Yesterday afternoon I was on the Cranborne Chase in bright sunshine. We broke our walk along the Shire Walk with a couple of dogs to look south and in the clarity of December afternoon sunshine we saw across Dorset to the towers of Bournemouth and south east to the Isle of Wight. The west of Dorset was imagined.
I thought of my friend Chris Bunford in Southbourne who I had speaking to about our both having been brought up in Dorset and I explained that my father was our true Dorset man.
As we spoke, me in Cranborne , he by the sea, it occurred to remind myself and introduce him to a man who is dead nearly eight years. I wrote about him last at the end of winter 2018; the title came from an article 17 years before in the Guardian
Balm for both body and soul – and from a politician to boot
Geoffrey Tapper is not a typical well-to-do GP
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.
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.’
I hope that Chris will continue as my father did, being productive for at least four decades to come!
Two Dorset men of different generations and professions, Chris an actuary , Geoff a GP. I thought of both as I looked over Dorset from the Cranborne Chase.
Henry. How interesting. My mother’s Belben/ Belbin/Kerly/Gaulton family relations were from the Tarrant/ Blandford/ Sturminster Newton area of Dorset. They worked the land and some were blacksmiths. By the 1900’s they had moved to places like Poole Dorset and Gosport/Portsmouth Hants.
Merry Christmas
I will make inquiries of my family Peter