Rhoda WATKINS

WATKINS, RHODA (b. Lucindale, SA, 1 March 1894; d. Adelaide, SA, 1975). CMS missionary in China.

Rhoda Watkins became a Christian as a young girl and was led to offer for missionary service after hearing a speaker on deputation from India in 1915. While her brothers and her boyfriend enlisted, Rhoda trained as a nurse at the Royal Adelaide Hospital. After the war she returned to the family home to nurse her brother who had returned with tuberculosis. The call to missionary service was still strong and she chose it above marriage to the young man whom she loved offering herself to CMS SA in 1919. She completed a midwifery course in Melbourne which proved valuable when she was a hospital matron in China.

When eventually posted by CMS in 1921 the telegram read: 'Watkins posted Kweilin China'. When she eventually arrived in Kweilin in 1923 after language study, it was in the throes of civil war with brigands and warlords fighting for supremacy. Her early optimistic hopes of peace 'for the sake of the Chinese people' were not fulfilled. War was the constant background to Rhoda's 28 years in China, first struggles among the warlords, then the Japanese invasion, and the Communist counter-attack, and victory in 1948. It brought to Rhoda Watkins siege, kidnapping, bombing, purges.

On the way to the hospital in Kweilin Rhoda Watkins and another missionary, Grace Santler, were almost killed when bandits began shooting at the little river boat on which they were travelling. She worked with an Englishwoman, Dr Charlotte Bacon, and became the matron of the Way of Life Hospital. She became greatly loved and respected by the Chinese Christians in Kweilin to whom anyone from the outside world was 'a foreigner'. They called her 'Jin Set Sen' meaning 'Gold pointing to the truth'.

The many people who came to the Way of Life Hospital for treatment were impressed by the love the Christian doctors and nurses showed them. There were many moving stories of life-saving care, sometimes followed by genuine expressions of Christian faith. In 1928 Rhoda returned to China after a home furlough. She found the country in a turmoil with Communist forces and other dissident groups fighting everywhere. She travelled up-river with a New Zealand missionary Blanche Tobin. Brigands stormed the boat and kidnapped the two women and two Chinese girls. They were held for ransom, and it was only Rhoda's weakness through seasickness which forced them to release her. Blanche Tobin was held for many weeks before a ransom payment released her.

In May 1930 Kweilin was the bomb target for the invading Japanese, and bombs dropped just outside the hospital, killing and wounding many. When the bombs fell Watkins and the nurses took the patients to shelter in the nearby limestone caves. Forced to return to Australia during the war years of the 1940s, Watkins was one of the first civilians to return to China in 1946. She found the Way of Life Hospital burnt to the ground. She worked tirelessly to raise funds from overseas supporters and returned to take charge of the new hospital.

In 1950 she left Kweilin for the last time. She was exhausted but it was not long before she served for a year as matron at the CMS training college in Melbourne. The need for nurses in Malaya drew her overseas again and for five years she worked in clinics and hospitals from one end of the country to the other, sometimes the only Westerner in the new villages. Failing health brought Rhoda Watkins back to Adelaide and it was discovered she had Parkinson's disease. Her last years were spent at the Julia Farr Centre in Adelaide where she was greatly loved.

H Caterer, Foreigner in Kweilin (London, 1966); CMS SA Archives (for regular report letters)

HELEN CATERER