This biography was written by Professor Cindy Farquhar and Dr Rosy Fenwicke, Heather’s eldest daughter, and is based on an interview with Rosy on 10 April 2025. Unless otherwise specified, all information comes from this interview. This biography contains descriptions of domestic violence. Reader discretion is advised.
Contents
1955 graduate
Early life
Heather Thomson (née Baillie) was born on the 19 September 1932 in the front room of her family’s home in Invercargill. She was delivered by her grandmother, Selena, who was an unqualified midwife. She had two older brothers, Wallace and Douglas. Her parents were James (Jim) and Ivy. Jim immigrated to New Zealand from Denny in Scotland after serving with the Cameron Highlanders in Ireland after the war. A qualified tool and die maker, he was sponsored by Fletchers NZ when they brought skilled migrants to New Zealand in the early 1920s. He met Ivy, Heather’s mother, in New Zealand. She had immigrated with her family from Halifax, Yorkshire, after WWI.
Both parents were keen readers and instilled a love of learning in their children.
Heather decided that she wanted to be a doctor at the age of eight and thereafter was devoted to her studies. She attended Southland Girls High School, becoming Dux in her final year. She was third in New Zealand in the Latin Scholarship exams.
Her parents supported her aim to become a doctor, and Heather was able to save money for university by working in the holidays, being awarded the Latin scholarship, and by being generally frugal. Like most young women she made her own clothes. She was an excellent seamstress, knitter, and embroiderer and in her retirement turned her hand to making furniture and oil painting.
Medical school
Heather excelled in her medical intermediate exams and was admitted to Medical School in 1950. She was awarded a Savings Bank scholarship. (1) In her second year she won the Scott Medal for Anatomy, which the family donated back to the Medical School after her death. She lived at St Margaret’s College throughout her years of study. Never much of a sportswoman, cook or housekeeper she spent her time studying. It was only in her fifth and sixth years that she started to attend parties and balls. She graduated along with fourteen other women in a class of 122 people in 1955.
After completing her sixth year, Heather worked as a House Officer at Kew Hospital in Invercargill. There she met Forrester Thomson, a pathology registrar. His family were early settlers of Port Chalmers. During the war, Forrester, aged 18, travelled to Liverpool, where he joined the British Merchant Navy. He served on ships in the Pacific, Mediterranean and Atlantic, returning to take up a position at the Otago Medical School in 1947.
Early career and marriage
Forrester and Heather married in 1955 and set up in general practice in 1956 in Mataura, Southland. As was common in the late 1950s and 1960s, they quickly had four daughters in less than five years: Rosemary (a doctor and writer), Jillian (a policy analyst, university lecturer, and sheep breeder), Prudence (a specialist cardiac nurse who worked in refugee camps in Hong Kong and Cambodia before returning to NZ to be an independent midwife) and Janet, a teacher.
Forrester worked hard to develop his practice in rural Mataura. He delivered babies at the nursing home in Mataura and at Gore Hospital. He was the doctor at the local paper mill and freezing works and attended most of the car accidents on State Highway One which ran straight through the town. He was a popular GP with a reputation for being a good diagnostician. In those days it was normal for the general practice to be attached to the family home. Heather did not work in the practice until after their youngest daughter was born, but during her years ‘at home’, did voluntary work with St Johns Ambulance and local Youth Groups. She remained a terrible cook.
Forrester had developed a drug habit during the war, and this reappeared along with an alcohol addiction in the early 1960s. It ruined his life and for a time, the lives of his family.
He was admitted on multiple occasions to Ashburn Hall and Cherry Farm for treatment. During his temporary remissions, he returned to Mataura to work in the practice. He could be violent when under the influence of drugs and alcohol and often disappeared for days at a time. Heather bore the brunt of his violence. She stayed years after she should have but in those days, there was no benefit, she had no money and nowhere to go. The banks did not give loans to women without a male relative’s guarantee. The police were called to the house on a number of occasions but were not always helpful, taking the Forrester’s side, often taking Heather aside to ask what she had done to provoke him.
