1925 – 2023
Remembering a long time Boscastle GP
Duncan’s son, Donald, contacted me in 2023 to let me know that his father Dr Duncan Weir had died in a Nursing Home in Nottingham in January of that year at the grand age of 97 years. It was my intention to put an obituary in the Boscastle Blowhole but the last issue had just been published so I passed on the news to some of the people who had known him and been his patients in the area. The online Boscastle Sound now enables me to do him justice and to put something in writing.
Duncan was born in Carlton near Market Bosworth in Leicestershire in 1925. He joined the Royal Navy at the age of 18 and soon after training he was assigned to HMS Tintagel on convoy escort duties across the Atlantic, this as a coder in the radio room. During his service career this position also took him to Australia, Newfoundland and Hong Kong. His late wife, Joan, to whom he was married for 66 years, had served in the WRENS during the war. Their son, Donald, was born in 1956 in Dover when his father worked there and subsequently attended Sir James Smith School in Camelford. I am grateful to him for keeping in contact with me and in providing further information and photographs of Duncan.
After the war Duncan studied the sciences and gained a scholarship to train as a doctor at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London where he qualified in 1954. By chance I trained at the same Medical School and qualified there just 16 years later. Duncan worked in Kent and then at Dorchester Hospital eventually joining a practice in Wiveliscombe in Dorset where he was a GP partner for 10 years. In 1969 he and Joan moved to Boscastle to join Dr William Young.
Practices worked a little differently in those days and Duncan was based at the Boscastle surgery at ‘Twillick’ on the New Road and Dr Young in the former practice premises in Tintagel adjacent to The Old Post Office. They covered for each other when they had their weekly day off and surprisingly this was a Friday for Dr Young and Monday for Dr Weir. These are now the busiest days of the week and they worked them alone until Dr Chris Jarvis joined them in 1979 and lightened their load a little. During those 10 years they also attended to the emergencies and worked the evenings, nights and weekends alternately. Between them they were providing medical care for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for 52 weeks of the year.
From the patients’ viewpoint Duncan was a quiet, totally reliable and retiring man. A doctor who would carefully listen to them, would take his time over the consultation and who worked slowly and methodically. However, his colleagues and staff knew that in addition to clinical acumen he possessed a very dry and sometimes wicked sense of humour. He was an enthusiastic follower of cricket and had a fondness for cars, though his choice of personal vehicle was never ostentatious. Few people knew that he had taught himself to read and speak Italian, this purely for pleasure and to enrich the holidays spent in Italy with Joan.
I very rarely saw him angry and never upset or worried. I remember asking him about this once and never forgot his reply. “When you’ve spent time on Atlantic convoys in the Royal Navy in wartime …. you don’t really become too concerned about much else in the future”
Duncan retired from the practice in 1985 at the age of sixty and several years later he and Joan moved up country to the Midlands to be closer to their son. Joan, his beloved wife, died suddenly aged 90 in 2016 and following this he remained in his own home, finally entering a care home for the last eighteen months. He retained his full mental faculties until the end and still took much pleasure in life.
He will be remembered gratefully and fondly by many people. May he rest in peace.
