Balm for both body and soul – and from a politician to boot

Dr Geoffrey Tapper’s financial destiny was shaped at the age of 10, when his mother steered him towards medicine rather than his father’s vocation in the Methodist ministry. She told him there was no money in being a minister, so Tapper decided instead to aim for a branch of medicine with a strong pastoral element.

‘I never deviated from wanting to be a general practitioner – it’s the medical equivalent of being a priest with your own parish,’

he says.

When Tapper started work, the financial disparity between the two jobs became obvious; in 1955, his first year as a hospital house-physician, his salary was £320- exactly the amount that his father earned in his final year as a superintendent minister. What’s more, Tapper’s mother underwrote her son’s finances when he joined his first practice in North Dorset; she bought him a house for £4,600. Forty years on he still lives there and thinks it’s worth about half a million. Tapper and his wife benefit still further from this investment because it’s a large former farmhouse, with plenty of extra accommodation to rent out. He retired as a GP in 1990 and his NHS pension is now £22,000 a year. So, as he says, there’s never been a problem with money.

And yet Tapper is by no means your typical, comfortably-off retired GP. At nearly 70, he’s Dorset County Council’s Chairman of Social Services. Although he followed his mother into the Conservative party in his youth, Tapper converted to the Liberals. From 1993 to 1997 he had the distinction of being leader of the Liberal Democrats’ largest council:

‘In Dorset there were more people under the control of the Liberal Democrats than there had been at any time since Lloyd George,’

he says.

Tapper went into local politics out of Christian motives.

‘I wanted to help the underprivileged. When we took over from the Conservatives, social services spending was 23 per cent below the figure that the Government reckoned the council should be spending. The Tories had been spending the money on roads. I admit that since my time as leader, the roads in Dorset have deteriorated and I’m not ashamed of that.’

Although Tapper is standing down as a councillor in May, he’ll still be busy, working for better care for the elderly through various local organisations he’s founded. But he plans to mark his seventieth birthday with a trip to the Eastern Mediterranean to ‘follow in the steps of St Paul‘. (He’s been a Methodist lay preacher for nearly 40 years.)

Looking back, he believes he made the right career choice as a boy – but not because of the money:

‘I made a better GP than I would have made a Methodist minister. My father had about a dozen churches during his career because you have to move around. As a GP you can’t do that because patients like to get to know their own doctor. I was lucky enough to be able to practice in Dorset, where my family has been since 1572. I love Dorset, and would have hated to leave it.’

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So – for posterity and for my Dad – here is how the news broke last night

If you’re able to read this Dad – here are today’s numbers

You can read more about my father here

I am pleased for Dorset.