Answering that of God
Martin Wainwright reflects on his father’s involvement with the Friends Ambulance Unit
In the first year of the second world war a tribunal heard evidence about a ‘fine young man’, a Methodist Sunday school teacher and Cambridge graduate, whose conscience forbade him to take up arms. He was my father, Richard Wainwright, and the hearing’s ruling in his favour led to six years’ work with the Quaker-run Friends Ambulance Unit (FAU), from cleaning hospital bedpans in Gloucester to saving German families and refugees from reprisals after the allied victory. His pacifist war service will be recognised this weekend with that of more than 1,300 colleagues in the FAU, seventeen of them killed in action, and their counterparts in the Friends Relief Service (FRS), which helped civilian victims of war, first in the 1940–41 blitz and then overseas in the wake of the fighting.
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