were often sold, sometimes to be brought up as “mui tsai —a form of slavery —or prostitutes. In other cases families got rid of their baby daughters because of “bad luck.” A girl born in the Year of the Tiger in the Chinese calendar, for example, was regarded as particularly unlucky because the child might grow up fierce and unmanageable. In other cases, the annual pregnancy, typical of Chinese families before the war, led many desperate mothers to “lose” their babies as soon as they were born. Invasion Always in these years there were problems and sickness, but Mildred Dibden endeavoured to run her home on the highest possible standards and many a girl today looks back to her love and care with deep gratitude. In 1941, Miss Dibden had to face the cruelist time of her life. In December, the Japanese invaded Hong Kong and Fanling was one of the first towns to fall. On December 8, the day after the bombing of Pearl Harbour, Britain and Japan were at war and Miss Dibden had to make hasty preparations to evacuate the home. The 34 older children were packed into a waiting lorry and sent off to what was thought to be the safety of Kowloon. The small staff of Chinese nurses and servants made ready to load the rest of the children into the lorry when it returned. But the lorry never came back. “We were very anxious, waiting for the lorry and watching for the Japanese who, we knew, must come very soon. Then we saw the first Japanese soldiers marching towards the house,” Miss Dibden recalls.

A Japanese officer on horseback rode up to Miss Dibden any said, “Anyone seen outside this house will be shot on sight. Soldiers are to be billeted here.” She pleaded there was no room, but she was ignored. Miss Dibden and her staff gathered the remaining children and huddled them into one of the rooms, but the Japanese soldiers were not long in breaking in. One young amah was seized by a soldier. Miss Dibden tried to save her, but the Japanese soldier raised the butt end of his rifle and smashed it down into her face. She had been holding a baby, but as she reeled under the force of the blow she clung to the

child to save it from falling, while blood poured from her wound on to her dress and the baby's shawl. The Japanese soldiers left the 54 babies alone that night and did not some back to the room but other members of the staff outside and villagers were raped. Miss Dibden spent the night praying and fighting off unconsciousness as her head reeled under the pain of the blow. In a few hours, however, she was remonstrating again with the Japanese soldiers when they found the home’s stores of milk and food for the babies, and began looting. This time, she bent down and began scooping up the tins filling her apron with them. The soldiers did not stop her and a few even began throwing tins to her.

Trampled To Death

The second night was even worse as Japanese soldiers burst into the babies’ room, over-turned the cots and forced the nurses and amahs at bayonet point downstairs to be raped. One baby died, and several more might have, on that cold night when without warmth and electricity they were cradled in the arms of Miss Dibden and her nurses and amahs who struggled back to their duty after the soldiers had finished with them. Miss Dibden recalls another occasion when, with a baby in one arm, she tried to intervene as a Japanese soldier dragged a Chinese servant girl by the hair across the floor. In the struggle another cot was overturned and the baby was trampled to death.

This was Miss Dibden’s Calvary, but she and many babies survived the war years. She recalls her 20-mile walks during the days of the Japanese occupation pushing a pram to the populated areas of Kowloon where she begged for rice for her children. This she did once a fortnight. After the war, Miss Dibden went to England for rehabilitation but quickly returned to Hong Kong only to find that her Fanling home had been taken over by a missionary group working under a committee.

She found it impossible to work under conditions which left her with little of her former control and too much interference from committee members. She had always worked alone and preferred to continue that way. Besides malaria was troubling her again, and dysentery was recurring. Govt. Intervention The final blow came when the missionary group decided to send the children up for adoption. For the third time, Mildred Dibden started up a babies’ home of her own, this time in an old police station at Shatin, in the New Territories. There she adopted almost 80 children in the post-war years before the Government ruled that all abandoned babies automatically became the wards of the Social Welfare Department. Patieiitly, Miss Dibden complied with the ruling, insisting however that she was going to have the last say on the homes into which her children would go. This completed, she was left with the 21 older girls whom she decided to take to England. And it is in “High Rock” in Southsea where Miss Dibden will end her endeavour to bring into the lives of a few of China’s abandoned children something of the love, warmth and happiness of a Christian family.