Two China ‘gadabouts’: guerrilla nursing with the Friends Ambulance Unit, 1946–48

In 1946 British surgical nurse Elizabeth Hughes and American public-health nurse Margaret Stanley eagerly anticipated their upcoming two years with the China section of the Friends Ambulance Unit, formed in 1941, commonly known as the China Convoy. Both idealistically embraced this Quaker-sponsored organisation’s Peace Testimony embodied in its GADA principle (‘Go anywhere and do anything’) to share the burden of suffering – hence its members’ nickname ‘the Gadabouts’. Believing that there were alternatives to war, Quakers sought to provide a practical demonstration of human sympathy and global fraternity through relief services. In 1939, British Quakers assisted by the American Society of