1900 - Mary & Edith Lutley

August 1900

Henan

Mary and Edith Lutley were two precious girls among a group of 14 missionaries who tried to flee the Boxer troubles in two springless carts. Leaving their base at Linfen in Shanxi Province on July 15, 1900, the group were like lambs to the slaughter—completely at the mercy of the hundreds of Chinese villages that lay on the long journey southward to Wuhan in Hubei Province.

On the second day the carts rolled through the small town of Zhaocheng, where a Chinese pastor named Sang boldly approached the group. One of the missionaries noted, “This dear old man, whose heart is full of love and whose face shows it, could not resist coming to our cart, drawing our curtain aside and wishing us peace, so little did he think of saving his own life.”[1]

Forty-five days of dreadful anxiety and barbarous treatment later the carts reached the safety of Wuhan, which at the time was under foreign control. The two little Lutley girls were not among those who made it alive. On August 3rd, Mary Lutley died from an illness resulting from the hardships of the journey. Bounding along hour after hour on rough potholed roads was a terrible experience for the sick child, and in the end her body simply expired while they were travelling through northern Henan Province. The missionaries buried Mary Lutley’s body outside the wall of a town they were passing through.

Two weeks later on August 17th, her sister, Edith Lutley, also died while being pushed along in a wheelbarrow. The loss of both their precious daughters was a huge blow to the Lutleys. After Edith perished, “The childless father wound the little body tenderly in a strip of cloth, then the party went its way while. [She was] tenderly laid to rest in a lonely hillside grave.”[2]

After a time of grieving at their home in Great Somerford, England, Albert and Mrs. Lutley returned to Shanxi without their two precious daughters and recommenced the work that God had called them to, and reported that when the mission station reopened, “the people came in crowds to hear the Gospel…. Mr. Lutley said he never preached to such audiences before, and Mrs. Lutley was quite overwhelmed with the number of women.”[3]