The Old Fashioned Physician
In those days just after World War II, everybody in the community turned to Dr. Kemp because he was the man in the community to whom everyone turned in time of need. Dr. William Alfred Kemp had been part of the soul of the city since 1923.
I first got to know Dr. Kemp when I was in my mother’s womb. He stuck the stethoscope on her and listened to my heart beating. He presided at my birth and swung me deftly by the heels smacking me on the bottom to bring me into this world and to bring into my lungs the first breath of air and from my throat the first cry.
He took an interest throughout my childhood treating various childhood illnesses and when the time came, he removed my tonsils. He was there beside the dentist’s chair to give me an anesthetic to remove a troublesome back tooth. He came in and out of our home as an old fashioned general practitioner for thirty years.
The doctors in the 40’s in our town were very special people. They had large waiting rooms with an interesting assortment of British magazines. He visited all of his patients in their homes and knew everybody personally by name. He could be approached for advice on any subject at any time. He was the source of knowledge on all subjects.
For the first thirty eight years of his life he was a grocer. Then he felt a calling of God to become a medical doctor. At thirty eight years he started study for the Melbourne university which was then followed by study overseas to complete his speciality at Edinburgh University.
To matriculate and enter Melbourne University when he had left school at twelve years of age was a tremendous struggle for him and to make matters worse his young wife, whom he had married thirteen years previously, suddenly died.
At an age of 40, he set out from Melbourne to go to Edinburgh where he graduated with his Fellowship. He became well known all over the United Kingdom as a preacher at youth rallies. He was a dynamic speaker with an attractive personality.
Dr. Kemp moved into the Box Hill area in 1923 and joined as a lay minister of the Box Hill Church of Christ. He loved children. He never had any of his own, but he supported many children’s organisations. He established a national youth ministry for boys and girls, established boys home nearby and helped young people as a children’s court magistrate. His work on the bench was later to lead him to become a justice of the peace, a stipendiary magistrate, and a special magistrate of the Children’s Court.
Dr. Kemp was a large and genial man with a grey clipped moustache. His grey hair was brushed flat. He wore spectacles and tweed suits with waistcoats and a watch chain. I found it impossible to think of Dr. Kemp without him wearing his waistcoat and watch chain and imagined that he even wore it to bed.
He was one of those doctors that came whenever you called, regardless of the time, or the condition of the weather. If we ever needed Dr. Kemp, my mother would ring the winding handle of our telephone and speak to the operator: “Jeanie, this is Mrs. Moyes. I want to speak to Dr. Kemp.” And Jeanie, who knew everybody’s business, would say: “Well I know he is not in his surgery right now. He was going to Mrs. Skidmore’s, then to the Henley’s and then up to the Town Hall for some inoculations. I’ll wait a little while and try to catching him at the Town Hall for you.” This was a service we missed when Jeanie was replaced by the automatic telephone exchange!
I later found out that he had a life long practice of never charging people who were poor or in difficult circumstances. When he came to sending out his bills he would select twelve home visits that he had made and send bills only to the six who could afford it.
Dr. Kemp came in and out of my life in a remarkable way in the years that followed. It was he my mother called at midnight when we found my father lying dead in the gutter in Bank Street.
A few years later when I started to attend church, I discovered that he used to preside at the communion table of the church. I never realized before that he was a member of that congregation in Court Street. With a group of school children I once visited the City Council to see the Council at work and to my surprise he was in the Mayor’s seat with the gold chain of office on the robes of Mayor upon his shoulders. When I went to high school, the first year students were welcomed by the President of the High School Advisory Council and you guessed it it was the same Dr. W.A. Kemp. I remember in my latter years at high school and then at university when I was doing some biological sciences, in his surgery he showed me some techniques of using a microscope that he had learnt in his studies. Later at university, he offered me his microscope but I had already purchased one. How I wished that I had taken his.
