This biography was written in 2023 for the Early Medical Women of New Zealand Project by Rachel Maule’s children. The biography was edited by Michaela Selway. Further information is listed in the bibliography.
Contents
1960 graduate
Early Family Life in Northern, Rural New Zealand
Rachel was born on April 24, 1936, the eldest of six children of Lorna Rachel and Norman Edward Senn. (1) (2) Lorna Rachel Dallimore was born in Brixton, London and her family had emigrated to Cambridge in New Zealand hoping the climate would improve her mother’s TB symptoms. Norman, born in New Zealand in 1901, had left formal education early and had worked in America on various jobs, including in a salmon tinning factory in Alaska, returning after five to seven years. Norman studied electrical engineering through correspondence school but, upon returning to New Zealand, could only find work as an insurance salesman, a job he disliked.
The couple met in Cambridge. Lorna had a close friend, Nora Todd (Aunty Toddy as she later became known to the Senn children). Nora was the sister of Jack Todd who, while in the USA, had been helped out of a difficult situation, possibly financial, by a fellow New Zealander, Norman Senn. Norman, presumably during a visit to Jack in Cambridge, met Lorna. After they first met, Lorna declared that she could not get involved with someone with such a terrible American accent. She evidently soon saw past this disability, as the couple married in 1935. (3) (4)
Rachel was born in Hamilton but the family moved to Kaitaia in 1939 when she was three, as her father had accepted a job as electrical engineer for the Northland Power Board. Her father was instrumental in bringing electricity to the Far North and there is an avenue named after him in Kaitaia.
At their first home there, a Power Board house, there was no sewage connection, and the bucket for the toilet was collected daily by a man in a cart. Rachel belonged to girl guides that was only run at the nearby township of Awanui so once a week she biked the 7 km to get there, which was quite a challenge considering the roads in those days. When she was around 10, she used to create horses out of corks and pipe cleaners and line them up on ledges in an under house space.
She was in love with horses, until the first time she rode one at around 12 years of age when she discovered they were hot, sweaty, and smelly. She was less fond of them after that, although she retained a love of doodling them all her life. One of Rachel’s responsibilities was to look after the family chickens, a task she particularly enjoyed. She was an avid reader, and could often be found curled up with a book behind the couches in the sitting room where there were bookshelves along the wall. Rachel’s three brothers became a little wild as teenagers, so Norman leased some land to grow potatoes and other vegetables for the family, and the boys were made to go down and help in the weekends.
The family were not particularly well off. However, Norman and a friend (Bertie Adamson) were able to build a very basic beach house at nearby Taipa, Doubtless Bay. He was able to build on some of Bert Adamson‘s land because he used to do electrical work for him during the war when the army used part of Bert’s land. You could not buy new wood at that time, so they bought two huts from the army when the war was over and some old timber from a building near Takahue. The bach was simply two army huts cobbled together with DIY wiring and a long drop as the toilet. Here, the family spent weekends and holidays.
As a child, Rachel loved to spend many hours alone, roaming barefoot in the hills around Taipa. She used to hunt for kauri gum which she sold. Once she was approached by a strange man who tried to grab her but she ran off, and did not tell her parents about it for fear they would forbid her from her solitary walks. She also enjoyed rowing the family’s rowboat on the Taipa estuary. The beach house stayed in the extended family until the 1980’s, when it was deemed unsafe and had to be demolished.
Lorna had been an older bride, as she had been at home looking after her younger siblings with her mother suffering from TB. After having a number of children over a short period of time, she asked her family doctor if there was any way she could stop having any more children, as her health was suffering, but the GP was very unhappy about this idea and said it was her duty to continue having more children. Alternatively, she could put a lock on her bedroom door. She died at the age of 54 of a hypertensive stroke. Rachel was in her twenties, away at university, at the time, and her mother’s death affected her a great deal.
In 1963, her father married Daisy Joan Arnell (known to all as Joan) a matron at Kaitaia Hospital. Because, at the time, married women couldn’t be matrons, Joan became a district nurse and was well respected in the region. They were together until Norman’s death in 1969. Rachel’s youngest sister, Helen, herself a nurse, died tragically in her twenties in a motor vehicle accident in Italy. She was on holiday with their middle sister Judith, to escape an unhappy love affair with a young doctor. Helen and Judith had both been planning to get work in London, to make a fresh start.
