Dr. Pat Rose was born in 1923 in Leigh Sinton, Worcestershire, the eldest of three children.
Her mother, Mary Ellen Firkins was originally from Bristol, and her father, George Firkins, was a grain farmer from Worcestershire.
Pat left school to study medicine at the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine in the 1940s.
During the war, when Royal Free medical students were moved from London to the Devonshire coast, Pat became friends with Rosemary Rose, a young medical student from Guyana, then British Guiana, the only English-speaking country in South America.
Pat met and married Rosemary’s brother, David, in 1948 and the pair had six children together.
Pat and David moved to Guyana in 1949, where Pat worked in the local public hospital and David was steadily promoted through the Colonial Police Force.
By the early 1960s, David had caught the eye of the Colonial Office and completed several tours of duty as the administrator of various British Caribbean islands.
In 1966, when British Guiana was transitioning from a British colony to the independent nation of Guyana, David was knighted and asked to serve as his country’s first native-born Governor-General.
Pat, now Lady Rose, gave up medical work and served as Guyana’s First Lady for three years. Tragically, Sir David Rose was killed at age 46 when his official limousine was crushed by a scaffolding collapse in Whitehall on November 10, 1969; this accident left his ADC and their chauffeur with life-changing injuries.
Guyana’s first Prime Minister, Forbes Burnham, asked Pat to remain in Guyana to work as the doctor caring for patients with Hansen’s Disease, known as HD or ‘leprosy’.
Sir David’s father, Dr Frederic Rose, had run the Mahaica Leprosy Hospital until his death 30 years earlier when there had been no formal HD programme.
Pat agreed but in view of the pioneering new drug therapies that had since been developed, and only on condition the Leprosy Control Programme should be entirely domiciliary and HD patients would not be forcibly quarantined in hospital.
She insisted the hospital should only be maintained for the care and support of the older resident patients and all other HD patients should be allowed to live normal lives in the community.
Before taking charge of this important national public health programme in 1971, Pat underwent extended periods of specialist training in Trinidad and Tobago, then Carville Hospital in Louisiana (USA) and finally at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Returning to Guyana, Pat began work at the Mahaica Hospital for the HD in-house and outreach programmes. Her work involved challenging the stigmatisation of people with leprosy, conducting clinical trials on the treatment of HD, and reviewing medical manuscripts for the scientific journal Leprosy Review.
In 1980, the World Health Organisation (WHO) asked all countries to introduce multi-drug therapy for leprosy. Guyana was the first country to do so on a national level and Pat received Guyana’s Golden Arrow of Achievement.
After 18 years of unstinting public service for Guyana, Pat was awarded the Cacique Crown of Honour in recognition of her medical work.
Pat returned to the UK in 1988, and for the next decade, she worked as a consultant clinical advisor to the Pan-American Health Organisation (PAHO) and Lepra, the main UK charity committed to the treatment of leprosy.
This meant frequent exhausting field trips across South America, Africa and the Indian subcontinent reviewing and modernising the treatments of many patients.
When business for the editorial board of Lepra permitted, Pat spent part of each summer tending her garden in the old family cottage in Sussex and migrated for the autumn and winter to her son’s family home in Hexham.
By the late 1990s, Pat retired fully from her medical commitments and spent more time on her piano, choral singing for various choirs and cake decorating.
She also began writing poems and joined a writer’s group in Hexham. Pat has since produced short stories about family life in Guyana, particularly in the early days when they lived on the remote Corentyne Coast, with dirt roads, no electricity or running water.
Today, Pat is still writing with Hexham Writers at the Abbey on a regular basis; she was the runner-up in a National Poetry competition in 2022. She has nearly completed her memoirs, centred particularly on her life with David and his illustrious career.
Many of Pat’s six children have worked in the medical field and five of her 16 grandchildren went into medicine.
John, one of Pat’s children, described her as ‘determined and forthright, but a very generous family woman’.
He said some of Pat’s friends from her writing club and a friend from her choir visited on her birthday for lunch before some of the family gathered in the evening.
Pat has 12 great-grandchildren, ranging from two to 11 years old. She still enjoys living in Hexham with her son and his wife, with one of her grandsons and four great-grandchildren close by. Other family members live further afield, in the USA, Barbados, Jamaica, Portugal, Switzerland, France and Australia.
The acclaimed Dr Pat Rose, who until the start of the pandemic sang in two different choirs in Hexham, celebrated her 100th birthday on November 25, 2023.
Pat is ‘immensely proud’ of all her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren and feels her life continues to be richly blessed with a close and supportive family. (extracted and extradited from Hexman Courant’s story written by Natalie Finnigan)