Most of us boys in the town got into trouble at one time or another with the police and if we were ever taken to court it was his kindly face with its clipped moustache and glasses that stared down from the magistrate’s bench. As a theological student, I was preaching in a small inner suburban church and one day, after a sudden attack of acute appendicitis, he removed my appendix on Saturday, visited me on Sunday morning, and then drove on to my student church where he preached on my behalf.
I discussed with Dr. Kemp my call to the ministry and in his spacious rooms he talked to me about the call from God and about how I should do everything to resist it until it became such a burning passion within my bones that I could do nothing else but to answer His call and to train for ministry. On the day my theological education commenced who do you think was there to welcome students as Chairman of the College Board?
Some years later my course was finished and the time of my ordination was at hand. I was allowed to invite one person to lay hands on my head symbolic of all those people who had prayed for me. He would pray that I might receive God’s gift of the Holy Spirit as I became a preacher. It was only natural that the man whose laid hands on my bottom at the time of birth, who put them round my shoulders in the time of death, should lay his hands on my head in benediction at my time of ordination. I felt honoured by his blessing.
During my time of studies at College and University my younger brother caught rheumatic fever, and became desperately ill requiring almost daily attention. He eventually was hospitalised and died. For three years, Dr. Kemp visited him hundreds of times administering the treatment the specialist had decided before his death. My mother kept insisting that he send her a bill but a bill never came. Finally after my brother’s death my mother insisted that she should pay his bill and I can remember seeing it when it arrived. It simply said “To providing care for Robbie Moyes say 20 pounds”.
My brother’s funeral was a very moving experience. The coffin was in our lounge room with the whole house and front garden packed with neighbours and friends. The minister led the service then asked Dr. Kemp and his partner, a former Missionary surgeon to India, Dr. Bert Oldfield, to speak and pray.
They spoke of the limits of their scientific skill and how even the imported wonder drugs from America could not save Robbie’s life. They then told how they had prayed while they treated him and how each of us lived only by the grace of God.
The people listened with deep respect.
Respect. That was what everyone gave to Dr. Kemp. I was not surprised when he was elected by his denomination as President of the Conference of Churches of Christ in Victoria and Tasmania.
In an era when youth were growing more cheeky toward their elders and less respectful towards authority, I cannot remember one young person ever having anything but respect for Dr. Kemp even when we would be laughing and giggling together after one of his sex education lectures he gave to every young person in our community at the request of our schools.
Respect. He earned it.
He received many honours from the community, from the churches, and from the Queen who presented him with the OBE. When he died at an age of 89, the church and the surrounding streets were packed with huge crowds of people. I only remember one phrase that was spoken in praise of him and that was by a specialist surgeon who had used Dr. Kemp’s skills as an anesthetist and he made this comment: “Throughout our professional life as an anesthetist and a surgeon, Alf Kemp and I worked performing 26,000 major or minor surgeries together.”
My mind boggled that such a man could have such an influence for so much good on the lives of so many people.
He certainly took a special interest in me and in my latter life. When he became a preacher he was very proud and often said to other people that I was the son he always wanted to have. He died childless but in fact hundreds of us looked upon him as a father figure.
The influence of Dr Kemp on my life was profound. Years later, I had the privilege of being invited to Edinburgh University in Scotland, to give three lectures in the great McEwan Hall. As I look at the magnificent woodwork on the platform, the immense pipe organ, and the three balconies where the students sat, I though that it was on this platform where Dr Kemp graduated and received his degrees. We stayed in a University hotel for visiting fellows and lecturers on the campus. I then discovered that decades earlier it was the original maternity hospital where Dr Kemp learned to deliver babies. We actually slept in what had been a delivery suite now turned into a hotel room. This was where Dr Kemp learned to deliver babies. Sixty years earlier, on his return to Melbourne and his practice in Box Hill, I had been one of his babies, delivered in the old house that served as our local hospital.
There was no more important man in my life and after my father died I often thought about Dr. Kemp as I would make my way home up Devon Street, opposite the cow paddock, to No.55 Birdwood Street, Box Hill, a great city that was once a village, where the adults were kind and where the children grew up responsibly.
GORDON MOYES
