Leeds nostalgia: Missionry with zeal who passed away...
This month in 1970, Miss Gladys Aylward, the missionary pictured above with her adoptive son, died.
She is pictured just a few years earlier with her adopted son Gordon, then aged four, who was abandoned by his parents in Formosa (modern day Taiwan).
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Hide AdShe was the Protestant missionary to China - here story was told in the book ‘The Small Woman’ by Alan Burgess, published in 1957.
In 1958, the story was made into the Hollywood film ‘The Inn of the Sixth Happiness’, starring Ingrid Bergman. Aylward visited Leeds and spoke publically prior to her death on January 3, 1970.
She was widely welcomed and was known to the Chinese as ‘the virtuous one’. A London secondary school was named in her honour.