Mary Atkinson Tyng Higgins
Mary Atkinson Tyng Higgins, 91, of Signal Mountain died on Monday, June 21, 2004.
The Rev. Kathryn Mathewson will conduct the service at 10:30 a.m. on Saturday in St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church.
The family will receive friends from 9:30 – 10:30 a.m. in the church.
Interment will be in University of the South Cemetery, Sewanee, TN.
Memorial contributions may be made to St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church, 630 Mississippi Ave., Signal Mountain, TN 37377.
Send condolences at www.CovenantFuneral.com.
Arrangements are by Covenant Funeral Service, Crox family owned and operated.
Higgins organized delivery of Red Cross relief supplies to the interior of China in 1939 and survived Japanese internment during World War II. Following Pearl Harbor, Higgins was captured by the Japanese with her missionary husband, the Rev. Charles A. Higgins, and their infant son in Hong Kong. After receiving very limited food rations for six months, they were repatriated in an emaciated state to New York in the first Gripsholm exchange during the summer of 1942.
Higgins, who graduated from Harvard’s Radcliffe College in 1934, was proud of her descent from five successive generations of Episcopal ministers and said she would have followed in their footsteps had she been a man.
"Because I was a woman, I couldn't become a priest, so I married one," Higgins used to tell her five sons as they grew up in Waco, Texas, and Little Rock, Ark.
Nonetheless she remained active in the church her entire life, attending national conventions with her husband and working behind the scenes for racial harmony during the Little Rock school integration crisis of the late 1950s. She corresponded extensively with friends in Asia, Europe and the North America and published accounts of her China childhood, Radcliffe years and young adulthood in China.
Inspired by her artist uncle and aunt, Griswold and Margaret Fuller Tyng of Boston, Higgins sketched scenery incessantly for most of her life and produced many oil paintings of landscapes, flowers, China scenes and family portraits.
Higgins was born April 20, 1913, in Hankow (now Wuhan), China, soon after her parents _ Walworth and Ethel Tyng _ were dispatched there from Boston as Episcopal missionaries. Following early education in China, where she became fluent in Chinese, she was graduated from Oldfields School, Glencoe, Md, and then received a bachelor of arts degree from Radcliffe in 1934.
She took her younger sister on a trip around the world in 1938, calling in the Philippines, Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), Singapore, Burma, India, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Egypt, Greece, Turkey, across Europe via Budapest, Vienna, Germany and the Netherlands to England.
Higgins returned to China, where she was dispatched by the Anglican bishop of Hong Kong, the Rt. Rev. R.O. Hall, to Haiphong, Indochina, in 1939 to clear up a backlog of China-bound relief supplies which were blocked by customs problems in the harbor.
She succeeded by working with officials in Haiphong and Hanoi and proceeded by rail and truck to clear the way for the supplies to western China.
Higgins became engaged to her future husband while riding in the truck he was using to move mission and college equipment in an attempt to keep it safe from Japanese attack.
She moved to Hong Kong and continued working for Hall by raising funds and organizing relief supplies, including the making of bandages by school children, as the organizing secretary of the Foreign Auxiliary to the Chinese Red Cross.
After their marriage and birth of their eldest son, Charles, the young family lived in spartan conditions on the Burma Road in western Yunnan province, where her husband was on the staff of Hankow Diocesan Middle School. They returned to Hong Kong, where they were caught in the December 1941 Japanese invasion.
The Japanese interned them in Stanley Prison Camp with 3,000 other British, Dutch and Americans on Jan. 6, 1942, where they soon were suffering from malnutrition and intestinal disease caused by the little contaminated food and water they received.
Higgins attributed her survival to the “horse-trading skills” skills of the Tennessean Cordell Hull, then U.S. secretary of state, who was able to arrange the repatriation of the Americans the following summer, in exchange for Japanese royalty and diplomats who had been detained in the United States at the outbreak of war.
Higgins wrote in her autobiographical book “With a War On,” that the large staffs of Japanese diplomats stationed in North and South America meant they far outnumbered the American diplomats interned in Asia.
“Cordell Hull insisted on a ratio of one-for-one in the exchange and added categories of our nationals who had been imprisoned, tortured and those of us who had been interned. In any case of choice, those who were suffering most took precedence.”
The Hong Kong detainees were included because the International Red Cross had visited the camp and found “conditions were so bad that we were given a fairly high priority.”
The Americans left Hong Kong on the Japanese ship Asama Maru on June 29, 1942.
The exchange took place in Lourenco Marques, Portuguese East Africa (now Maputo, Mozambique). The Asama Maru was docked “fantail to fantail” with the neutral Swedish liner Gripsholm, which was carrying the Japanese internees who had been held in the luxurious Greenbrier Hotel.
“The Japanese, looking very rich and well-fed after their stay in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, filed along the other side of the railway cars, wearing and carrying beautiful furs in the hot weather,” Higgins wrote.
The other Americans gradually were taken to the Gripsholm until only the Higginses and another woman missionary remained on the Asama Maru. The Americans on the Gripsholm, feeling guilty that they already were enjoying a lavish smorgasbord on the new ship, threw fruit and other delicacies to them.
The problem was that there were two fewer Japanese for the exchange than Americans, and the Japanese were insisting on retaining the two women, but Joseph Grew, the U.S. ambassador to Japan, finally persuaded them to let all four leave by personally promising to make up the number in the next exchange.
Following their return to the United States, the Higginses lived in Cape Girardeau, Mo., and Waco, Texas, where her husband was rector of Episcopal churches.
While in Waco she learned of the distress of women discouraged from breast-feeding in the face of the popularity of infant formula and wrote and distributed detailed nursing instructions for new mothers, long before breast-feeding advocates became well-organized in the United States.
In 1957 they moved to Little Rock, Ark., when her husband was called to be dean of Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, placing them in the middle of the United States’ first major integration crisis.
Her husband was an outspoken advocate of school desegregation and worked with a broad coalition of religious leaders to ease tensions.
“I plead for a spirit of charity and forgiveness between those who disagree,” he said in a sermon calling for the dismantling of three "barriers to the brotherhood of man – slavery, gender or sex and race.”
On the retirement of her husband in 1977 they moved to Sewanee. She was widowed in 1985 and moved to Chattanooga in 1987.
Higgins was president of the Little Rock branch of the National League of American Pen Women 1968-70 and Arkansas State Chairman 1970-72. She was a member of American Association of University Women, the Hereditary Order of Descendants of Colonial Governors, Colonial Dames, the National Society of Magna Charta Dames, and the Order of Charlemagne.
She is survived by her sons, Charles T. Higgins of Signal Mountain; Alexander G. Higgins of Arzier, Switzerland; L. Ashley Higgins of Helena, Ark.; Dudley A. Higgins of Houston, Texas; and Stephen T. Higgins of Buford, Ga.; two brothers, William Tyng of Washington, D.C., and Franklin Tyng of Bel Air, Md.; and a sister, Anne Tyng of Greenbrae, Calif.; 12 grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.