Robert Baird "Bob" McClure OOnt FRCS (Edin.) FICS (November 23, 1900 – November 10, 1991) was a Canadian physician, medical missionary to China, Taiwan, Gaza, India, and Borneo, and was also the 23rd Moderator of the United Church of Canada, the first unordained lay person to hold that position. During a very active life, McClure became friends with Soong Mei-ling and Chiang Kai-shek, crossed paths with Norman Bethune, was one of the first men to drive a vehicle along the Burma Road, parachuted into jungle valleys to save downed pilots, was threatened with imprisonment by Canadian prime minister William Lyon MacKenzie King, and was almost summarily executed as a spy by Japanese soldiers. He was finally forced to retire as a missionary doctor at age 67, but then spent his first two years of "retirement" as head of the United Church of Canada, and another nine years as a short-term missionary doctor around the world. During the 1960s and 1970s, the forthright and plain-spoken McClure was one of the most recognizable and most-quoted men in Canada.
Early life Bob McClure's father, Dr. William McClure, was born in Lachute, Quebec, and earned a medical degree under William Osler at McGill University. William's wife, Margaret (nee Baird) McClure, was born in Pennsylvania. Together, the two became missionaries at a Presbyterian mission in Wuhan, China in 1888.
The Boxer Rebellion of 1900 forced the McClures and their two young daughters to evacuate to the port of Shanghai, although Margaret was three months pregnant. From Shanghai, they parted ways. William joined the medical unit of HMS Centurion under the command of Captain John Jellicoe, which was headed for Beijing as part of the Seymour Expedition. Margaret and her daughters sailed to North America on the SS Shinano Maru, landing at Portland, Oregon, where her son Bob was born on November 23, 1900. By 1901, the Boxer Rebellion had been suppressed, and the McClures were reunited in Weihui, where the Presbyterian Church had established a new mission.
Bob McClure grew up in the Weihui compound. Despite his red hair and quick temper, he quickly made friendships with Chinese playmates, and could speak both English and Mandarin by an early age. His father soon made a rule that Bob could speak Chinese outside, but had to speak English while inside the family household.
In 1910, William took a two-year sabbatical and returned with his family to North America, staying with Margaret's relatives in Wooster, Ohio. In 1912, when William was scheduled to return to Weihui, the family made the decision that William and 11-year-old Bob would return to China, while Margaret would stay in North America with her daughters as they completed their primary and high school studies.
After three more years in China, William returned with Bob to North America for another sabbatical, and the family reunited in Toronto, where Bob's two sisters were enrolled at school, Janet at the University of Toronto, and Margaret at Harbord Collegiate Institute. Bob was also enrolled at Harbord, and during his first summer in Toronto, he worked at the Russell Motor Car Company, making munitions for the Canadian Expeditionary Force fighting in the First World War. The next summer, he worked on a farm as part of the "Soldiers of the Soil" program.
University In the fall of 1917, Bob enrolled in medicine at the University of Toronto, working evenings and weekends as a stevedore at the Toronto docks or a baggage handler at Union Station to earn enough to pay his tuition. He also attended Bloor Street Church, where he was greatly influenced by the sermons of Dr. George C. Pigeon, who would go on to become the first Moderator of the United Church of Canada in 1925.
In 1920, Bob met Amy Hislop and the two started to date. In 1922, McClure graduated with his medical degree, and was planning to do post-graduate surgical work at Harvard University before joining the British Colonial Service. He was approached by George Pidgeon, who asked McClure if he would instead consider travelling to Qinyang, China to replace the doctor at the Presbyterian mission hospital who had been killed by bandits. When McClure pointed out that he would need twelve months of surgical training, Pidgeon arranged for McClure to work with Dr. Kenneth Perfect at Western Hospital in Toronto for a year.
China missionary McClure arrived in China in early 1924. Since he could speak Mandarin but could neither read nor write Chinese characters, he enrolled in Chinese language school for several months. McClure then travelled to Qinyang to take up his post as mission doctor at the Menzies Memorial Hospital. The following year, with the formation of the United Church of Canada from the union of the Presbyterian, Methodist and Congregationalist Churches, the hospital and mission became a United Church charge.
In 1926, Bob asked a colleague travelling to Toronto to present Amy Hislop with his marriage proposal; Amy said yes, and the two met later that year in Tianjin to be married. Bob returned to Qinyang with his new bride, but less than a year later full civil war broke out between the Kuomintang, Communists and Nationalists, forcing Bob and his pregnant wife to flee to Tianjin.
