CD1

(71 mins)
 

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born London 1921 / family background / Shanghai Cathedral School / prep school / parents / Empress of Japan / typhoid / siblings

Born in July 1921 at his grandmother's house in London. He was always told it was the hottest summer of the 20th century.

When he was just a few months old he travelled out to live in Shanghai, China - his father was an accountant there. He attended the Cathedral School in Shanghai.

Returned to England when he was nine or ten and went to a prep school near Crawley. The school was housed in a grotesque mansion that was originally built for a South African diamond tycoon.

His parents continued to live in Shanghai. His mother would come back to England about every other year, his father only came back once every four or five years.

In 1938 he travelled out to Shanghai on the Siberian railway for a month. While in Shanghai he ate some persimmons that he had bought off a street trader and on the way back to England on the Empress of Japan he came down with typhoid and was taken into the ship's sick bay. His elder brother got badly sunburnt on the return journey when he went for a swim in Honolulu - the doctor's bills were higher for treating the sunburn than they were for treating the typhoid. He doesn't think the ship's doctor really knew what was wrong with him - probably just as well as he would have been put in the isolation hospital which was on an island three hours' sail away from Vancouver. He ended up staying in a hospital in Vancouver itself for about two months. After the typhoid cleared up he suffered from deep vein thrombosis in his left leg.

His brother was 18 months older than him; he also had a sister who died at birth. [Back to top]
 

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education / Cambridge / brother / parents interned / airforce / Rhodesia / Cambridge / Barts / parents

He and his brother were due to go to an English school in Switzerland but because of his illness they missed the first term and started the following term. They had two terms there before the war started. Some of the other pupils were there because of illness - asthma and so.

He had been at Canford School but hadn't liked it. He wasn't particularly academic and was slow to learn to read. He thinks he was probably dyslexic.

When the war started the school in Switzerland moved lock stock and barrel to take a house in Repton School with its 11or 12 boys.

In 1941 he went to Cambridge, where he read medicine, and thoroughly enjoyed it. In his second year there his brother was killed at El Allamein and his parents were interned when the Japanese moved into Shanghai. These two events prompted him to join the RAF, and he was stationed in what was then Rhodesia. He trained as a pilot then became an instructor.

When the war ended he returned to Cambridge and then to Barts.

When the Communists took over in 1949 his father's import/export business had to close and, after helping his Eurasian staff relocate to South American, he returned.

His father retired to Surrey, and MH went to live with his parents for a couple of years there until he qualified. His father did not live for much longer after retiring and his mother died in 1956, shortly after MH got married. [Back to top]
 

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first employment / meeting wife / applying for jobs post-war / Tolland

He took his first house job in Bath. It was there that he met his wife, when he took over her job. After Bath, he took another house job in Amersham, Bucks for six months. Then he worked as a GP in Tarrington, near Ledbury, for about a year, before working as a locum for a Dr Jobson, a house doctor in Wales.

He started applying for permanent jobs, but because the war had finished just a few years previously, there were a lot of people who had served in the war, come out and studied medicine and who were now also applying for medical jobs, so competition was fierce. It took a couple of years for him to find a job.

By this time his wife's parents had moved to Gaulden Manor in Tolland, about ten miles away, three miles outside Wiveliscombe. [Back to top]
 

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Brendons / local doctors / starting practice / access to doctor

He and his wife came to stay at Gaulden and got to know the area well. He realised that there were a lot of farm workers living in the Brendon Hills who found it difficult to get to a doctor because they did not have a car, so he wrote to the Medical Practitioners Committee asking them if he could set up a practice in there.

He remembers visiting a family in the Brendons with seven children who had not been immunised against anything. They all lived one small cottage with an enormous double bed.

His application went before the local medical committee, who rejected it, then it went to London to have the rejection approved, but they reversed the decision. [Back to top]
 

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dispensing Land Rover / area covered

He started out with a Land Rover, which he fitted out with a kind of dispensary in the back. In this he was often able to give patients the medicine they needed on the spot.

Remembers visiting Mr Williams who had the Lowtrow Cross Inn when it was an old-fashioned country pub.

His patch covered the area bordered to the west by Wheddon Cross and to the east by Elworthy, taking in Luxborough, Brompton Regis, Skilgate, Upton, Washford, Withiel Florey, Monksilver and other villages. [Back to top]
 

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building up practice / local doctors / immunisation

After a few months he had about 100 patients, and within three years he had 700-800. He settled at about 1,000 - he did not want any more than that.

There were a lot of large families around when he was starting his practice, and they were grateful that a doctor was able to come and visit their children. This was one reason why his patient numbers grew quickly. Very often he was summoned by word of mouth to see a patient. His patients hardly ever came to see him - he went to see them.

It didn't make him very popular with the existing local doctors, but he thinks it did them a lot of good because it had been all too easy for them. They had been getting a generous mileage allowance to visit these patients but they weren't actually making the journey.

His work was entirely on the National Health Service - he never had any private patients. [Back to top]
 

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Hook Hill Cottage / Ralegh's Cross / Mr Rowsell [2 mins cut] / buying vicarage

For the first three months of his practice he was living at Hook Hill Cottage. He was at Ralegh's Cross Inn where a Mr Wills told him there was a cottage on his farm which MH could have for about five bob a week. It a living room and a kitchen downstairs and two bedrooms upstairs. After a short time at Hook Hill Cottage he heard that Mr Rowsell, a furniture maker, wanted to sell what was the vicarage at Leighland and move somewhere less isolated. He wanted £1800 for it, as he had paid £1700 for it. He had got the house from the Church Commissioners. It was the rectory for Old Cleeve. [Back to top]
 

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iron mines / school house / Leighland then / incline / mineral line cottages

At the turn of the century iron ore was still being mined in the Brendons. There was a school with 126 children near Leighland in 1900 and several cottages in what is now a field. The mines were profitable for a time, but the problem was that the iron ore was in vertical rather than horizontal seams, which meant that the working area was always flooded and they had to keep pumping water out.

There was a railway line running along the top of the Brendons serving the mines, which linked up with the Incline railway near Seaview House. As the iron ore was loaded on the wagons and taken down 1,000 feet or so to the bottom of the Incline, the weight of the loaded wagons would pull up the empty ones on the other side. They did try to bore into the hill to get to the iron ore from the bottom of the Incline, but it didn't work. Cheaper iron ore from Spain put paid to the mining in the Brendons - the industrialists in Cardiff decided to buy it from there instead. There are still workable amounts of iron ore in the Brendons but it's a very expensive business to get it out of the hills. When he started his practice there were still one or two people in the area who had worked in the iron ore mines.

The houses on what was the mineral line used to be workmen's cottages but have now been tarted up and tend to be occupied by middle class people these days. That's the trouble with villages - too middle class all together nowadays, he thinks. [Back to top]
 

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Leighland / Charlie Routley / Charlie's mother / walking son to school / school

There used to be a lot more little cottages in Leighland than there are now. Charlie Routley lives in a whitewashed cottage near MH's house; his mother, who died very recently [ie spring 2001], had a wonderful memory and could remember being brought up in what was left of the mining industry.

Charlie Routley sold the cottage very close to MH's house to MH's son, though he and his wife have since moved down to Watchet. MH holds the deeds to that cottage - he doesn't want just anyone moving in!

When he first lived in the area there was still a school and school house in Leighland; his wife used to walk his eldest son to the school across the fields from Hook Hill Cottage. When the number of pupils dropped to less than half a dozen the local authority decided to close the school. The school buildings have been converted into a house. [Back to top]