My friend Wendy Rogerson, who has died aged 91 of systemic sclerosis, was a nurse who spent three challenging, dangerous, but hugely rewarding years running a clinic in Borneo.
Born Rhoda Grey (but always known as Wendy) in Newcastle to Elsie (nee Gregg) and the Rev Maurice Grey, Wendy grew up in her father’s parishes in Amble and Stannington, Northumberland, attending the Duchess’s school in Alnwick. Her younger brother, Joe, went to boarding school.
Wendy trained as a nurse at Charing Cross hospital in London in 1948, did her midwifery back in Newcastle, and enjoyed her job as a health visitor, living in the lively Newcastle suburb of Jesmond.
She then read about two men, indigenous Dayaks from Sarawak, Borneo, who had established an Anglican mission amongst the Dusun people in what was then British North Borneo (now part of Malaysia) and needed a teacher and a nurse to complete their team. She spent a year at the College of the Ascension, Selly Oak, founded by the SPG (now the USPG – United Society Partners in the Gospel) before sailing to Borneo in September 1959.
It took five days to sail upriver from Sandakan to her new home of Tongod in the remote interior. By now the mission included a school for 60 pupils. Wendy and the teacher Joan Goodricke shared a simple hut – a raised structure with bark walls, a palm-leaf roof and a slatted bamboo floor – and were visited at various times by snakes, rats and scorpions.
While medical treatment had been the preserve of the local medicine woman, people were soon flocking to Wendy and, as the only practitioner for hundreds of miles, she worked from dawn to dusk. Dysentery, scabies, ringworm, malaria and a disfiguring disease, yaws, were all rife. On several occasions, Wendy had to become anaesthetist and surgeon to save her patients’ lives.
Wendy met Colin Rogerson, a curate, while home on furlough in October 1962. They married the following February and their daughters, Catherine and Jane, were born in 1963 and 1966. Wendy supported her husband in his parishes in the Newcastle and Durham dioceses as well as taking on senior roles in the Mothers’ Union. She was also a prison visitor and a Samaritan.
On retiring to Durham, she and Colin attended the city’s lively St Nics church. Wendy returned to Borneo in 1985 and 2003, with each of her daughters, when old friends and patients travelled many miles to see her.
In 2018 I helped Wendy to turn her diaries into the book Midwife of Borneo.
She is survived by Colin, Catherine and Jane. Joe predeceased her.