Forrester became unable to work so Heather returned to work in 1964.
Four years passed and Forrester’s behaviour remained erratic and increasingly unpredictable. He threatened his wife and daughters with a rifle and made plans for a final showdown with the police.
With the support of Sir Charles Burns and Heather’s lawyer, Ralph Hannan (later the Minister of Justice) Heather was able to make a run for it one Saturday at the beginning of 1967. She took the four girls to live in a rented hospital house attached to Kew Hospital. She had twenty four pounds and very little furniture, but she did have a job.
Forrester stayed in Mataura for a few years, then spent time in various psychiatric hospitals both as a patient and as a staff member before he died of alcohol poisoning in 1974 at Kingseat Hospital. There was standing room only at his funeral.
A&E, anaesthetics, and general practice
Heather worked in A&E at Kew Hospital for three months while simultaneously training in anaesthetics, before moving to establish her own general practice in Yarrow Street, Invercargill. Her older brother, Wallace, guaranteed a loan from the bank so she could, buy a house to live in and to which she added a surgery and waiting room.
During her career Heather delivered over three thousand babies. She also worked with the police to provide acute examinations of rape victims, worked five afternoons a week in general practice and did two morning anaesthetic lists at Kew Hospital and one private list at Park Hospital. On one occasion while giving a private anaesthetic, the oxygen cylinder fell off the wall and ripped open her right lower leg. She had just paralysed the patient so had to keep bagging him from where she was lying on the floor, until help arrived and she was taken to Kew hospital for treatment.
After ten years working as a GP, she was bitterly disappointed when her application to join the newly formed Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners as a foundation member was declined because she was two days late getting the form to the gatekeepers. She never applied again.
Heather loved her work and was devoted to her patients probably at the expense of a private life. She never re-partnered but did have a few short term relationships.
Because she had to leave the house to attend deliveries (sometimes twice in one night) and to provide emergency anaesthetics, she employed a live-in housekeeper until the four girls no longer needed supervision. As her own parents still worked, family support was limited. It was not a big house and the housekeeper (of whom there were many) had to share a room with the youngest daughter. It was not an ideal arrangement.
Later career
Heather completed a diploma in Obstetrics and Gynaecology in 1972, and in 1978 visited China to study acupuncture. She practiced acupuncture until 1981 when she decided it was not a reliable form of therapy.
In 1977 she was appointed to the Abortion Supervisory Committee and served on the committee for 3 years. Her time with the two other committee members, Dame Augusta Wallace and Mr Bruce Grieve opened her eyes to an aspect of New Zealand she had never experienced. She toured the country to supervise the development of services which thanks to the law change had just become legal and not only learned about Wellington realpolitik, but she expanded her geographical, cultural and medical horizons. Her own position on abortion was never clarified. She returned to Invercargill with a newfound confidence.
After her tenure with the Abortion Supervisory Committee she served on the NZMA Committee which fought (ultimately unsuccessfully) to retain GP maternity services. For this work, she was made a Fellow of the NZMA. She was also invested as a Commander of the Order of St John for her lifelong work with that organisation. She was a keen supporter of Books in Schools. In 1999 she was elected to the Invercargill City Council and worked as a councillor for three terms. (2) Heather was awarded an MBE for her services to medicine and the community in 2007.
Heather enjoyed gardening, reading, and crafting anything from clothes to furniture. She had several holiday homes. The first was in Te Anau, before she moved to Queenstown and finally Arrowtown. After she stopped delivering babies, she enjoyed the freedom of going away for weekends. In 2010, she moved to Dunedin to be closer to family. Two grandsons and two granddaughters were attending Otago University and she enjoyed spending time with them. She also travelled extensively.
Heather died suddenly in Dunedin in 2017. She was survived by her four daughters, seven grandchildren and much loved dog, Katie.
References:
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“Scholarships Awarded,” Otago Daily Times, 29 March 1950, p. 7. Papers Past.
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“Obituary: Heather Thomson,” New Zealand Medical Journal, 130, no. 1455, (2017).