McClure relocated to a Presbyterian mission hospital in Taipei on the Japanese-occupied island of Taiwan. There he worked with a highly trained Canadian doctor, George Gushue-Taylor, FRCS (Edin). McClure, with his single year of basic surgical training, later recalled in a conversation with medical historian Charles Gordon Roland that "[Gushue-Taylor] was certainly, academically, the highest trained surgeon we had had up to then. I don't think we've had anybody since then, any higher, with his academic training. He had come out of University College Hospital, in London, with gold medals in gynecology, I remember, and gold medals, I believe, in surgical anatomy, and things like this. Really, a very highly qualified man." Despite his Canadian background, Gushue-Taylor acted very properly British, and discouraged social casualness of any kind. Gushue-Taylor had been in Taipei since 1911, and had learned the language well enough that he had co-authored a 1917 Taiwanese-language nursing manual, Lāi-goā-kho Khàn-hō͘-ha̍k. Gushue-Taylor was very critical of McClure's Canadian medical education — as McClure recalled, "he immediately told me what a terrible education I'd had in Canada. That ideally you couldn't get any good medical course in Canada. He was right in this respect, that the ordinary Canadian medical student had not spent the time on the basic stuff of anatomy. Simply, in anatomy we did not know our anatomy the way the English medical student knew his. We did not know our basic pathology. We did not know our medical pathology the way he did." So Gushue-Taylor took McClure back to school, insisting he read medical texts about the cases he was treating, questioning McClure afterwards, and casting doubt that McClure could ever hope to earn his FRCS degree from the prestigious Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh.
In addition to his medical work, McClure started to learn the Amoy dialect so he could speak directly with his patients, and he also learned some rudimentary Japanese for his dealings with local occupation authorities. Two children were born to the McClures during their time in Taiwan.
After three years of education and prodding by Gushue-Taylor, McClure made the decision to earn his FRCS degree. In 1930, while Amy and the children travelled to Toronto, McClure journeyed to the UK to commence his studies. After several months of surgical training and study at Chelsea Hospital, McClure failed the FRCS exam. He rejoined his family in Canada and studied surgery for several more months at Toronto General Hospital. He then re-took the FRCS exam in Toronto in the spring of 1931 but for a second time, he failed. He immediately travelled to Edinburgh to sit for the summer exam, and this time, he passed.
During his studies in Edinburgh, McClure had learned about the use of radium in cancer treatments. At the time, radium was very expensive, costing £15,000 per gram. In preparation for a return to the mission hospital at Qinyang, McClure raised enough money to buy a few micrograms of radium. One of his donors was diplomat Vincent Massey. McClure was the second missionary doctor in the world to buy radium (the first being the Canadian doctor William James Wanless for the Miraj Medical Centre in India.)
The family moved back to Qinyang in late 1931. In the next two years, the McClure family expanded with the arrival of two more children. In 1934, McClure travelled to Europe for five months to study the latest developments in the use of radiation treatments for cancer.
In 1937, McClure became the Field Director for the International Red Cross (IRC), and in this role, tried to convince all the factions vying for control of central China to allow for the free movement of medical supplies and treatment of wounded soldiers. During one of these attempts, he was detained by Japanese soldiers as a spy, and was only saved from immediate execution by the intervention of a Japanese officer who had worked with McClure on rural reconstruction. As the situation deteriorated in China, Amy returned to Canada with their children, and bought a house in Toronto, the first house that the McClures had owned. McClure's father, William McClure, now 84, moved in with Amy and the children.
On February 23, 1938, McClure crossed paths with fellow Canadian doctor Norman Bethune, who was travelling to join Communist forces at Shanxi. McClure biographer Munro Scott characterized the meeting as unpleasant, saying, "Dr. McClure had found Dr. Bethune to be very anti-Canadian, paranoic about his thoracic work, too militantly communist, and bitter." It was the only meeting of the two Canadian doctors — 18 months later Bethune would die from blood poisoning contracted while performing combat surgery.
Later that spring, McClure had to abandon attempts to negotiate with the Japanese forces in China when he learned they had placed a bounty of US$50,000 on his head. Through his work with the IRC, he did meet Soong Mei-ling, wife of Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek. McClure developed a friendship with both of them, and a few months later Soong Mei-Ling asked McClure to travel to England to speak at a World Red Cross Conference on behalf of the Kuomintang's Central China Committee.
With the situation in China deteriorating, McClure was unable to return to his work, so he reunited with his family in Toronto and filled his time doing fundraising tours of the United States and Europe for the IRC before attending a world missionary conference in Madras, India. While there, McClure was told about the Burma Road that had just been completed by the British to connect Rangoon, Burma to Kunming, China. Seeing this as a potential way to get medical supplies into China for the IRC while bypassing Chinese ports blocked by warring factions, McClure decided to test it, and became only the third person to drive a car the length of the road. McClure set out to organize regular relief convoys along the road.