Flying through school and Medical Intermediate
Rachel thrived academically at school. She was a shy girl, and not good at sports apart from running, but flourished in her school work, and was a school librarian. Kaitaia District High School was not well geared towards academia, although Rachel would recall they had some very good teachers at the time. In 1946, Rachel won an award for best essay across Standards 3 and 4. (12) She also won the overall academic prize for top student in Form 3. (13) Rachel was very motivated and was able to study to a level beyond that which most of the teachers in the school were able to teach.
By her final year, the teachers were mostly just giving her the textbooks to work through and leaving her to self directed learning. In spite of this, she was able to get some of the highest marks in the country in some of her subjects and was made Dux. She scored the second highest exam mark in New Zealand in Geography, narrowly beaten by a boy who would later be in her same year at medical school. While at school, her teachers suggested to her parents that she go to university and assumed she would be a secondary school teacher. However, Rachel considered her social skills were not her strong point and did not see herself as a leader. Having been a librarian at school, she contemplated doing that as a career but she wanted a future with life, not books, even though people were a bit of a mystery to her.
Rachel recalled considering being a doctor after reading a book by AJ Cronin, a GP turned author, in which a doctor revived a new born baby by repeatedly dunking it in hot then cold water. She also thought she may have been influenced by the fact that her family’s GP was a woman, a rare thing in those days. Rachel had decided on a medical career by the time she was in 5th Form. She spent most holidays from her 6th Form onwards (including holidays during her intermediate year at Auckland University College) working as a nurse aid at Kaitaia Hospital. In her final school exams, she just missed out on getting a scholarship (only 30 were awarded over the whole of New Zealand) but did get a Boarding Bursary which would pay for her fees and a hostel.
Rachel did her medical intermediate at Auckland University College, staying at the Girls Friendly Society hostel, a boarding house for young women on nearby Wellesley Street. She joined the tramping club and became notorious for walking to the summit of Rangitoto in bare feet. She was enthralled by the cultural life of concerts, movies, and art exhibitions that the big city could offer.
Early into the year, Rachel was sitting in Albert Park with a male fellow student who told her that no girl ever gets through the intermediate year in one go. Rachel thought then that her medical-school dreams had been dashed as her bursary would not stretch to a repeat year. However, Rachel had had a strong school education in the sciences, unlike many of the All-Girls school students and she found the subjects easy. She was a conscientious student and enjoyed the work. Although she did not do a lot of studying between exams, she would study furiously before each one and had no difficulty in getting the required marks to be accepted into medical school.
Life in Dunedin as a Student
Rachel moved to Dunedin 1955 for Medical School. The journey from Kaitaia to Dunedin was a long slow one by train, bus and ferry in those days. It took her three days to make the trip. She remembered Wellington as a grey place with invariably miserable weather.
For her first year at Otago, Rachel stayed at Saint Margaret’s College, which was at that time a women’s only, Presbyterian hall. She remembered it as having a rather genteel atmosphere. Evening meals were taken in the hall with the matron and her assistant sitting at ‘High Table’ and students would take it in turn to dine with them. She made long term friends there. It was quite a strict hostel; the lower windows were barred to keep boys out, they were assured, rather than to keep the girls in. However, Rachel and her friends soon found they could ‘escape’ out of a higher window and across a shed. Rachel would sometimes stay out late attending Communist party meetings. She also joined the university tramping club that year and was a very active member.
In Rachel’s medical school class there were only 12 women out of 120 students. They tended to stick together, as the men were often less than welcoming. The women students had a separate tea-room to protect them from the roughness of the males. The lecturers were, on the whole, careful to be very fair. However, Rachel felt that it may have been better for the woman to have some recognition being such a small group amongst the bigger male one. In the anatomy and dissection classes, the female students had two tables separate from the male students to ‘protect their delicate sensibilities’ and not have men leaning over them. Most of the women in Rachel’s year would go on to be specialists overseas, a career path Rachel was intending to follow. Rachel also felt out of place socially in New Zealand.
Rachel did well in her studies. She remembered reading the results of one exam in histology that was put up on a notice board. She had scored the top mark, and the male student who came second was looking at the list at the same time. He was furious at being beaten by a woman, and he said to her angrily that she must have studied ‘bloody hard’ to get that mark, before stalking off.
Rachel went flatting for her second and subsequent years in Dunedin. Her flatmates included friends she had made at medical school such as Miriam Frank. One of her good friends at medical school died in a car crash on her honeymoon soon after graduating.
