Lula Bell HOUGH [1906-2002]

Lula Bell Hough was an American missionary (born 1906) who was ordained by the Assemblies of God and went to Guangzhou, South China in 1929, to preach the gospel in a previously unreached area. It was a time of hardship, often living in primitive conditions, as did the people they dwelt among.

In 1939 because of the Sino-Japanese War, Miss Hough moved to Hong Kong, where she started a mission church near the cross-roads in Fanling NT, which she pastored for 24 years. Like many missionaries who started mission churches, she provided her own music to accompany the hymn singing; her instrument was an accordion.

She was a friend and neighbour and a regular visitor to Miss Mildred Dibden who opened the Fanling Babies’ Home nearby in 1940.  When given the option of evacuation to the USA before the war, she said she preferred to stay.

On the day following the Japanese invasion (8th December 1941) she had been found by the Japanese hiding in her church with her amah and another Chinese woman and detailed to help at the Babies’ Home, so she called at the Home to offer assistance to Mildred, whose amahs had all fled in terror, following the rampaging of Japanese troops in the Home. 

During the night of the 9th, the amahs returned, cold and hungry and soaked through, and blackened with soot from having been hiding for 14 hours round the chimney pots on the roof of the Home.  By a miracle the Home had a peaceful night.

The next day (10th) rations of rice and vegetables were shared out.  There were frequent interruptions by troops coming in and turning things over.  Locking the doors just resulted in broken locks.  At dusk that evening the babies were put to bed and the staff settled down for the night, only to be roused at 10.00pm by officers with lamps demanding identification of the three European women (Miss Dibden, Miss Hough, and Miss Ruth Little, an Australian nurse who had started at Fanling 6 months earlier).  All documents were taken away as evidence, and the exhausted women settled down once more.

But then at 1.00am more soldiers; the 3 European women ('foreigners') were arrested, tied up and taken off to spend the night in a barn occupied by Japanese troops.  This did not bode well and they realised that the end of their lives could be near.  But as they waited through the night, Mildred Dibden describes (in her story The Yip Family of Amah Rock) how a wondrous feeling of peace permeated them and held them fast.  The next morning at dawn, Mildred and Ruth were marched out (they thought to execution) but to their great surprise they were marched back to the Home and inexplicably released.  

Lula Bell Hough was sent to join Florence Raetz and another American missionary at the Door of Hope Mission at  Taipo, and interned by the Japanese for 7 months before being returned to the USA as an exchange prisoner in June 1942, but she returned to Hong Kong after the war in March 1946 to continue her work. 

Her church continues today as the Fanling Assemblies of God Church.

Sources:

The Yip Family of Amah Rock - Jill Doggettt.

This Flower Pentecostal Heritage Centre link gives her picture and more of her life.