John Chesshire died aged 96 on the 27th of November 2011. His obituary appeared in the Daily Telegraph on the 3rd of January 2012 as follows:
In March 1944 Chesshire, a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC), was serving as Medical Officer to 1st Battalion, The South Staffordshire Regiment (1 SSR), part of 77th Indian Infantry Brigade. In the middle of the month the Brigade blocked the railway at Henu, northern Burma. Faced with this threat to their supply lines, the Japanese attacked and, on March 17, the regimental aid post manned by Chesshire and a colleague, Captain Thorne, was overrun.
The two officers continued to operate and tend the wounded until a counter-attack repelled the enemy. Days of heavy shelling followed, but Chesshire carried on with his work even though it meant standing in the open while others were able to take shelter. During the first two weeks of the month-long battle, he was senior MO to the Brigade. On at least five occasions shells landed close to his operating theatre.
The citation for his MC estimated that 500 men had passed through his hands during the campaign. It paid tribute to his tireless energy under dreadful conditions, which had saved many lives and provided a great boost to morale.
John Stanley I’Anson Chesshire, the son of a clergyman, was born on September 8 1915 at the rectory at Stourport-on-Severn. After leaving Marlborough he wanted to become a missionary, a vocation that his father had followed as a young man. He decided, however, to become a doctor, reasoning that he would find other ways to satisfy his initial ambition.
He went up to Birmingham University to read Medicine and was then apprenticed to the city’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital. As a junior registrar he was always short of money and supplemented his income by assisting the brain surgeon – who could only use the theatres at night because of the length of time that most of his operations took.
When war was declared Chesshire was exempted from call-up but, after pestering the authorities, joined the RAMC and accompanied 1 SSR to India and then Burma. After the conflict he started practising as a GP, based at Knighton, Radnorshire; in the early 1950s, however, he resigned from the National Health Service and transferred to the Colonial Service so that he could take his surgical skills to Malaya. After eight years there during the Emergency, he spent a year in Sumatra as Esso’s chief medical officer.
Chesshire subsequently returned to Knighton and became a hill-farmer, rearing Welsh ewes and Hereford cattle. During the lambing season he converted a large wooden crate into a shepherd’s hut, had it taken to the top of Stowe Hill and camped with just a primus stove for warmth.
When the missionary in him emerged once more, he set off for Borneo. On one occasion, on a trip into the jungle to attend someone who was ill, he experienced severe stomach pains. A self-diagnosis confirmed his fears. He had acute appendicitis and he was the only medical practitioner for many miles. He did, however, have a medical orderly with him whom he instructed to set up a primitive operating table with a mirror over it. Chesshire then gave himself a large dose of local anaesthetic and, with the aid of the mirror, proceeded to guide the orderly through an operation to remove the appendix.
He retired from farming in the late 1970s but continued to practise medicine and enjoyed fishing into old age. An accomplished fly fisherman, when his legs were not strong enough to support him, he would tie himself to a tree to avoid falling into the water. Geology was another absorbing interest and he achieved some striking results using boot polish to make paintings of rock formations. He married, in 1949, Marion Walker. She predeceased him and he is survived by their three sons and a daughter.