As Rachel’s boarding bursary only covered accommodation and food, she had to work in the holidays to earn money for anything else. Consequently, she worked as a nurse aide at Seacliff for three week stints in two successive years. The living conditions and treatment of the patients and the camaraderie and good humour amongst the staff while doing a very difficult job left a lasting impression on Rachel; she regarded this work as perhaps the most vivid experience of her whole medical training.
In Rachel’s final year at Medical School, one surgeon decided to make a point about the students in his class whom he felt had not worked hard enough, and he failed them for that section of the course. This meant that a large number of the class were prevented from graduating at the same time as the rest of the year. Unfortunately, this was only made known to those students just before they were due to graduate. Rachel’s parents had already arrived in Dunedin for her graduation so this was a bitter disappointment, although shared by a number of her friends and their families. She ended up graduating in 1960.
House Surgeon Years & Meeting Alastair
Rachel worked as a house surgeon doing runs at Auckland, Greenlane, and Cornwall Psychogeriatric Hospitals. At Cornwall, she impressed the specialist there by taking very comprehensive patient histories, more thorough than had been done previously, a task she greatly enjoyed. The hours, however, were punishing. They often worked for days at a time without sleep. One weekend she was constantly paged by the nurses to one very ill patient. Eventually she was saying to herself that she wished he would just die so that she could get some sleep. This realisation shocked her. Another time, she managed to get an hour off duty to get a haircut, and she fell asleep in the hairdresser’s chair.
The hard work and long hours took their toll on Rachel’s health and she developed a respiratory illness for which she was admitted to hospital. Her father, now on the Kaitaia town council knew one of the local GP’s who had recently had a heart attack and was advised to take it easy, so Rachel was invited up to Kaitaia to work as an assistant GP in the Far North. She loved the work, often travelling out to remote areas in her trusty cream Morris Minor to attend to patients. The area covered Kaitaia and Mangonui county up to the Cape.
The work mostly entailed dealing with emergency call-outs. She had a lot of contact with local Māori patients and often experienced aspects of Māori culture of which she would only later realise the significance. She also worked two days a week as an anaesthetist doing a list for the hospital. Rachel spent nine months working in the Far North. Soon after arriving, she went to a hospital ball with a local teacher (Garth) and met his fellow boarder, a probation officer named Alastair. Later, Rachel was the first aid physician at a local rugby game in which Alastair was playing. During the game he badly injured his thumb, and she advised him to go to the hospital.
Alastair and Rachel started dating and fell in love. On one date, they went on a picnic to the beach, and Rachel prepared a hamper of food carefully. However, she forgot to pack any salt, which Alastair was very fond of. He ended up having to dip his boiled eggs in the sea to get them salty. After some months, they agreed to wed.
Before they were married, Alastair was offered a promotion and position either in Tokoroa or Palmerston North. He took the Palmerston North position without telling Rachel. Rachel sewed her own wedding dress. She did not understand why she always got diarrhoea whenever she sat down to work on it, but finally worked out that it was anxiety. In spite of that, the wedding went ahead without any problems. They were married on February 3rd 1962 in Kaitaia. The honeymoon consisted of a week at the beach in Ahipara and a week at a Social Work conference in Dunedin.
Married Life and Becoming a School Medical Officer
The newlywed couple moved to Palmerston North in March 1965. (14) Rachel saw this as an opportunity to take a break from work, however after only a couple of weeks, she got bored and asked the local Medical Officer of Health if they needed any school medical officers. She saw it as a practical solution as they both wanted children as soon as possible. Rachel enjoyed the work of a School Medical Officer, as it involved travelling around different schools and meeting a wide range of people.
Rachel and Alastair had five children in the subsequent seven years (three sons followed by two daughters). She suffered ill health before and after her first-born, including a kidney infection and severe asthma, and she was not coping very well. On reflection, she thought she was most probably suffering post-natal depression. She had little support, was miles away from family, and disliked her mother-in-law.
She was keen to get back to work and at one stage she was taking groups of women on talks about breast feeding, whilst breast feeding with them.
After weaning her third child, she thought the children would not suffer any lasting psychological trauma if she went back to work and had someone else look after them. Her first job was part-time research work at the hospital investigating a rare kidney disease in mice. She then resumed School Medical Officer work and some social welfare. As part of a government initiative, child welfare clinics had been set up and Rachel was the medical officer for the Palmerston North team.
As part of her work she would sit for an hour with the mothers while they told her their problems. It amazed Rachel that after an hour of simply listening, the mother would thank her profusely for helping her, even before any treatment had been instigated. Rachel did not really mix with people from the medical world, their friends were mostly through Alastair’s work, but she did attend educational meetings at the hospital and at one, a psychiatrist from Kingseat Hospital, Fraser McDonald, gave a talk about a newly described condition called Suburban Neurosis. Rachel felt quite strongly that this was a very important concept.
