increasingly involved with the Quakers; his administrative experience was especially appreciated by the Quaker Meeting in Norwich and he served a term as co-clerk of the Meeting. Bryan had, however, grown up in the Church of England, retaining a special affection for Norwich Cathedral. On finally moving back to Norwich, he was able to find expression for this again, together with an engagement with the St. Julian's Church, which was only a short distance from the Bryans' home on Southgate Lane. For Liao, it had been a visit to Jordans, coupled with the personal support of Margery Fry, who, as Principal, had admitted her to Somerville, that had first drawn her to the Quakers. The Bryans were married in Chengdu after the Quaker custom and stayed with Margery Fry on their first return as a couple from China. As Chinese Secretary, he helped to resolve the Yangtse Incident of April 1949, when the British warship HMS Amethyst was caught off-guard on Yangtze River behind the rapidly advancing lines of the People's Liberation Army. While his assistant, Edward Youde, later to serve as Governor of Hong Kong, achieved popular recognition for cycling behind those lines to make contact with the Amethyst, it was Bryan who was sent to take a lecture on gun-boat diplomacy from Huang Hua. Bryan was never a communist and would chuckle in recalling the blandishments of those who had encouraged him to join the Communist Party, only themselves to fall away, especially after 1956. Nevertheless, he was candid in his sympathies for the Chinese in the circumstances China faced, reflecting the practicality of the consular official, rather than the valiant discretion of the diplomat. While serving as the British Consul in Peking, he called for the admission of the People's Republic to the United Nations a generation before the Americans stopped vetoing it, and in 1951, during the Korean War, he said he approved of Mao's social reforms. Although Bryan had served in China almost continuously for eighteen years and was then the Foreign Office's most able sinologue, the early 1950s were a period of heightened political sensitivity and it was decided to offer Bryan the post of Commercial Attache in Lima, Peru. Bryan activated the early retirement provision, largely out of consideration for his wife. The move accelerated the careers of younger colleagues such as Youde, but also left confusion in the minds of those not