Return to list of doctors                                                next: Epilogue

Herbert Rowse Bastard

He was born in 1884 on the northern edge of Bodmin Moor Cornwall to farming parents. His father Samuel had been orphaned when both his parents died on the same day when he was only a week old.

He trained at Guy’s hospital in London where he qualified in 1912. He worked there and at The Soho Hospital for Women.

1914 was a whirlwind year for him. He was working for the Orient Line as a ship’s surgeon on RMS Otway, which took about 1,000 immigrants on each outward journey to Australia. His second trip to Brisbane that year left London on 31 July; five days later Britain declared war against Germany. By then the Otway had berthed in Gibraltar and its stay there was prolonged by four days as there were enemy ships in the Mediterranean. Its delayed arrival in Brisbane was on 18 September and it turned around for London the next day.

One of the passangers on the Otway was a Miss Chérie Overell, aged 28. Her father was a prosperous draper owning shops in Brisbane. It had been announced in the local gossip columns that Chérie was going to vist her father who was in London, and other friends, on an extended visit. The Otway docked at Plymouth on 6 November.

On 19 November Herbert Rowse Bastard was appointed a temporary surgeon in the Royal Navy and three days later he and Chérie Overell were married in the church of St Tudy in Cornwall, by license. (The Otway was requisitioned by the navy and three years later was torpedoed by a U-boat and sank in the North Atlantic.)

In 1915 he was Resident Surgical Officer at the Schiff (convalescent) home in Cobham, Surrey.

In 1917 he bought some land in Bow, adjacent to Fair Park.

In April 1920, Dr. H. R. Bastard was appointed medical officer for Bow subdistrict, having bought the practice and Fair Park from Dr. Kelly who had resigned owing to ill-health.

Two daughters had been born in Cornwall and two sons and another daughter were born after they moved to Bow. In Bow churchyard there is a memorial to two of their children who died as infants.

In 1938 their eldest daughter Gladys married a tea planter Maurice Alberic Gonzague De Weck in Mangalore, India where she died in childbirth a year later aged 21.

Their only remaining son Geoffrey married Elspeth Mary McMorland, daughter of a Devon GP who had been found dead with a hypodermic syringe containing morphia. They farmed in Devon and then emigrated to Australia in 1968.

n 1923 Dr Bastard’s younger brother Reginald married Agnes, the daughter of Richard Davy the London surgeon who had retired to farm at nearby Burstone Manor.

It was not until 1927 that telephones were available in Bow. Initially Bow was on the Copplestone exchange (Dr Bastard’s number was Copplestone 13). From about 1931 Bow had its own exchange (Bow 33 later changed to 333).

Herbert Bastard was a keen cricketer and passionate about shooting. In 1937 he managed “a right and a left” at woodcock (i.e. downed two birds in the air at the same time, using both barrels of his shotgun).

Dr Bastard died at Fair Park, Bow on 5 October 1954, aged 70. During and after his last illness, Dr Ernest Aubrey Price (1879-1960) from Woodbury (who had been the village doctor at Witheridge in the 1920's-30's) acted as locum until Dr Bruce Marsden took over in December.

Chérie Bastard, his widow, stayed in the area and died in 1960 at her son’s farm.