Alastair was by then becoming increasingly disillusioned with his career as a probation officer, and they decided it was time for Rachel’s career to take precedence. She was keen to specialise. She would have liked to specialize in Obstetrics and Gynaecology but could not figure out how that could fit with the demands of motherhood, so in the end she chose psychiatry. The things that prompted this choice were her experience at Seacliff, the discovery that interviews were more than fact-gathering exercises, and that if she got a training position at an Australian country hospital, a house would be included, a very appealing perk when you had a husband and five children. It would have been possible to do some psychiatric training in New Zealand, but only in Dunedin, and Rachel did not fancy returning there. Moreover, she had friends doing psychiatry in New South Wales. Alastair was also keen to move away from Palmerston North, partly because he was sick of the cold winds that blew south off the Volcanic Plateau. So, the couple decided to move to Australia. In 1970, Rachel was offered a position at Morisset Hospital, a psychiatric hospital near the small town of Morisset on Lake Macquarie, New South Wales. The superintendent was a fellow New Zealander, Howard Gorton. There was no formal training programme during Rachel’s first year at Morisset. It comprised of on-the-job training and Rachel got a lot of experience in making decisions under pressure.
A Short Stint in Australia
With their youngest being only one year old when they moved to Australia, Alastair initially did all the child care before getting a job as a social worker at the hospital. They then employed a young nanny for a year before organising a neighbour to look after the youngest children at her house for the rest of the two years that they were there. Rachel made some lifelong friends amongst her psychiatric colleagues at this time, the Gortons and Sandra Smith. Rachel had to travel to the UK to sit the exams for the first part of her Diploma of Psychiatric Medicine (DPM). As part of the deal, she accompanied a young Yugoslavian sailor, who had had a schizophrenic episode on board his ship and had been left behind in Australia, back to his home in Zagreb. This helped reduce the cost of the trip.
Rachel considered that psychiatry in Sydney and Melbourne was, at the time, strongly psychoanalytical and she felt to work in psychiatry in Australia, she would have to undergo something similar to a religious conversion and become part of an in-group, which she felt would not be conducive to a happy marriage. So, from Australia the family moved to England. As part of the journey they drove in a VW Kombi from the East Coast across the north of Australia, with a detour to Alice Springs, to Fremantle on the West Coast. They packed the Kombi to be shipped to England and took a cruise liner to Singapore (Rachel was sea-sick for most of the voyage), and flew from there to Heathrow.
Postgraduate Training in England
Before they left Australia, Rachel had written to all the psychiatric hospitals within 100 miles of London, as they did not want to be located too far from the big city. She did not get many replies but one looked promising from Graylingwell Hospital in Chichester, West Sussex. They wrote back saying they had a vacancy coming up and could she contact them once she arrived in England. She duly did and went for an interview shortly after they arrived. She remembered the interview as a very formal affair with a large number of people, both lay-people and psychiatrists, sitting around a large table. One interviewer asked what area she would like to specialise in, a question she found difficult to answer since in New Zealand and Morriset, the psychiatrists were generalists, and specialising was not an option. Another gentleman asked what she was going to do with the children, to which she nearly replied that she was thinking of drowning them, but did not. Rachel was offered the position and was a member of staff from 1973 until 1975.
As well as dealing with general mental health, Graylingwell Hospital had a good research unit and alcohol treatment unit. Registrars did most of the work in the hospital while consultants and nurses held outpatient clinics in nearby towns. Graylingwell also had an early version of community teams and the place generally worked well with no wildly eccentric members of staff. As well as her work, Rachel attended lectures and training sessions for one day a week at Southampton University. She completed her Diploma in Psychological Medicine in 1974, including the English membership. (15) She was asked to apply for a senior registrar position which would have been a good career move, but she felt if the family stayed in England, the children would grow up English. Rachel wanted to return to New Zealand and it seemed the right time to do so.
Before leaving for New Zealand, the family took a six week adventure around Western Europe in the VW Kombi.
Pursuing Psychiatry in Auckland & Health Complications
Rachel had the opportunity to work at either Porirua hospital just north of Wellington or at the newly established Carrington hospital in Auckland. Carrington Hospital started life as Whau Lunatic Asylum and, in 1960 became Oakley Hospital. In 1972, after a nurses strike for better conditions, the hospital split into Oakley and Carrington Hospitals. Oakley contained the male-only, locked forensic wards and Carrington the general community psychiatric hospital.
The more progressive staff shifted to Carrington which made it an easier working environment. She had heard that Fraser McDonald was looking for staff at Carrington Hospital and she remembered his fascinating lectures in Palmerston North. She was delighted to be invited to join him at Carrington. Further cementing the decision was the wish to be near to her own family in the north of the North Island, and as far away as possible from her mother in-law. The couple remained in Auckland for the rest of their lives. Rachel started at Carrington as a consultant under Fraser. Only she, Fraser, and one other were trained psychiatrists; the rest were mostly ex GPs, some of whose health had failed and wanted an easier life working in a hospital. The culture at Carrington was very positive, with good staff wanting to improve the quality of treatment for their patients including setting up an active community program.
The staff at Carrington were idealistic and worked very hard but were not sufficiently resourced and had no idea how to go about getting more resources. The hospital was also starting to get a reputation for overworking visiting doctors. Fraser was a very inspirational man who encouraged very long working hours amongst his junior colleagues.
After some years in that post, when Rachel was 45 years old, she felt her health was being impacted by the stress of work and so started jogging with her husband at the Auckland Jogging Club. Rachel entered the Round the Bays race one year but ran with some asthma symptoms which gradually, throughout the weekend, got worse. She saw her GP who told her she was doing everything right, but soon she got so bad she suggested her husband call 111. They told him to drive her to the hospital, but as soon as she got in the car she lost consciousness. Although Rachel was in extremis, blue and unresponsive, Alastair, an extremely law-abiding man, still stopped at all the red lights even when there was no one around. He eventually did go through one red light when it took too long to change. When Rachel woke the next morning, the intensive care specialist told her he had never resuscitated someone so far gone. The attack had been brought on by the beta blockers she had been prescribed for her high blood pressure. The doctor that she credited with saving her life was none other than the classmate she beat into second place in the histology exam all those years before. She spent several nights in ICU but eventually made a full recovery.
Rachel took a year off and, upon returning to Carrington, Fraser announced she was the hospital’s Deputy Superintendent, which meant she covered his position when he was away and he could pass various tasks on to her. However, she felt she was still not well, was finding it difficult to cope, and could not concentrate in meetings. At this time she was also becoming disillusioned with the hospital’s management. Recent management restructures and rapid, poorly considered changes had resulted in a chaotic work environment. She told Fraser she did not think she could cope in her current position and he suggested she take over Woolfe Home, the hospital’s alcohol unit. However, once she changed roles, she found Woolfe Home to be smoothly and cheerfully run by the nurses and psychologists with doctors being largely superfluous, although she did learn a lot during her short time there.
Moving to Prison Work, Forensic Mental Health Services & Psychogeriatrics
Soon after her move to Woolfe Home, Alastair heard that there was a vacancy for a psychiatrist in the Justice Department; the incumbent psychiatrist wanted some more support. Rachel applied and got the job. During the interview in Wellington she was asked if she would be frightened having to deal with prisoners, a question which took her by surprise as she had not considered it an issue, perhaps because she had worked with mentally ill prisoners at the forensic unit at Morriset. She was based in an office in central Auckland but would regularly visit prisoners in the various prisons around Auckland. Her more senior colleague there was more liberal with sedatives than she was comfortable with and she several times refused demands for more benzodiazepines from inmates. She was aware of her diminutive stature when alone interviewing imposing prisoners, but was well respected by them.
In her work she saw that the prison system was flawed, and she joined the Howard League for prison reform. After Oakley Hospital closed, there was a need for forensic mental health services. Rachel was involved in a report recommending the set up of a special mental health unit at Paremoremo Prison which worked well. This report was instigated by a number of suicides occurring in the prison. (11) Her more senior colleague was a heavy smoker and eventually died of lung cancer, leaving Rachel alone in the job.
For the last two years in the Department of Corrections, she was made the Principal Medical Advisor and regularly visited prisons throughout the country dealing with both psychiatric and general medical issues, such as the spread of HIV/AIDS. Every fortnight, she would attend meetings at the Department headquarters in Wellington. She grew to love it there, eventually buying a rental property in the city. However, her job was professionally isolating and it was difficult keeping up to date with progress in psychiatry. For example, she did not learn about borderline personality disorder until late in her career and thought that the diagnosis could have been applied to a number of the clients she had seen over the years.
During her time as a Justice Department psychiatrist, Rachel was also a vital member of a seven-member task force advocating for better mental health legislation. The Health Department submitted a proposal in December 1984, but the task force found that it did not “go far enough in guaranteeing psychiatric patients’ rights.” (10) The task force had written a 400-page report in February 1984, outlining a complete overhaul of New Zealand’s mental health laws, and they argued that the later December submission did little to address the issues presented.
Rachel left the Department of Corrections in 1995 and after doing some travelling, did a number of part-time and contract jobs including writing court reports, interviewing prospective immigrants, and working in psychogeriatrics. She then did some part-time maternal mental health work which lasted five or six years. She used to commute to South Auckland daily for this work, although she also had an office in Kingsland. She enjoyed this work, but found it frustrating that many of the junior members of the team, including non-medical personnel, such as occupational therapists, would be assigned as case managers for some patients, and wanted the same rights, recognition, and pay as the doctors – although if ever there was a bad outcome, the medicolegal blame would always go to the psychiatrist on the team.
After several years in maternal mental health, Rachel left but continued to work in psychiatry, doing locums in, for example, psychogeriatrics. Initially, she could hand write her notes and have them typed up by a general secretary but had difficulties when there was a new system whereby she was expected to type up notes whilst also interviewing clients within a short consultation time.
Rachel received an Order of Merit for services to psychiatry and the community in 2002. (16)
Life Outside of Medicine
Rachel stayed with her Socialist roots her entire life, and remained active with the Mount Albert Labour Party through her time living in Auckland. She was still delivering pamphlets for them door to door the week she died. She was the Secretary at one time, and Treasurer at another. She was even put up as the Labour candidate for a safe National seat at one point in the 1980s.
She and Alastair were strongly opposed to the Springbok Tour and attended several marches, much to the dismay of their politically inactive teenage children.
Rachel’s beloved husband Alastair sadly died at the age of 60 of a heart attack while out jogging, which left Rachel a widow at 53. She never remarried.
Rachel enjoyed her work, and it gave her a sense of identity as well as a useful income to help support her family. Rachel had always enjoyed travelling and she continued to do this, taking trips to, among other places, China, Japan, and Sri Lanka. She won a trip to Paris through alliance Francaise night classes in 1990. Her last trip was several years before her death, an educational small group tour to Turkey. Rachel had a lifelong love of learning. She studied Te Reo Māori, Japanese, and Spanish at university and even did a degree in linguistics whilst still working clinically as a doctor.
Her other hobbies included gardening, and she was a member of the Auckland Cactus and Succulent Society and had a collection of orchids. She loved art and drawing. She joined a badminton club, and was a member of the YMCA jogging club. She assisted with marshalling at the Round The Bays fun run, and even as she slowed down with age, would go out with the walking group. She did Scottish Country Dancing for a number of years when she was older, and was club secretary for the Mt Roskill Club at one stage. The only boyfriend she had during her widowhood was another Scottish country dancer. In spite of growing up in the winterless north, Rachel did not know how to swim properly, and relied on the dog paddle. She had a bad experience as a child, when a swimming teacher pushed her head underwater. This gave her a longstanding phobia, which she finally overcame when she learnt to swim freestyle in her forties. While working in Auckland she used to go sailing with her friend Brian Leyland.
While not overtly religious, throughout her life Rachel had a deep and lasting connection to the Anglican church. Early in her marriage, Rachel and Alastair would attend church while her first few children went to Sunday School. This regular attendance soon fell away and she would only attend church for Easter and Christmas celebrations. Later on, she started attending St Matthews in the City regularly and got involved with the running of the Cathedral including being a member of the synod, doing readings to the congregation, and on at least one occasion giving professional advice and helping interview prospective vicars.
Later Years and Passing
Rachel had a number of lifelong health problems including asthma and hypertension. She also had a pacemaker inserted in her late seventies. She developed polymyalgia rheumatica in her seventies, which was successfully treated with steroids. When she first developed it, she was still working clinically as a psychiatrist, and she was dismayed when she found she was no longer able to stand up at the end of a patient interview, as a signal to the client that the appointment was over. This led to a number of overrunning sessions as her patients were delighted to be able to keep talking as long as possible. She assumed it was just a sign of old age and it was only diagnosed after some months whilst visiting her daughter in Wellington, whose husband was a GP. However, Rachel remained independent, living in her own home after she retired. Her memory was just beginning to become a problem, and she contemplated moving into a retirement home “when I get old”. She died in her sleep one month shy of her 80th birthday on 20 March 2016.
Bibliography
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